Rajiv, Rahul

New Delhi, March 25: A replica of Olympic mascot Fuwa in hand, a team from China has invited Rahul Gandhi to Beijing to mark 20 years of father Rajiv’s “historic” handshake with Deng Xiaoping.

A delegation of Communist Party of China officials today proposed to Congress leaders that a bilateral conference or seminar be held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the visit and that Rahul be given the honour of inaugurating it.

Sources said the Congress was open to accepting the invite to the seminar, tentatively called the “Beijing Congress”. Fuwa was sent over to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

The proposal was placed before Congress leaders Veerappa Moily, Devendra Dwivedi and others at the party headquarters by a team headed by Li Jinjun, the vice-minister of the CPC central committee’s international department.

The sources said the talks had a “narrow focus” and both sides were careful not to let thorny issues such as the Tibet rebellion, the Indo-US nuclear deal and the Congress-Left relations creep in.

However, “substantive notes” on economic reforms and their positive and negative spinoffs were exchanged. “We agreed to exchange knowledge on how to deal with the human fallout of putting agricultural land to industrial use. The Chinese seemed as concerned as us,” a source said.

“We were focused on trying to evolve some institutionalised form of interaction between the two parties,” said Ravni Thakur, a faculty member in the department of East Asian studies at Delhi University, who attended the meeting.

Li suggested the CPC and the Congress should sign an “expression of intent” in the next two months to “formalise the bilateral relations from a diplomatic point of view”.

Sources said the Congress found this “a bit bizarre”.

“It will have no legal or contractual lease but we reckoned that in a polity like China’s, which does not recognise the party-government distinction, such documents are treated with the utmost seriousness,” a source said.

The delegation wanted Rahul to be the Congress’s signatory but would not name his counterpart in the CPC pecking order.

“Certainly not the CPC general secretary who is also the President of China. We expect a younger functionary since there was a lot of stress on how the younger leaders should meet more often,” a source said.

This is the fourth visit by a CPC delegation to the Congress in the last four years.

“The CPC has figured out that the Congress is India’s principal party and has to be understood and appreciated on its own terms. We got the feeling that the CPC has at last begun to form independent perceptions of us and is not looking at us through the Left’s prism,” said a participant at the meeting.

Sonia and Rahul had visited Beijing last October and met Chinese leaders. “Today’s visit is to keep up the momentum her visit and that of the Prime Minister generated,” Thakur said.

Sources said there appeared to be a “sub-text” to China’s marked interest in the Congress. “They seem to think there is a constituency in our party that isn’t gung-ho about pursuing strategic relations with the US,” a source said.

“Some may have reservations about a pro-US tilt but that doesn’t mean sympathy for China.”