New Delhi: India on Friday (July 24) said it was Beijing, rather than New Delhi, that should answer questions on sovereignty after a Chinese foreign ministry readout attributed remarks on Taiwan and Tibet to external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) pointing to China’s occupation of territory claimed by India and Chinese projects in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.Responding to questions at the weekly media briefing about the Chinese foreign ministry’s account of Jaishankar’s meeting with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Manila earlier this week, MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said India had consistently respected China’s sovereignty, but China had violated India’s territorial integrity.“The external affairs minister said that when it comes to sovereignty issues, it is actually India that should be, and is, raising them. India does not violate China’s sovereignty in any manner and has been consistent. But China [has been] in illegal occupation of Indian territory in Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh since 1963, where India’s right is officially acknowledged even by China,” he said.Jaiswal added that there were “Chinese projects on territories in Jammu and Kashmir that belong to India, and we object to that”.The remarks were prompted by a readout posted on China’s foreign ministry website after Jaishankar’s meeting with Wang in Manila on Wednesday, on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit and ASEAN-related foreign ministers’ talks.The readout quoted Jaishankar as saying that India’s position on “such issues as Taiwan and Xizang remains unchanged”, alongside a line describing India as respecting China’s sovereignty and committed to a forward-looking, cooperative relationship. It was the first such Chinese readout involving Jaishankar to bracket Tibet with Taiwan.Friday’s exchange is the second time in less than a year that a Chinese readout of a Jaishankar-Wang meeting has drawn a public response from New Delhi.Last August, after Wang’s visit to New Delhi, China’s foreign ministry issued a Mandarin readout quoting Jaishankar as saying “Taiwan is part of China“, a line also carried by the state news agency Xinhua. Jaishankar’s own opening remarks, published on the MEA’s website, made no reference to Taiwan.But the MEA’s press release on the visit said there is “no change in our position on Taiwan”, adding that India, like the rest of the world, maintained a relationship with Taiwan “focused on economic, technology and cultural ties” and intended to continue it.China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called that clarification a “surprise” that was “inconsistent with the facts” at a briefing on August 21, 2025, and said it appeared that “some people in India” were trying to “undermine China’s sovereignty on the Taiwan question and impede the improvement of China-India relations”.She reiterated that “there is but one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory”, and urged India to “earnestly abide by the one-China principle” and “handle sensitive issues properly”.India has last explicitly endorsed the one-China policy in a bilateral joint statement during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to China in 2008. The reference was dropped from the joint communique issued during then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to India in 2010, after ties had become strained over issues including China’s practice of issuing stapled visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir and its refusal to grant a visa to the then-Northern Army Commander Lieutenant General B.S. Jaswal.Since then, no Indian government has restored the explicit language. New Delhi has instead stuck to variations of the “no change” formula it used again on Friday, even as India and Taiwan continue to run trade representative offices in each other’s capitals.The formulation used in the Manila readout echoes language that has surfaced in Chinese readouts of other recent India-China exchanges.National security adviser Ajit Doval was quoted in a readout of his meeting with Wang in New Delhi on June 23 as saying “India’s position on the Taiwan question has not changed at all“. A Chinese readout of the Special Representatives-level border talks between Doval and Wang in New Delhi had instead quoted Doval as saying India “consistently upholds the one-China policy“, but without the word Tibet appearing in either instance.The high-level meetings were taking place against the backdrop of a broader normalisation of bilateral ties that began with the October 2024 patrolling arrangement along the Line of Actual Control that resolved the four-year-old military standoff and led to the Kazan meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping.