Opinion Inspirational Wen Jiabao

President Pratibha Patil is in China. Apart from her meetings with her Chinese counterpart,Hu Jintao,and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao....

May 30, 2010 01:53 AM IST First published on: May 30, 2010 at 01:53 AM IST

President Pratibha Patil is in China. Apart from her meetings with her Chinese counterpart,Hu Jintao,and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao,the Indian media will focus on her visit to Shanghai Expo,which showcases,more spectacularly than even the 2008 Beijing Olympics,China’s emergence as the next superpower. However,from the viewpoint of celebrating the civilisational links between India and China,what is most significant is her visit to Luoyang in central China,where she inaugurates a beautiful new Buddhist temple built by India. It adjoins the existing White Horse Temple that honours two Indian monks,Kashyapa Matanga and Dharma Vanya,who travelled to China in the third century BC.

I feel nostalgic. In 2003,I had accompanied Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Luoyang during his visit to China. Atalji,who as India’s foreign minister had broken the ice with China by visiting Beijing and meeting Deng Xiaoping in 1978,was immensely pleased with the temple project since it sought to re-establish the age-old spiritual ties between our two great countries. Hundreds of Buddhist cave-temples dot the hills around Luoyang. According to legend,many Chinese emperors received the wisdom to rule from these sacred hills. As I and other members of the prime ministerial delegation climbed from one cave-temple to another,I was intrigued to find that a highly placed Chinese diplomat,obviously a communist party member,was engrossed in meditative prayers at each stop. I later asked him if he had religious beliefs. “In China,many people are religious,” he replied. “My 90-year-old mother in Shanghai has built a Buddhist temple at home. Chinese people feel affinity towards India because of Buddhism.”

My inerasable Luoyang experience reminds me that communist China is changing in two fundamental ways. Firstly,it is achieving prosperity at a blinding speed,unparalleled in human history. Secondly,the best minds in modern China are rediscovering the value of their own ancient civilisation—and,in the process,also rediscovering the greatness of civilisational India.

I felt elated on reading that Wen Jiabao expressed happiness over President Patil’s inauguration of the Buddhist temple in Luyoang,describing it “as yet another effort by our two countries to promote friendly relations.” He is the same leader who,in 2003,had told India’s visiting defence minister George Fernandes: “Friendliness accounts for 99.99 per cent of the 2,200-year-old Sino-Indian exchanges and misunderstanding merely 0.01 per cent. It’s high time we buried that 0.01 per cent and re-established the 99.9 per cent.” I had later asked George sahab,who for many years was a strong critic of communist China,if he trusted Wen Jiabao. His reply: “The Chinese prime minister was exceptionally warm and sounded genuine. I felt that we should now leave our misunderstandings behind and build a new relationship.”

At Wen Jiabao’s annual press conference in March this year,which lasted 150 minutes as against

Dr Manmohan Singh’s 75-minute press meet last week,PTI’s Beijing correspondent asked him if India and China can be “good friends and good neighbours”. After a lengthy reply,replete with facts and figures about the growing economic ties between Delhi and Beijing,Wen Jiabao said,“I wish to ask this reporter to send my message back to the Indian people that China and India are not competitors,we are friends. I wish to conclude by quoting from an ancient Indian scripture,probably written more than 3,000 years ago in Sanskrit,that is in the title of ‘Upanishad’. It is to the effect: ‘May He protect us both together. May He nourish us both together. May we conjointly work with great energy. May our study be vigorous and effective. May we not hate anyone. Let there be peace,let there be peace,let there be peace.’” How many Indian leaders have paid similar heartfelt tribute to the pearls of wisdom in Chinese history?

If there is one contemporary Chinese leader who best symbolises the modern and the ancient,who most persuasively articulates the need for a two-pronged pursuit of economic progress and the ideal of a just and moral society,who embodies high administrative competence with the compassionate heart of a true Buddhist,and who is a genuine friend of India,it is Wen Jiabao. He does not openly profess religious beliefs—after all,China has not yet embraced reforms that fully respect citizens’ freedom of thought and faith. However,if compassion,courage,wisdom and concern for justice are the hallmark of a true religious person,Wen Jiabao’s conduct and pronouncements leave no one in doubt that his personality is cut from a different cloth of communism. Here is a leader who repeatedly warns his partymen that “unfair wealth gap and corruption” could endanger the communist party’s rule. He boldly states that economic growth must not conflict with the highest ethical standards,“Nothing is greater than morality. It shines even more brightly than the sun. Within the body of every businessman should flow the blood of morality.” He courageously affirms that no single nation or ethnic group can claim superiority over others. “We should respect multiculturalism. This world is multicultural and multicivilisational; and it has existed in the past,exists today and will exist in the future.”

More about Wen Jiabao in my next column.

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