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The Indian security establishment is mulling revoking the liberal security clearance regime for Chinese companies after the Dragon blocked India's proposal to impose sanctions on Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Maulana Masood Azhar in the United Nations.
Highly placed sources said that the deliberate backing of Pakistan by China on the JeM issue in the UN recently has not gone down well with the top brass in the security establishment, including security agencies.
It also follows Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tough remarks against blocking the sanction. Soon after the Chinese decision, Modi, at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, said that the world community should "drop the notion that terrorism is someone else's problem" and that "his terrorist is not my terrorist."
A meeting of the concerned ministries – telecom, home and power – and security agencies is soon expected to take a decision, sources said.
India has blamed Jaish and its top functionaries – Masood Azhar, his brother Rauf Asghar and a couple of other Jaish operatives – directly for planning and executing the Pathankot terror attack and has also given plenty of evidence to back its claim.
Pakistan, too, responded pro-actively to India's accusations by sending its joint investigation team to India to probe the attack.
Signalling a major shift in its hardened security-centric approach, the Union home ministry had, last year, taken off Chinese companies from the no-go list and given its nod to let them set up shop in India in core sectors like telecom, power etc for manufacturing, trading and logistics base.
The change in outlook towards Chinese companies had come after Modi's China visit last year where the two countries decided to break existing barriers and increase trade among each other.
After taking the affirmative decision towards Chinese companies, the Union home ministry, in the last one year, granted security clearance to close to 25 top Chinese companies, including telecom hardware giant Huawei.
It was awaiting security clearance since 2013 because of the hard stand taken by Indian security agencies to keep Chinese companies out of strategic sectors.