New Delhi: Close on the heels of reported border incursions, China's recent practice of issuing separate visas to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir has sparked widespread concern and brought to the fore a growing trust deficit between the two neighbours.
India's external affairs ministry conveyed its unhappiness to the Chinese government Thursday, a day after a media report disclosed the practice that is seen to give separate status to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, claimed by Pakistan, widely considered Beijing's all-weather ally.
"It is our considered view and position that there should be no discrimination against visa applicants of Indian nationality on grounds of domicile or ethnicity," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said here. "We have conveyed our well-justified concern to the Chinese government in this regard," he said.
The issue was taken up yesterday with both the Chinese embassy and with the foreign office in Beijing.
"The visas are valid," was all a spokesperson of the Chinese embassy would say when asked about the practice of issuing standalone visas to Kashmiris.
External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna is likely to raise the issue with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi's visit to India Oct 26-27, top sources told IANS. Yang will be here to participate in the trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of India, China and Russia which will be held in Bangalore.
The Chinese embassy has been issuing visas for some time to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate sheet of paper rather than stamping them in their passports, which is the norm with other Indian citizens. They have given stapled visas earlier to residents of Arunachal Pradesh, over which China claims its sovereignty.
The move is fraught with security risks as the unattached visa does not leave any trail behind and does not fully reflect the travel record of the passport holder.
According to sources, the new practice has coincided with a hardening of Chinese posture on India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. "It's meant to put India on the defensive on the boundary issue," said the sources.
"It's extremely troubling and disturbing. It does suggest a new level of tension between India and China. There has to be a political message in what has happened," Mira Sinha Bhattachrjea, a China expert at the Institute of Chinese Studies here, told IANS.
"Except for a brief period during the India-Pakistan war in 1965, the Chinese have not raised the Kashmir issue," she pointed out.
"If the Chinese are beginning to highlight the disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir, it's a matter of great concern and anxiety," said Bhattachrjea. "Trust deficit is growing."
"These are pinpricks. This could be used as a bargaining chip in boundary negotiations or on other issues like India's claim for a seat in the UN Security Council," Srikanth Kondapalli, a China expert at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, told IANS.
The visa issue has revived trust deficit, an impression that has been bolstered by reports of recent incursions and a string of hostile posturing by China against India's interests that started with Beijing's alleged negative role in trying to block consensus in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) a year ago.
Recently, China tried to block a development loan for India in the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on grounds that a part of the loan was meant for irrigation projects in Arunachal Pradesh.
New Delhi: In a move that has puzzled and annoyed South Block, the Chinese embassy in New Delhi has begun issuing visas to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate sheet of paper rather than stamping them in their passports as is the norm with other Indian citizens. Though it is not clear when the new Chinese policy started or what prompted Beijing to adopt it, immigration authorities at Delhi airport first started noticing the standalone visas a few weeks ago. The Bureau of Immigration, which is run by the Ministry of Home Affairs, initially assumed these visas to be fake and turned the unfortunate travellers – all of them Kashmiri students or businessmen – away. But when some of them returned with letters from the Chinese embassy declaring the visas to be genuine, the matter was referred to the Ministry of External Affairs.
With the Chinese issuing "stapled visas" to the handful of Indian passport holders from Arunachal Pradesh who have travelled to China since 2007, the MEA saw in Beijing’s latest move an attempt to question the status of Jammu and Kashmir. The immigration authorities were told to treat any visa that is not stamped on a passport as invalid for the purposes of travel. Simultaneously, the issue was taken up with the Chinese authorities, MEA officials told The Hindu.
Although the People’s Republic of China embassy in Delhi said it would not officially comment on the matter, Chinese diplomats told The Hindu that the practice of issuing visas on a separate piece of paper is not new. "This kind of visa is one category of Chinese visa. It is valid. This has been practised for many years. Upon the implementation of this, a note was sent to your immigration authorities. All the visa holders of this kind have not met any problem in the past in your custom/border control," an embassy official said on condition of anonymity.
The MEA denies the contention that India has only now started objecting to some pre-existing Chinese practice of issuing Kashmiri domicile passport holders visas on a separate sheet of paper. "What the Chinese are doing is definitely new and we have taken a serious view of it," an MEA official said.
