Thank you for the question.
It's important to go back to these principles and the basis for managing diplomatic relations, which is the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. In short, that convention uses the term “parity” nowhere, and that term was the basis on which the Indian government explained its expulsion of 41 diplomats.
It is the case that the VCDR, as it's known, provides for host states to place limits on the number of diplomats a sending state will have posted, but that requires consultations and has to take into account both the needs of the host state and the conditions of the sending state. Therefore, the idea of some kind of pure, literal parity or pure reciprocity in numbers simply doesn't exist in the Vienna convention. That word doesn't exist, and there's no agreed definition of that in the international law.
We reject the Indian government's position in this regard, and we have been quite clear on that.