Connectivity Projects Must Respect Countries’ Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity: Vijay Gokhale

New Delhi: In what can be seen as remarks targeting China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale on Thursday said that regional connectivity projects should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. “Physical hardware of connectivity across nations can only sustain itself in a common and universally applicable rules-based world order,” Gokhale said while addressing a regional connectivity conference on South Asia in the Indo-Pacific context organized by the Cuts International think-tank, the Washington-based East-West Centre, industry body Ficci and the US State Department here. “Such an order must uphold the sovereignty, territorial integrity and equality of all nations,” he said.

The Foreign Secretary’s remarks came after India on Wednesday lodged strong protests with Pakistan and China over a bus service scheduled to be launched on Saturday between Lahore and Kashgar, a city in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, through Pakistani Kashmir. “It is the government of India’s consistent and well-known position that the so-called China-Pakistan ‘boundary agreement’ of 1963 is illegal and invalid, and has never been recognised by New Delhi,” the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement. “Therefore, any such bus service through Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir will be a violation of India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

While the bus service is an attempt at increasing “friendship” between Pakistan and China, the issue lies in the fact that the bus route passes through Pakistani Kashmir, a part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which is a key project under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s pet BRI project. “All nations must respect their international commitments,” Gokhale said in his address on Thursday. “This is the foremost requirement, and therefore a pressing need in our part of the world (Indian Ocean) and any such arrangement must naturally accord due to primacy to the states located in the geography of the Indian Ocean.”

Secondly, Gokhale said, “connectivity can be meaningful only when everyone has equal access under international law to the use of global commons that would require freedom of navigation, unimpeded commerce and peaceful settlement of disputes in accordance with international law”. “Third, connectivity efforts in the region must be based on principles of economic viability and financial responsibility,” he said. “Fourth, connectivity initiatives that straddle national boundaries must be pursued in a manner that respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations,” Gokhale said.

Stating that regional connectivity in South Asia is today very much of relevance to the wider Indo-Pacific and the world at large, Gokhale said that this is because physical connectivity is “only a part of the larger web of trade and economic interaction, digital connectivity, people-to-people links and knowledge connectivity that are the defining parameters of the Indo-Pacific region”. “India views the Indo-Pacific as a positive construct of development and connectivity, in which India can play a unique role by virtue of its geographical location and economic gravity,” he said. “Like China’s Belt and Road initiative, Japan too steers a Partnership for Quality Infrastructure or PQI and is working closely with India in her Act East (Policy) pursuits,” Hiramatsu said. (IANS)

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