As India and China ejected each other’s journalists in the recent weeks, former CEO of Prasar Bharati Shashi Shekhar Vempati termed the development unfortunate and blamed China for its intransigent attitude.
“An unfortunate development contributed largely by China’s intransigence,” said Vempati on Twitter referring to India and China virtually wiping out mutual media access and deepening a rift between the world’s two most populous nations.
Reminiscing his days as the CEO of Prasar Bharati, Vempati said that over the years he observed that provocative coverage of India by CGTN, a state-run foreign-language news channel based in Beijing, had no red lines while even the slightest mention of Taiwan by DD News would elicit advisories from the Chinese embassy.
An unfortunate development contributed largely by China’s intransigence. Over my years at the helm of India’s Public Broadcaster have observed that CGTN’s provocative coverage of India had no red lines while even the slightest mention of Taiwan by DD News would elicit advisories… https://t.co/RWjyn2qS5A
— Shashi Shekhar Vempati शशि शेखर (@shashidigital) May 31, 2023
“At multilateral platforms such as the Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union, the behaviour of China’s Public Media entities was often petulant against India with barely any support from other national media,” he wrote.
He said trust between the world’s two most populous nations and neighbours will require direct and first hand reporting and understanding on each other’s developments.
“Hope China realises this as it has lost immense trust in India,” he added.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, citing people familiar with the matter, New Delhi denied visa renewals this month to the last two remaining Chinese state media journalists in the country, from state-run Xinhua News Agency and China Central Television.
Indian media outlets had four remaining journalists based in China at the beginning of the year. At least two of them haven’t been granted visas to return to the country, a Chinese official said.
A third was told this month that his accreditation had been revoked but he remains in the country, the report added.
The reciprocal moves are likely to add to acrimony between the two neighbours, whose relationship has deteriorated since a deadly brawl on the contested Sino-Indian border in June 2020.
Since then, a once-warming relationship between the two members of the so-called BRICS grouping of emerging powers has grown testy, spilling over into a wide-ranging bilateral dispute.
India has shifted toward more active participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the US-led grouping known as the Quad that also includes Australia and Japan, and which China regards as an attempt to encircle and contain it.
Ties between New Delhi and Beijing have soured in other ways. India has banned dozens of Chinese mobile apps, including TikTok, WeChat and other global hits with roots in China, effectively locking them out of the fast-growing Indian market.
In recent months, China has renamed certain features in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing claims almost in its entirety and calls South Tibet.
China boycotted a Group of 20 working group meeting on tourism after India, as host, decided to hold the meeting this month in the territory of Kashmir. The region has been at the center of a dispute between India and Pakistan since partition in 1947, with both countries claiming it in full but only controlling parts of it.
China’s territorial disputes with India include the abutting strategic area of Ladakh.
The journalist ejections add another dimension to the fraying ties between China and India, reducing exchanges and visibility between two nuclear-armed neighbors whose combined population accounts for more than one-third of the world’s total.
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