BJP's Nitin Gadkari to visit China on CPC's invitation

NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party has never been known to be an admirer of China but equations seem to be changing. For the first time, a BJP President will visit China on the invitation of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Nitin Gadkari, accompanied by a seven-member party delegation, will begin his five-day tour of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou on January 20. “I am very keen to visit the local neighbourhood community to learn about party building at grassroots level in China,” Gadkari said on Wednesday.

During the visit, part of an exercise to promote party-to-party contact at the highest political level, Gadkari is likely to take up the issue of Beijing giving stapled visas to people of Jammu and Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, according to party sources.

China has made territorial claims over Arunachal Pradesh, which is part of the long-standing boundary dispute between the two countries. In 2007, China denied visa to senior IAS officer Ganesh Koyu, who was a member of a 107 strong IAS officers’ team on a management programme to China.

The BJP had made it an election issue in the state last year and asked the UPA government to come out with a white paper on Chinese incursions into this frontier state. The party had accused the UPA of not taking the Chinese incursions seriously.

More in the nature of a goodwill visit, Gadkari is planning to focus on studying recent developments in China in sectors like energy, recycling projects, bamboo and agro processing.

Chinese ambassador Zhang Yan, who hosted a dinner on Tuesday for the visiting BJP delegation, said Beijing was attaching great significance to the first visit to China by a BJP president.

“It is an extremely important visit for us and we will accord Mr Gadkari a very warm welcome in China,” he said. Zhang expressed the hope that Gadkari’s visit would promote and strengthen the relations between the CPC and BJP.

He also recalled that both countries had “greatly benefited” from former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to China in 2003. Vajpayee himself had said after the visit that the two countries had moved forward on the border issue more than during any other official visit.