Perception of China not a media creation: envoy

August 04, 2010 02:17 am | Updated November 05, 2016 07:18 am IST - BEIJING:

Public perceptions in India will always be “coloured” by how China treated India's “core interests,” Indian Ambassador to China S. Jaishankar said on Tuesday.

“If there is an image of China with the broader public, it is tested against what the public believes are the core interests of India,” Mr. Jaishankar said in an interview with China's official State-run broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV).

The Indian Ambassador's comments were made in the context of the increasingly prevalent view in China that the Indian media's reporting of China was entirely to blame for the souring of relations last year. A number of articles in China's official media have in recent months blamed the Indian media for creating negative perceptions of China, as well as of the direction in which bilateral relations were heading. “Indian media hype cross-border spat,” was one typical headline, appearing in May in the official Global Times newspaper.

But Mr. Jaishankar made the point on Tuesday that China needed to understand the independent nature of the Indian media and how it functioned. “We have a fiercely independent media,” he said. “They pride themselves on the fact that they make their own judgment and they are people of great integrity. When people suggest that we can guide the media better, it shows a lack of understanding of the Indian media.” Chinese officials had, last year, called on the Indian government to “guide” the media to give more “positive” coverage of bilateral relations amid the strains.

Respecting each other's core interests was also crucial to creating better public perceptions, Mr. Jaishankar stressed. “Core interests,” he noted, was becoming a fashionable term in China — the phrase has found increasingly regular occurrence in Beijing's diplomacy, usually a coded reference to China's “non-negotiable” interests in Tibet and Taiwan, as well as to its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

“India too has its own core interests,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “Public perceptions will always be coloured where another country stands vis-à-vis India's core interests.”

Indian officials have made the point to their Chinese counterparts in recent meetings that Beijing's recent positions on one of India's core interests — Kashmir — has remained a source of tension, and mistrust, in the relationship.

Last year, Indian officials voiced their concern at China's policy of issuing stapled visas to Indian citizens from Kashmir — a move seen as China questioning India's sovereignty. China also recently signed a $525 million deal to help Pakistan build highways in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), another move, Indian officials said, that violated a “core interest” of India's.

The two countries agreed on the need to respect each other's core interests during National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon's recent visit to Beijing as the Prime Minister's Special Envoy. But a clearer understanding of both countries' interests, as well as a mutual acceptance of how legitimate those interests were, was needed, officials said, to deal with any persisting mistrust.

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