By IANS,
New Delhi : With a host of issues generating tension below the surface of bonhomie and burgeoning trade, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided to send National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon as his special envoy to Beijing to review afresh the entire bilateral relationship when he met Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington and Brasilia over two months ago.
Manmohan Singh met Hu at the April 12-13 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington and conveyed that he will be sending a senior official as his special envoy to review the entire spectrum of bilateral relationship, well-placed sources told IANS.
The idea was to take a big picture of the entire relationship to keep it on an even keel despite recent differences over a host of issues, added the sources.
The decision to send Menon, a former ambassador to China and a Mandarin-speaking seasoned China hand, was firmed up when the two leaders met at Brasilia for bilateral talks, the sources said.
Manmohan Singh had introduced Menon, also India’s special representative for boundary talks, to Hu and Dai Bingguo, the powerful Chinese diplomat who is China’s Vice Foreign Minister and Special Representative for boundary talks with India, in Brasilia.
Only six months ago, Manmohan Singh had said in Washington that he had noticed “a certain assertiveness” on part of China and it was a cause of concern for India. This time around, the atmospherics of India-China relations had improved, with both sides showing a desire to translate positive economic momentum ($60 billion bilateral trade) into better strategic understanding.
Menon will leave for Beijing on four-day visit Saturday. He will meet a host of Chinese leaders, including Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Dai.
Menon’s visit comes two weeks after Pakistan’s Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani visited Beijing and barely days before Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari lands in the Chinese capital to firm up a nuclear deal for building two additional reactors for Islamabad.
With the China-Pakistan nuclear deal emerging as a new source of friction between the two rising powers, Menon is expected to convey India’s concerns to the Chinese leaders over the deal. New Delhi fears that the nuclear deal will impact on its security and non-proliferation architecture given Islamabad’s known record as an arch proliferator.
Menon will seek details and try to get an assurance from Beijing that even if such a deal were to go through, the atomic material given to Islamabad will not be diverted for weapons programme which is clearly targeted at India, the sources said.
Though the nuclear deal gives Menon’s visit an added significance, the thrust of the NSA will be on working out a new template of future relationship that will insulate it against strategic misunderstanding.
The new template has to build on oft-repeated assertions of both Indian and Chinese leaders that there is enough space for both India and China to grow in Asia, Srikanth Kondapalli, a China expert at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told IANS.
The subterranean tension in relations that manifested when Beijing tried to play a spoiler at the NSG meeting in September 2008 considering a one-time waiver for India has come back to shadow the bilateral relations with the Pakistan-China deal.
Menon’s visit is part of India’s effort in the 60th year of establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries to ensure that the economic upswing is matched by a broader strategic understanding that the two emerging powers can reinforce each other’s rise rather than dissipate their energy in hostile posturing.
The last two years have shown that if the relations are not managed with flexibility and maturity, they can easily go awry, added Kondapalli.
The contentious issues that have the potential to mar India’s relations with China include the Chinese practice of issuing visas on separate sheets to Indians from Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh and Beijing using its all-weather ally Pakistan to balance India in south Asia.