Salman Khurshid, External Affairs Minister in the UPA govt of Dr Manmohan Singh, seems to have a tendency to be economical with truth; he also acts as colour-blind: If the colour is grey or has a touch of black, he tends to regard it nearly white! His another characteristic is to stick his neck out for the sake of loyalty and sycophancy vis-a-vis the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. He has been castigated and rebuffed by Anna Hazare and the Central Election Commission for his indiscretions and improprieties. Clearly, he seems insensitive and thick-skinned to several aberrations from dignified conduct but he seems to get away with them, perhaps because he is seemingly intellectually smart, foreign-educated, lawyer by profession, a member of the minority community with Congress loyalist father and grand father who occupied the the top-most post.
Khurshid's latest statement made in an interview with the Indian Express, on way back from Burma(Mynamar), takes the cake. He gives a clean chit to China as a "peaceful" neighbour, asserting that "China's rise hasn't created problems for India...There has not been any major specific problem between us and China". He deliberately forgot the 1962 invasion of Mao's China on the North-East Frontier Agency(NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, that has been the most disastrous and humiliating defeat of the Indian army under the Congress' first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru who had emerged as the self-appointed champion of Communist China. India recently marked the 50th anniversary of that debacle-the most painful chapter of our post-indpendence history.
There have been so many occasions when our big, powerful neighbour has been intimidating us with repeated hostile expansionist claims on Arunachal Pradesh and parts of Ladakh. Also, its denial to visas to Indian citizens resident in Arunchal and J&K. Recently, it stamped visas with a map reiterating the territorial claims. It has also started warning India to keep off the South China Sea. Yet, our new Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid has no hesitation in claiming that China is "peaceful" and its rise poses no problems to us!
Khurshid's latest statement made in an interview with the Indian Express, on way back from Burma(Mynamar), takes the cake. He gives a clean chit to China as a "peaceful" neighbour, asserting that "China's rise hasn't created problems for India...There has not been any major specific problem between us and China". He deliberately forgot the 1962 invasion of Mao's China on the North-East Frontier Agency(NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, that has been the most disastrous and humiliating defeat of the Indian army under the Congress' first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru who had emerged as the self-appointed champion of Communist China. India recently marked the 50th anniversary of that debacle-the most painful chapter of our post-indpendence history.
There have been so many occasions when our big, powerful neighbour has been intimidating us with repeated hostile expansionist claims on Arunachal Pradesh and parts of Ladakh. Also, its denial to visas to Indian citizens resident in Arunchal and J&K. Recently, it stamped visas with a map reiterating the territorial claims. It has also started warning India to keep off the South China Sea. Yet, our new Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid has no hesitation in claiming that China is "peaceful" and its rise poses no problems to us!