Worry about Chinese funding for empty airports, ports: Delhi tells Dhaka

Countries seeking loans should worry about unsustainable infrastructure projects like airports and ports that are empty, said Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, in a sharp riposte to Bangladesh Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen, who asked about whether the Quad grouping can offer the same kind of financial assistance that China does, reports The Hindu.

In an exchange at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Mr. Jaishankar also said India’s ties with China are right now going through a “difficult phase,” adding that the state of the relationship stems from “the state of the border”, and China’s transgressions along the Line of Actual Control since April 2020.

“We have seen now countries including in our region being saddled with large debts. We have seen projects which are commercially unsustainable: airports where an aircraft doesn’t come, harbours where a ship doesn’t come,” Mr. Jaishankar told a panel about the future of the Indo-Pacific, in comments that appeared to indicate the debt situation in Sri Lanka, where there have been concerns over the Hambantota port and the Mattala airport, both originally developed with Chinese loans, which Sri Lanka struggled to pay back, eventually having to hand over the port on a 99-year old lease to a Chinese company.

“It’s obviously in the interest of the consumer country concerned, but it’s also in the interest of the international community because unsustainable projects don’t end there. Often the next is, debt becomes equity, and that becomes something else,” he said, in a further illustration of the problem Sri Lanka faced.

Significantly, the question of infrastructure financing was raised by the Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, who was in the audience of the panel discussion where Jaishankar shared the stage with the Foreign Ministers of France, Australia and Japan, as well as senior U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

The Bangladesh Foreign Minister said while India had offered Lines of Credit and Japan had also helped with infrastructure financing, incoming loans had been “declining”, and it was China that had “come forward with a basket of money and aggressive, affordable proposals”.