NEW DELHI: In an overnight U-turn, India has decided to go ahead with sending a military delegation to China next week but curtailed it to 15 members, instead of the original 30, after Beijing refused to issue a visa to an IAF officer, who hails from Arunachal Pradesh.
The 15-member tri-Service delegation will leave for China on Sunday, as was scheduled earlier, to hold talks with their People's Liberation Army (PLA) counterparts as well as visit military establishments in Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai from January 10 to 13, said officials on Saturday.
Group Captain M Panging, the chief operations officer at the Sukhoi-30MKI fighter airbase at Tezpur, will, however, not be part of the truncated delegation. The visa denial to Group Captain Panging had led to the delegation's visit being put on hold on Friday, with the defence and external affairs ministries speaking in different voices, as reported by TOI.
Given its over-cautious attitude about not doing anything to ruffle a prickly Beijing, India in the past has avoided sending officials hailing from Arunachal Pradesh for defence and other exchanges with China. The defence establishment seems to have inadvertently included Group Captain Panging in the 30-member delegation, which included eight officers each from Army, Navy and IAF as well as six from the integrated defence staff, much to the external affairs ministry's consternation.
Consequently, a 15-member delegation, led by an air vice marshal, will now be heading for China as "a reciprocal visit" to the one made by a 29-member PLA delegation here in the last week of December. This was one of the ``net outcomes" of the 4th India-China annual defence dialogue, held in New Delhi on December 9, which had decided to enhance "the range and scope of bilateral exchanges at various levels'' as a confidence-building measure between the world's two largest armies.
If the delegation's visit next week had been called off, it would have been the second time in less than two years that India would have taken such a step. Earlier, in July 2010, India had frozen all military exchanges with China after Beijing had denied a proper stamped visa to the then Northern Army commander Lt-General B S Jaswal on the grounds that he was commanding forces in the ``disputed and sensitive'' region of Jammu and Kashmir. The ice was broken only after an Indian delegation, led by Major-General Gurmeet Singh, commanding a Rashtriya Rifles division in J&K, visited Beijing in last June.
India to go ahead with sending a military delegation to China next week
