India should not feel alone as it confronts Chinese Communist Party : Pompeo

Agencies | New Delhi

The Daily Tribune - www.newsofbahrain.com

India should “not feel alone” in its strategy to push back and stand up against an assertive “Chinese Communist Party” even as countries around the world are beginning to see the “threat posed by the Marxist-Leninist ideology”, US Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo told ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

Pompeo, who was in New Delhi for 26 hours along with US Secretary of Defence Mark T. Esper, said India is with like-minded countries such as the US, Australia and Japan, and can never feel alone in its struggle against the “Chinese Communist Party”.

“I have watched the relationship between the US, Japan, Australia and India grow, deepen, broaden. We are called the Quad but put the name aside for a moment, we are four big democracies, with big economies, with a shared view of rule of law and transparency. With these kinds of relationships, none of these countries are ever alone,” Pompeo said.

The top member of the Donald Trump cabinet also drew a parallel between what China is doing to Uighur Muslims and what Nazi Germany did to Jews in the 1930s.

Why he refers to ‘Chinese Communist Party’, not China

According to Pompeo, it is the Chinese Communist Party that follows the Marxist-Leninist ideology, and not the people of China, whom the world should be able to “confront”.

“The Chinese Communist Party wants the same thing in every place — they want to control and dominate, they want to have political influence, they want to be extractive,” the Secretary of State said.

“You see this in the Belt and Road Initiative… These are predatory economic activities, designed a little bit to build a road for someone, but mostly to get their teeth into that country, to be able to exert political influence in that place and when the time is right to make that country pay a tribute,” he continued.

“There’s a long history of the Chinese having nations that they feel owe tribute to them. This is the same model that the Chinese Communist Party has now adopted. This is dangerous for the world, and I’m confident that India and the US and other freedom-loving nations will push this back in a way that’ll make the world a more stable, safer place,” Pompeo added.

Pompeo also stressed that the trouble India is facing with China, in terms of the six-month-long LAC stand-off in Ladakh, in which the country lost 20 of its soldiers, is due to the Chinese Communist Party.

“The trouble in the world, the challenge whether it’s the problems currently on your (India’s) northern border or the fact that the virus escaped and the Chinese Communist Party failed to let the world know in a timely fashion to prevent untold misery from taking place,” he said.

“That wasn’t the Chinese people, that was the Communist Party, an authoritarian regime that was simply incapable of dealing with a crisis in a way that the world has every expectation, properly so, and indeed what it promised to the world. They are part of the WHO and they had an obligation to do better.” – He said