KARGIL, 25 Aug: Raking up the border issue, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that every individual in Ladakh knows that China has “taken away our land” and claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertion that not an inch of land has been taken away is “absolutely false.”
The former Congress president’s remarks came after Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a conversation on Wednesday on the sidelines of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in Johannesburg. The conversation was not a structured bilateral meeting and was an informal one.
“I visited the whole of Ladakh on my motorcycle over the past week. Ladakh is a strategic place and when I was at Pangong Lake, one thing was clear that China had taken over thousands of kilometres of Indian land.
Unfortunately, the prime minister during an opposition meeting makes a statement that not an inch of our land was taken away, which is absolutely false,” he said, addressing a public meeting here on the last day of his nine-day tour of Ladakh.
“Every individual of Ladakh knows that China has taken away our land and the prime minister is not speaking the truth,” he alleged.
India’s Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra had on Thursday said that Modi conveyed to Jinping India’s concerns on the “unresolved” issues along the line of actual control in eastern Ladakh, underlining that maintenance of peace and tranquillity in the border areas is essential for normalisation of India-China ties.
The ties between India and China came under severe strain following the eastern Ladakh border row that began in May, 2020.
Indian and Chinese troops are locked in an over three-year confrontation in certain friction points in eastern Ladakh, even as the two sides completed disengagement from several areas following extensive diplomatic and military talks. (PTI)
