PremiumNEW DELHI: India seems to be giving a pass to Beijing over two posts on the microblogging site Weibo that showed photos of the bodies of covid victims being cremated in India alongside a rocket launch and a giant hospital in China.
New Delhi seems to be maintaining a silence – at least for now -- over what are clearly provocations after the two posts were pulled down over the weekend after protests by Chinese netizens and others.
Premium Premium The text with one of the posts – that aimed to show the contrast between a rocket launch in China to funeral pyres being lit in India -- had read: “Lighting a fire in China VS lighting a fire in India." The post by the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission was accompanied by a hashtag noting that new Covid-19 cases in India had surpassed 400,000 a day, a Bloomberg report said.
“The image was deleted later that day after it was criticised both at home and abroad for its insensitivity," the South China Morning Post reported on Monday.
The South China Morning Post report also said that the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which has 31 million followers on Weibo, also posted a similar message on Friday. It had compared the image of a giant emergency hospital in Wuhan named Huoshenshan with a photo of a mass cremation ground in India. The second post too has since been deleted.
Some of the criticism that forced the posts to be withdrawn came from unexpected sources.
Official social media accounts should “hold high the banner of humanitarianism at this time, show sympathy for India, and firmly place Chinese society on a moral high ground," Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of Communist Party-backed Global Times newspaper, wrote on Weibo commenting on the deleted post. Hu – seen as an India baiter -- said such methods were not an appropriate way for official social media accounts to gain traffic.
All this comes amid military tensions between India and China on Ladakh border.
It also coincided with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and President Xi Jinping expressing solidarity with India over a vicious second wave of covid-19 infections raging across the country. Chinese ambassador to New Delhi Sun Weidong has posted several messages on Twitter showing how China was keeping supply lines open to ensure India was able to source whatever it needed from China to fight the pandemic.
There was no response for a request for comments from the Chinese embassy in New Delhi. Earlier this week, a Chinese foreign ministry response quoted by Bloomberg news said: “We hope everyone gives attention to the Chinese government and mainstream public opinion supporting India’s fight against the epidemic."
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