New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Ladakh underscored India’s resolve to beat back Chinese aggression and he delivered a clear message there to the neighbouring country with his reference to “expansionism”, strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney said on Sunday.
Modi’s visit and the speech were morale boosters for the troops and his reference to “expansionism” echoed the mounting international concern over China’s “imperial overreach under Xi Jinping, who has simultaneously opened multiple fronts”, he said.
“Modi’s visit to the Ladakh front underscored India’s resolve to beat back China’s aggression and encroachments,” Chellaney told PTI Bhasha.
“After weeks of concerted government effort to downplay the Himalayan border confrontation and obscure China’s encroachments, Modi’s visit to Ladakh helped shine a spotlight on the war-like situation India confronts,” the strategic affairs expert said.
Asserting that China has sought to take advantage of the world’s preoccupation with the COVID-19 pandemic, Chellaney said Xi has been pushing the limits, be it breaking Beijing’s binding commitment to Hong Kong’s autonomy, attempting to police the waters off the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands or picking up a border fight with India by encroaching on its territory.
President Xi’s actions are shifting attention from China’s culpability in the global spread of COVID-19 to the threat his authoritarian regime poses to international security, the professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research said.
“Xi’s ambition, coupled with the concentration camps he has set up and the cult of personality around him, has led some to compare him with other expansionist despots of modern history.
US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien recently said that ‘Xi sees himself as Joseph Stalin’s successor’,” Chellaney said.
“Some, however, have compared Xi with Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler’s expansionism, Xi has opened multiple fronts. And, what Xi’s regime is doing to the Muslims of Xinjiang appears to be a reprise of what the Nazis did to the Jews. In fact, Xi has earned the social-media nickname of ‘Xitler’,” he said. (PTI)
