Beijing 2008: China invites Sonia, not PM or Prez

Eighty heads of state and government will grace the Beijing Olympics in August but PM Manmohan Singh will not be among them.

Not because he is too busy, but because he was not invited. In fact, neither India’s head of state nor government have been invited, with the invitation going to its most important politician, Sonia Gandhi.

The Congress chief is unlikely to attend, leaving that job to sports minister M S Gill. But even if you are really charitable, it can’t be denied that it’s yet another Chinese snub of pretty large proportions, and no amount of earnest protestations from government functionaries about the wonderful state of Sino-Indian relations will change that.

In October 2007, when Sonia visited Beijing, she received a welcome fit for a head of state. It raised eyebrows in India because it showed where the Chinese government was focusing its attention. It was then that the Chinese leadership first extended an invitation to her to attend the Bejing Olympic Games.

Although the government was the first to deny it, the scale of Sonia’s visit prompted a delay in the prime minister’s visit to Beijing. He was initially supposed to make his summit visit at the end of 2007, but this had to be pushed to the new calendar year. In 2008, the Beijing Olympics acquiring a distinct political hue with the Tibetan protests. Consequently, India-China ties took on a strained look, made worse by China’s repeated incursions in Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim.

China’s internal troubles did not stop it from keeping the Indian government is a state of permanent squirm — first with repeated claims to Arunachal and then by incursions into Sikkim. In fact, foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was faced with a sudden cancellation of his meeting with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

Also by this time, China had invited pretty much every world leader to the Olympics, but maintained a silence on India. India wasn’t on the first list, or the second. While the Chinese government has invited the who’s who in terms of heads of government to the Games, in the case of India, it made a clear distinction between the head of government and the most powerful political leader in the ruling combine. When Mukherjee visited Beijing in June, the formal invitation was finally made — to Sonia. Officials, when questioned, evaded the issue.

The PM would not have gone, said officials trying to defend the lack of an invitation. In October, Singh will be in Beijing for the ASEM summit, which officials say will be his second visit there this year. So a third visit during the Olympics was not on his radar. But as with much of India-China thorny issues, this too is looking more and more like a post-facto justification. Sources requesting anonymity said the Chinese leadership, which also derives its strength from the party, merely looked at the Indian leadership through that perspective.

However, seen in almost any light, the Chinese decision is little short of a snub to the PM personally and his office.