India and China are expected to hold their first high-level talks on the Pulwama terror attack next week, when External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj meets her counterparts from Beijing and Moscow in Wuzhen — a picturesque town in southern China.
The killing of 40 Indian paramilitary troops in a suicide car bombing is bound to feature during the Russia, India, China (RIC) Foreign Ministers’ meeting on February 27, a diplomatic source said.
An official source told The Hindu that, so far, Chinese officials have interacted with their Indian counterparts in the UN to discuss the Pulwama incident.
During the announcement of the visit on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang, stressed that the three Foreign Ministers — Ms. Swaraj, Wang Yi from China and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov will pursue the “consensus” reached in November by the leaders of the three countries during their informal meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Argentina.
Mr. Geng said: “The three Foreign Ministers will focus on the implementation of our leaders’ consensus and exchange views on major international and regional issues of common concern and deepening trilateral cooperation.”
Asked what additional proof China required to impose a UN ban on Masood Azhar, the leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which has video recorded its responsibility for the attack, Mr. Geng said: “You talked about the designation of the head of the JeM; I have answered many questions regarding this. We know that 1267 committee of the Security Council has clear rules of procedure when it comes to designation of terrorists and terrorist organisations, and on this issue, we will adopt a constructive attitude to work with all sides.”
China is a party to a UN ban on the JeM, but is the only member among the P-5, which has repeatedly cast a “technical hold” on designating Azhar as an international terrorist in the 1267 committee of the UN Security Council.
It is also a signatory to the joint statement released at the end of the Xiamen BRICS summit in September 2017, which singled out “Taliban, ISIL/DAISH, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates including Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, TTP and Hizb ut-Tahrir,” as a cause for “concern” on the security situation in the region.
