China expresses concern over India's plan to deploy BrahMos on border

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China expresses concern over India's plan to deploy BrahMos on border


Chinese defence ministry spokesman Wu Qian said maintaining peace and stability in the border region was an "important consensus" reached by both countries

BEIJING: China's defence ministry said on Thursday that it hoped India could put more efforts into regional peace and stability rather than the opposite, in response to Indian plans to put advanced cruise missiles+ along the China border.

Indian military officials say the plan is to equip regiments deployed at the China border+ with the BrahMos missile+ , made under an India-Russian joint venture, as part of ongoing efforts to build up military and civilian infrastructure capabilities there.

The two nuclear-armed neighbours have been moving to gradually ease long-existing tensions between them.

Leaders of Asia's two giants pledged last year to cool a festering border dispute, which dates back to a brief border war in 1962, though the disagreement remains unresolved.

Asked about the missile plans at a monthly news briefing, Chinese defence ministry spokesman Wu Qian said maintaining peace and stability in the border region was an "important consensus" reached by both countries.
"We hope that the Indian side can do more to benefit peace and stability along the border and in the region, rather than the opposite," Wu said, without elaborating.

China lays claim to more than 90,000 sq km (35,000 sq miles) ruled by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. India says China occupies 38,000 sq km (14,600 sq miles) of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.

India is also suspicious of China's support for its arch-rival, Pakistan.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visits China next month to attend the G20 summit


Modi government has ordered BrahMos Aerospace, which produces the missiles, to accelerate sales to a list of five countries topped by Vietnam, according to a government note viewed by Reuters and previously unreported.

Modi visits Vietnam, which is embroiled in a dispute over the South China Sea with Beijing, before arriving in China.

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NEW DELHI: The NDA government has given the final go-ahead for the Army to induct and deploy an advanced version of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, with "trajectory manoeuvre and steep-dive capabilities" for mountain warfare, in the northeast as a conventional deterrent against China.

Sources said the Cabinet Committee on Security, chaired by PM Narendra Modi, cleared this fourth BrahMos regiment at a cost of over Rs 4,300 crore. The regiment consists of around 100 missiles, five mobile autonomous launchers on 12x12 heavy-duty trucks and a mobile command post, among other hardware and software.

The 290-km range BrahMos is a tactical or non-nuclear missile with "nine times more kinetic energy than sub-sonic missiles" for greater destructive potential. Jointly developed with Russia, it has become the preferred precision-strike weapon for the Indian armed forces.

From 2007 onwards, the Army has progressively inducted three regiments of BrahMos with largely Block-I and II missiles developed to hit a specific small target with a low radar cross-section in a cluttered environment, as earlier reported by TOI.

The missile's Block-III "steep-dive" version will now be deployed in Arunachal Pradesh to counter China's huge build of military infrastructure all along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control. Flying at a velocity almost three times the speed of sound at Mach 2.8, the missiles also have "a combined high-low trajectory" to evade enemy defence systems.


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