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Opinion | Vitriol in Indian media can only poison relations with China, at a time when cooperation is needed in coronavirus fight

  • Though public opinion in India has never been friendly towards Beijing, the voices raised now in concert blaming China for the spread of Covid-19 and questioning its motives in extending help to other countries are disconcerting

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Students in Chennai, India, wear masks of China’s President Xi Jinping as others wave the national flags of India and China, ahead of his informal summit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on October 10 last year. Photo: Reuters

The Covid-19 outbreak in India appears to be under control. Although the number of confirmed cases is still increasing, India’s record in battling the pandemic has been quite a success, considering the size of its population.

The World Health Organisation has praised India’s lockdown measures at an early stage. Nevertheless, the government is facing a storm of media criticism, including accusations of unreliable data on infection numbers and the death toll, and on the measures’ adverse impact on daily-wage workers. The harshest criticism has been aimed at New Delhi’s handling of the hate propaganda against minority groups, specifically Muslims.
Many Indian observers even go so far as to blame China for the outbreak of Covid-19 and criticise the Chinese government’s lack of transparency.
The average Chinese finds such criticism difficult to accept. When Beijing imposed a lockdown on Wuhan with little notice on January 23, tens of millions of people were forced to stay at home in an unprecedented living arrangement. Caught unprepared, we experienced fear and discomfort. During the worst time, the first thing I did when I awoke every day was to check the number of new cases.

At that time, India quickly took steps to evacuate its nationals in China and later banned the export of certain masks. Many Chinese, in all fairness, understood the need for such measures, even if they did not like them, especially after reading comments in the Indian media sneering at China’s fight against Covid-19.

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