IANS

NEW DELHI

In what can be seen as remarks targeting China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale on Thursday said that regional connectivity projects should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.

“Physical hardware of connectivity across nations can only sustain itself in a common and universally applicable rules-based world order,” Gokhale said while addressing a regional connectivity conference on South Asia in the Indo-Pacific context organised by the Cuts International think-tank, the Washington-based East-West Centre, industry body FICCI and the US State Department here.

“Such an order must uphold sovereignty, territorial integrity and equality of all nations,” he said.

The Foreign Secretary’s remarks came after India on Wednesday lodged strong protests with Pakistan and China over a bus service scheduled to be launched on Saturday between Lahore and Kashghar, a city in the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, through Pakistani Kashmir.

“It is the government of India’s consistent and well-known position that the so-called China-Pakistan ‘boundary agreement’ of 1963 is illegal and invalid, and has never been recognised by New Delhi,” the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

“Therefore, any such bus service through Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir will be a violation of India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

While the bus service is an attempt at increasing “friendship” between Pakistan and China, the issue lies in the fact that the bus route passes through Pakistani Kashmir, a part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which is a key project under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s pet BRI project.