Four days after he “exchanged courtesies” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will travel to Arunachal Pradesh on Saturday to inaugurate infrastructure projects in a move that is likely to draw a response from China which frowns on central ministers travelling to the state that Beijing claims as its territory.
Modi will inaugurate Arunachal’s first greenfield airport, the Donyi Polo Airport, in Itanagar and dedicate the 600MW Kameng Hydro Power Station to the nation. In more ways than one, the inauguration will serve the ruling BJP’s politics, bolstering its claims of placing the Northeast on the development track.
The drumroll began with the announcement of Modi’s vist and continued on Friday with the ruling ecosystem using the inauguration of the airport — conceived in 2005 — to talk up the “aviation revolution in the Northeast”.
It will also help address the disappointment among Modi’s supporters over his meeting with Xi, which was caught on camera. The government has been silent about the brief encounter in Bali during the G20 summit.
Modi posted photographs of his meetings with all other leaders, both formal and informal, but not with Xi.
This indicates a degree of unease over the meeting in the ruling dispensation, knowing full well the appetite for muscular diplomacy within its core support base.
That base would have been disappointed with the Modi-Xi encounter amid regular reports of China ramping up its military infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control, including inside India-claimed lines on the Depsang Plains.
Modi taking actions that are known to annoy China is bound to please this core support group.
Though the Donyi Polo Airport has been waiting for inauguration so that it can begin operations from the month-end, it remains to be seen whether Modi will use the occasion to rake up one of the biggest setbacks suffered by India during the Sino-India War of 1962 — the Chinese taking over much of the Northeast Frontier Agency that forced then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to send two letters of appeal in quick succession to US President John F. Kennedy for air support.
Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the day Nehru penned the letters.