BEIJING/NEW DELHI - China is funding the construction of villages on Indian land amid rising tensions between the two nuclear superpowers over disputed border territory, according to British publication The Week.
Tapir Gao, a member of parliament from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told The Telegraph that “China has occupied our territory”. Beijing is behind the construction of “more than 100 houses”, he said, that have appeared on the banks of the River Tsari Chu in the Upper Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh.
The region is “remote with harsh weather conditions”, the paper said, “but the villages are said to include high-quality infrastructure such as roads, water, electricity and a communication network to entice new residents”.
Indian officials believe China is “constructing more than 600 such villages” along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the paper added, a border between the two countries agreed after what Newsweek described as a “brief but bloody border war” in 1962.
Last year in June, at least 20 Indian and five Chinese soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat in the mountains in the first fatal clashes in at least 45 years.
Five months later a Beijing-based academic claimed Chinese troops had got around a no-live-shots agreement by using a microwave weapon that left Indian soldiers “vomiting” and unable to stand within 15 minutes.
According to the Vivekananda International Foundation, a think-tank headquartered in New Delhi, one villager in the newly constructed village was quoted in the Tibet Daily as saying that he received 30,000 Yuan (£3,500) a year to live in the border region.
The Telegraph described “similar views” being “echoed by several locals” who described “bribing” being deployed as an incentive to move.
Konchok Stanzin, a councillor in India’s Ladakh border region, said: “China lures locals by providing them with better-living facilities so that they come to live in the disputed border areas and create permanent settlements.”
The publication of an annual US Defence Department report has also “turned the spotlight on India’s concerns about a push by China to create civilian settlements” in the disputed region, Voice of America (VoA) said.
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