NEW DELHI: After a barrage of warnings to Pakistan in recent weeks, ranging from the terse to the ominous, it was China’s turn on Thursday to get an earful from India.

“Today, no one can give warning to India. We are a very powerful country,” Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh was quoted as telling reporters at a function in Manesar, near Delhi.

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Press Trust of India described Mr Singh’s comments as a response to Chinese reservations on Delhi’s plans to build a border road in territory claimed as disputed by China.

Mr Singh was asked about China’s strong reaction to Indian plans to construct a road network along McMahon line from Mago-Thingbu in Tawang to Vijaynagar in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh to match China’s infrastructure development.

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“There is a dispute about the eastern part of the China-India border. Before final settlement is reached we hope that India will not take any action that may fur-ther complicate the situation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lie had said in Beijing, according to PTI.

The home minister said on Thursday India and China should sit together to resolve the border dispute.

Government is taking a number of steps for improving infrastructure along the Sino-Indian border, especially in Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, PTI said.

Forces of the two countries were locked in a stare-down at Chumur in Ladakh for a fortnight beginning on September 11, which clouded the Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day India visit, the news agency said.

For days, soldiers of the Chinese PLA and Indian Army personnel were engaged in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation in the area.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the matter twice with the Chinese president.

Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar is among a handful of analysts who have slammed Mr Modi for war mongering with Pakistan.

“Pakistan is a sovereign nation,” Mr Aiyar wrote in his blog this week. “It makes its own assessment of the threats to its security. And the kind of talk they have heard in recent days from our governmental chiefs only persuades them that they are right in regarding India as the biggest threat to their security.”

The language of the akhara is not the language of statesmen, Mr Aiyar told the prime minister.

“And war is not a continuation of diplomacy by other means; it is a confession of the breakdown of diplomacy.”

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2014