By Seema Mehta , CNN Written by
India and China have traded increasingly strong words in recent months as their competing interests in the region — South Asia and the Indian Ocean — jostle for influence.
India and China have been involved in border disputes and counter-claims for years. A tour of India’s border region in the highlands and remote mountain areas of Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh — also known as China’s disputed region of Aksai Chin — is an eerie reality of the challenges to both countries’ security.
But with tensions increasing between India and China, the two were recently left red-faced after their nuclear tests over the weekend.
After the very public show of India’s ability to easily strike targets in China’s northeast, the country claimed that a faulty test firing was to blame.
In a statement on its nuclear test site , India’s Ministry of External Affairs blamed China for the accident.
The statement was accompanied by pictures of the satellite-mounted missile-launching system, its exhaust escaping from a booster and clips of operators opening an umbilical strap on the missile’s nose.
“Upon inspection, it was observed that the missile inadvertently broke off from the booster,” it said.
China issued its own statement about the launch late Saturday, saying that it had serious reservations about the tests because it violates the “spirit” of the 1980 Indo-US nuclear deal that promised to eliminate nuclear cooperation between the two nations.
