Trust deficit to shadow Hu's visit

The last time a Chinese president came to visit India, he met with the prime minister of a politically shaky, minority coalition, with little clarity in its foreign policy.

President Jiang Zemin's meetings with HD Deve Gowda in 1996 built upon the 1993 agreement on peace and added confidence building measures to the relations.

In the intervening decade, any number of Joint Working Groups and Eminent Persons' Groups have been constituted following that visit.

However, when President Hu Jintao comes to India (New Delhi and Mumbai) tomorrow, India and China will also be looking at a continuing trust deficit in political relations, exacerbated by the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, which is all set to put Indo-US relations on another trajectory.

It was the statement of Ambassador Sun Yuxi that spelt out the gap between the two countries.

"In our position, the whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory. And Tawang is only one of the places in it. We are claiming all of that. That is our position," he said earlier this week, exposing to public gaze, how little ground India and China had really covered in border talks despite interminable rounds held over the last several decades.

A previously scheduled November 9 session for talks between the Special Representatives "" MK Narayanan and Dai Bingguo "" on the border question was put off days earlier, so Sun Yuxi was possibly articulating the reason for the postponement.

For the record, however, Cui Tiankui, China's Assistant Foreign Minister, said at a press briefing in Beijing earlier this week that "active progress" was taking place in solving the boundary dispute and that following the announcement of the political parameters and guiding principles for resolution of the border issue, "exploration has started on the details of a framework agreement."

The Sino-India border, that is the biggest and possibly the only dispute between the two countries, is divided into three sectors "" The

Eastern, the Western and Central.

A resolution involves negotiation for the East (Arunachal Pradesh including Tawang) and West (Aksai Chin), and aligning maps mutually for the central sector, which is the least disputed.

Experts feel Sun Yuxi's statement was a throwback to 1960 when Chou En-lai offered a swap "" Tawang in return for Aksai Chin "" that India refused at the time.

When Jiang Zemin visited India experts said China hardened its position, which was: concessions in the East for concessions in the West. In other words a trade-off in the eastern sector that gave Tawang to China but could get for India, parcels of territory in the Ladakh and Aksai Chin area.

But Tawang was then, and continues to be now, non-negotiable for India, for strategic reasons.

Experts say that raising the Arunachal Pradesh issue at this point is merely putting a spoke in the wheel. Several agreements on energy, agriculture, education and science and technology are likely to be signed.

But the political message will be contained in President Hu's speech to be made in Vigyan Bhavan on November 22.

China has made much of a Free Trade Agreement and officials have flagged "reports" on India's recent moves toward restricting Chinese investments in certain key sectors on security grounds. Hu goes from India to Pakistan on November 23 and is reportedly going to sign a nuclear energy agreement with Pakistan.

But a substantive result of the Sino-Indian relationship, military experts say, cannot be expected until the border issue is resolved "" because that is the reason for the trust deficit.