China wants India to oppose politicisation of COVID-19 pandemic

Beijing wants New Delhi to continue to stay away from the campaign the United States launched to blame China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even as both sides are engaged in talks to de-escalate tension along the disputed boundary between the two nations in eastern Ladakh, Beijing has conveyed to New Delhi through diplomatic channels that it expects India to join China to oppose what it called “politicization” of the COVID-19 pandemic by the President Donald Trump’s administration in the United States.

The issue of the COVID-19 pandemic came up for discussion when the senior diplomats of India and China had a video-conference on Friday. The video-conference set the framework for the talks the commanders of the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had on Saturday to defuse the tension along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) – the de facto border between the two nations – in eastern Ladakh.

“They (senior diplomats of India and China) also agreed that #China & #India should deepen cooperation on fight against #COVID19 epidemic, support the #WHO, resolutely uphold and promote multilateralism & (and) safeguard common interests of developing countries,” Sun Weidong, China’s ambassador to India, posted on Twitter.

Naveen Srivastava, Joint Secretary (East Asia) in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), represented New Delhi in the video-conference. His counterpart, Wu Jianghao, led the delegation of the Chinese Government.

“The two sides also exchanged views on the challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and cooperation in various multilateral forums,” the MEA stated in a press-release issued in New Delhi. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, stated in a separate press-release issued in Beijing that the two sides agreed to deepen cooperation to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and oppose “politicization of the epidemic situation”.

India refrained from joining the US-led tirade blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, which started from Wuhan in the Hubei province of the communist country. It also did not echo American President Donald Trump’s allegations against the World Health Organization (WHO) that it had been biased towards China and had not alerted the US and other nations adequately about the spread of the virus well in time. The US also stopped funding of the WHO.

New Delhi however later joined the European Union and several other nations to sponsor a resolution at the World Health Assembly asking the WHO to identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of its introduction to human population.

When Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke over phone recently, they also discussed the need for reforms in the WHO.