The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) president Lobsang Sangay on Tuesday said trust deficit and the paranoia of dealing with COVID-19 and internal issues can be the reason that China is creating tensions on the border with India to divert attention of its people.

Sangay said at this point of time, China is under tremendous pressure from the mishandling of the Coronavirus situation, trade relations with the US and also with Europe.

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“Trust deficit has happened. Certain business people are also looked at as new colonialists. All these pressures are building within China and then obviously, they want to clamp down on Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minority groups within China. That shows that there is a bit of paranoia and nervousness within and external pressure. So they have to divert their attention and hence the incursions in the border of India,” he said.

He said when Tibet was occupied Mao Tse Tung, Chinese leaders had said that Tibet is a palm and Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, and Arunachal are five fingers.

“So once they occupied the palm and now they are coming after the five fingers. Their adventurism and the incursions in Ladakh and Sikkim are nothing surprising for us. In 2017, Doklam standoff happened and now it’s happening in Ladakh.

The infrastructure build-up of the Chinese military is huge in both the areas.

This is nothing surprising as we have been saying all these years after the occupation of Tibet ‘what has happened to us could happen to all the neighbouring countries including India’,” he added.

Sangay further stated that what’s happening to India and the borders of India is what we have been saying for the last 60 years.

In a way, the whole world focused on dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic which originated from Wuhan in China and that’s where the attention should be and all these incursions are absolutely unnecessary and very insensitive at this time of the year but the Chinese government is doing it.

“Chinese government is flexing its military muscles and India happens to be the largest populated country in Asia which can go toe to toe as far as population is concerned.

As far as military capacity is concerned, I think it could be testing its water but definitely since the occupation of Tibet as the border between Tibet and India changed to India-China, all the tensions have come up and it will continue to come till the Tibet issue is resolved,” he added.