Pakistan, China to revitalize CPEC; India says connectivity should respect sovereignty

Connectivity projects should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Tuesday with China and Pakistan set to announce “revitalization” of an economic corridor opposed by India.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif arrived in Beijing on Tuesday. He will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday. The meetings are expected to result in the two sides announcing “revitalization” of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through parts of India’s Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and Ladakh currently under illegal occupation of Pakistan.

Jaishankar, however, subtly sent out a message to Islamabad and Beijing, indicating that New Delhi would continue to oppose the CPEC, which it perceived as a move to undermine the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India. “Connectivity projects should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Member States and respect international law,” he said, participating at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – an eight-nation-bloc, with China, Pakistan and India among its members.

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The external affairs minister represented the Government of India in the meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of Governments.

He, however, underlined that the SCO nations needed better regional connectivity built on the centrality of interests of Central Asian states. He said that the connectivity projects would unlock the economic potential of this region in which Chabahar port and the International North South Transport Corridor could become enablers.

“Our total trade with SCO Members is only $141 billion, which has potential to increase manifold. Fair market access is to our mutual benefit & (and) only way to move forward,” Jaishankar tweeted after participating at the SCO meet.

The CPEC is one of the flagship projects of Beijing’s ambitious cross-continental Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which the Chinese President launched a few years back, but triggered controversy due to predatory lending practices and debt-trap diplomacy by the government of the communist country.

New Delhi has been consistently opposing the CPEC in particular and the BRI in general. A joint statement issued after the SCO meet on Tuesday also noted that China’s BRI had support of all other SCO nations, barring India.

“My discussions with Chinese leadership will focus on revitalization of (the) CPEC among many other things. The 2nd (second) phase of CPEC promises to usher in a new era of socioeconomic progress that will uplift the quality of our people's lives. There is a lot to learn from the Chinese economic miracle,” Pakistani Prime Minister tweeted before leaving for a two-day tour to China.

The CPEC was originally envisaged as a $ 46 billion economic corridor to link China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region and the port city of Gwadar in southern Pakistan.

China’s debt-trap diplomacy over the past few years ballooned Pakistan’s total public and publicly guaranteed external debt from $44.35 billion in June 2013 to $90.12 billion in April 2021. Pakistan owed 9.3 % of its total external debt to China in 2013, but it went up to $24.7 billion in 2021.