Delhi State Chief and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal has called for a boycott of Chinese goods following a tense face-off between troops of the two countries at the border in Arunachal Pradesh.
"We continue to increasingly buy goods from China. Why? In just 2020-21, we bought goods worth $65 billion from China. When Chinese aggression increased, we bought goods worth $95 billion in the subsequent year. Can we not increase indigenous manufacturing manifold? We buy the same stuff from China which could be produced in our country," Kejriwal said during a meeting of his party's national council in Delhi on Sunday.
Kejriwal's remarks regarding the boycott of Chinese goods came after Defense Minister Rajnath Singh informed Parliament about the latest skirmish on the border earlier this week.
Indian and Chinese soldiers patrolling the area confronted each other at one of the mountain peaks before a hand-to-hand fight ensued, which resulted in some troops falling in the hilly terrain and injuring themselves, reports in several media outlets said.
It was the first violent border clash between the soldiers of the two Asian giants since June 2020 when 20 Indian and four Chinese troops died in the Galwan Valley of Ladakh, a federally-administered territory in India's north.
"PLA troops tried to transgress the LAC in Yangtse area of Tawang Sector and unilaterally change the status quo," Singh told Indian lawmakers while referring to the People's Liberation Army of China and the country's contested border with its larger Asian neighbor, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in official parlance.
India and China share a disputed 3,500 km border and even waged a deadly war against each other in 1962.