New Delhi: Congress President Rahul Gandhi during an interaction on Friday in London talked about India’s border standoff with Chinese troops last year, he said the “Chinese are still in Doklam” and PM Modi could have stopped it had he kept a careful watch.
“Doklam is not an isolated issue. It was a part of a sequence of events, it was a process. Prime Minister is episodic. He views Doklam as an event. If he was carefully watching the process, he could’ve stopped it,” Rahul Gandhi said at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
Implying that the government was obfuscating facts on Doklam, Rahul Gandhi said: “The words used are very interesting – the Chinese have withdrawn from the point of contact, they have withdrawn from where the altercation happened. The truth is that the Chinese are still in Doklam today.”
He added that “if India was punching above its weight, Doklam wouldn’t have happened.”
Doklam is a strategically important area which is claimed by Bhutan.
A standoff over Doklam saw Indian and Chinese soldiers standing eyeball to eyeball for 73 days over Beijing’s attempt to build a road in the area, which New Delhi viewed as a serious security concern because of the access it provides to Beijing.
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Talking about India-Pakistan relationship, Rahul Gandhi said that it was difficult to converse with Pakistan as no single institution in that country enjoyed supremacy.
The Congress president also alleged that PM Modi had no deeply thought out strategy for Pakistan.
“It’s very difficult to converse with Pakistan because there is no one institution that holds supremacy. So we wait until they come to form a cohesive structure,” Rahul said.
“There is no deeply thought out strategy by PM Modi when it comes to Pakistan,” he added.