New Delhi, Sep 24 (Inditop.com) India Thursday said it will hold the third joint military exercise with China next year and clarified that no such drill was planned for this year.
“It was mutually decided during the last exercise that the next joint military exercise would be held in 2010,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said. He was responding to media reports that the joint army exercise had been “called off”.
“Therefore, no joint military exercise was planned in 2009,” Prakash said in a statement here, adding India and China had conducted joint military exercises in 2007 and 2008.
In an important confidence building measure, the armies of India and China held the first joint counter-terrorism exercise, named Hand-in-Hand, in December 2007 in Kunming province of China.
This was followed by the second joint exercise at the Belgaum commando school in Karnataka in December 2008.
Alluding to reported spike in Chinese incursions across the Indian border recently, a report in the Times of India Thursday said the third edition of the joint exercise “has run aground, with no clear explanations forthcoming”.
