Growing suspicion and lack of trust is proving to be a hurdle in the resolution of border dispute with China, India’s Defence Chief General Bipin Rawat has said. The US Department of Defence in its recent report said China has built a large village inside disputed territory between its Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s Arunachal Pradesh state in the eastern sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Reacting to the report, the External Affairs Ministry said India has neither accepted China’s “illegal occupation of its territory nor any unjustified Chinese claims.” Rawat, however, dismissed the report, saying China had only been carrying out construction on its side of the LAC. “As far as we are concerned, no such village development has taken place on our side of the LAC,” he said at the Times Now Summit 2021.

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The two statements prompted a reaction from former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who on Friday alleged that the country’s national security is “unpardonably compromised” as the government does not have a strategy on China. 

Congress leader P Chidambaram claimed the External Affairs Ministry and the Chief of Defence Staff had a different take on the China border issue.

“MEA said that China is in ‘illegal occupation’ of Indian territory and India will not accept ‘unjustified Chinese claims’.

“Within hours, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) said that the Chinese ‘have not transgressed anywhere on our perception of the LAC’ and they are ‘well within their side of the LAC’,” Chidambaram said in a series of tweets.

Indian and Chinese military commanders have held 13 rounds of talks to break the border stalemate between the two countries that reached its peak last June when 20 Indians and at least four Chinese soldiers were killed in the deadliest clash between the two sides along the 3,488-kilometer boundary in four decades. Each country has amassed around 50,000 to 60,000 troops along the LAC in the sensitive sector of eastern Ladakh.

China has become India’s biggest security threat, and it would be long before New Delhi can recall tens of thousands of troops and weaponry it has dispatched to the border, a Bloomberg report quoted General Rawat as saying.

“India is prepared for any misadventure along the border and in the sea,” he added.

The Defence Chief also highlighted the impact of Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan on India’s security, a concern raised by National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval at the Delhi Regional Security Dialogue on Afghanistan that India hosted on November 10.