Dharamsala, May 6: The president of India Pratibha Devisingh Patil will visit China next month to mark an occasion celebrating the so-called “60 years of diplomatic ties” between the two Asian giants.
During the visit, Mrs Patil will dedicate an Indian-style Buddhist temple, which took five years to build at a cost of $4 million, to the Chinese people, an IANS report said.
The temple, inspired by the Sanchi Stupa in Madhya Pradesh, is located at Luoyang, one of China’s ancient capitals, in central China’s Henan province. It is adjacent to the White Horse Temple (Baima Si) built in the first century A.D. in honour of two Indian monks who travelled on horseback, carrying with them religious texts and an image of the Buddha.
India has provided technical, financial and other support for the temple that stands on a 6,000 sq metre plot provided by the Chinese government, the report said.
The idea of a temple was proposed by the Chinese side in 2003 when then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Luoyang. He promptly accepted the idea, realising the “importance of a Buddhist shrine as a means for people-to-people contact.
A Memorandum of Understanding was later signed during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in 2008.
The temple, with a 15 feet high Buddha statue, has a dome 63 feet high and 80 feet in diameter. Its glass roof allows in a swathe of sunlight on the Buddha statue made of Chunar sandstone, the same that was used to make the fifth century Buddha idol at Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh.
The temple is ready for dedication May 27 as India and China celebrate 60 years of diplomatic ties, the report said.
But such a gesture may do little in easing relations between the two Asian giants, facing rising border tensions and sharpening geopolitical rivalry.
Besides, the countries have had had little political experience historically in dealing with each other. After all, China became India’s neighbor not owing to geography but after forcibly occupying buffer Tibet in 1950.
The bitter 32-day war in 1962 did not settle matters because China’s dramatic triumph only sowed the seeds of greater rivalry.
Hopes of a politically negotiated settlement of the lingering territorial disputes dissipated amid rising military incursions and other border-related incidents as well as by new force deployments along the long, 4,057-kilometer Himalayan frontier in recent years.
Rounds of border talks over the years did little in defusing the escalation in border tensions.
Earlier in April this year, the two countries even signed an agreement to establish a direct hotline between their Prime Ministers in an effort to take their bumpy bilateral relations to a new level.
