India to raise stapled visas issue with China

Ahead of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s India visit this month, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said on Friday the two countries were putting in place more confidence-building measures to tackle the complex boundary issue. She said India was making a serious attempt to try and arrive at a “fair, reasonable and mutually-acceptable solution” to the dispute.

In her talk on India-China relations, Rao said that a host of issues will be raised during the high-profile visit, including the issue of stapled visas, Chinese presence in PoK and China-Pakistan relations. Premier Jiabao, on his second Indian visit, will attend the closing ceremony of the Festival of China in India, marking the 60th anniversary of Indo-China relations.

About the strategic dialogue in Beijing a fortnight ago attended by the foreign secretary and the recently-concluded 14th round of talks between special representatives on the boundary issue, attended by national security advisor Shiv Shankar Menon in Beijing, Rao said that the Indian leadership is understood to have been “quite frank” and “hard-nosed” while raising these issues of concern in discussions with their Chinese counterparts.

“The absence of a solution to the boundary dispute question is not due to a lack of effort but arises from the difficulty of the question,” Rao said.

About stapled visas to residents of Jammu and Kashmir, she said that it was made clear to Beijing that this was not acceptable to India, which China was aware of. So, “It was a knot to be untied, which could only be done by the Chinese.”

Rao called the India-China boundary the most peaceful of all boundaries and said that both the countries had a “well-organised” set of confidence-building measures to ensure peace and tranquility on the boundary.

“We are currently talking to each other on establishing more such mechanisms,” she said, adding leaders on both the sides have shown maturity to understand the complexity of the issue and to insulate it from affecting the broader relationship. About the companies engaged in construction work in Pak-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), the secretary said that no decision was taken to black-list companies from working in India and a decision would be taken when the time comes.