Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (29 page)

After independence, India’s focus remained on Kashmir’s western border, leaving the eastern boundary essentially unmarked and unpatrolled. Sino–India relations in the early 1950s were marked by great shows of friendship by Premiers Nehru and Chou En-Lai. It was the age of ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai’ (meaning Indians and Chinese are brothers). It appears that Nehru was led to believe that the Chinese accepted the McMohan Line in the east and that any disagreements over the western border could be ironed out by friendly negotiations. Thus, it came as a shock when it was found in 1957 that, over the previous year, the Chinese had quietly built a highway between Tibet and Xinjiang that went right through Aksai Chin. The Indian government did not even know about such a major project being constructed on territory that it claimed!

Matters really heated up from there. An official Chinese magazine published a map in 1958 that showed large parts of Ladakh and the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) as part of Chinese territory. If any reader was not convinced about the importance of cartography in history, I hope they have changed their mind by now. Nehru wrote angry letters to Chou En-Lai. The Chinese responded that Aksai Chin had always been Chinese territory and that the McMohan Line was not valid as it had been concluded between British imperialists and the
Tibet Region of China (implying that a mere province had no business negotiating the national boundary). In the middle of all the letter-writing, in March 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India via Tawang and was granted asylum.

The Chinese had long claimed suzerainty over Tibet and had occasionally exercised it. However, as the Mughals had discovered in the seventeenth century, the hostile terrain made it very difficult to enforce control. Thus, Tibet had been effectively independent for a long time when the communists invaded and annexed it in October 1950. Nehru had, at that time, preferred to look away despite Sardar Patel’s warning, just a few weeks before he died, that ‘In the guise of ideological expansion lies concealed racial, national or historical claims’.
¹³

By the time the Dalai Lama arrived in India, there were regular skirmishes between Indian and Chinese border patrols. Alarm bells were going off everywhere. General Thimayya, the army chief, repeatedly requested an equipment upgrade and the redeployment of troops to the China border. Some units of the army were still armed with .303 Enfield pea-shooters from the First World War. Yet, Prime Minister Nehru and Defence Minister Krishna Menon disregarded the warnings. When asked to introduce Belgian FN4 automatic rifles, Menon retorted that he did not want ‘NATO arms’ in the country. Dogma came first.

One of the reasons for Thimayya’s growing unease was that he had received a first-hand account of Chinese activities in Tibet from a very unlikely source: the adventurer Sydney Wignall. Thimayya had recruited the Welshman who wanted to climb Himalayan peaks on the Nepal–Tibet border (although he had almost no mountaineering experience). He was arrested by the Chinese and interrogated. Wignall was unfazed and
told them outrageous stories that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was a coded message and that his password, straight out of Welsh rugby, was ’Keep passing to left, boyo’. The Chinese eventually decided that he was mad and let him go—but Wignall reported back to Thimayya that the Chinese were building significant military infrastructure along the border.
¹⁴

With calls for his resignation mounting, Menon decided to promote Brij Mohan Kaul, an officer known to be close to Nehru, to the rank of lieutenant general. Thimayya was furious and threatened to resign. Kaul had not only superseded twelve senior officers but had no field experience. His main experience so far had been in developing real estate on army land. Worse, on 3 October 1962, he was put in charge of defending NEFA!

On 18 October, barely a fortnight after arriving, Kaul complained of chest pains and was evacuated to Delhi. Thus, when the Chinese launched a full-fledged attack on the night of 19 October, the Indian troops were outgunned, outnumbered and leaderless. The Chinese had attacked Ladakh too, but there the Indian army had fallen back to defensible positions and held their ground. In NEFA, however, they were overrun and the Chinese took control of Tawang on 25 October. Here, they halted their advance to construct supply roads. The Indians should have used the time to build up a more defensible position at Bomdila where it would have been easier to resupply from Assam. However, Kaul insisted that the Indians should defend a position farther up at Sela Pass. When the Chinese restarted their advance on 14 November, they simply went around Sela and cut off the Indian troops from behind. There was a massacre and Bomdila fell soon after. When this news arrived in Assam, there was panic. The town of Tezpur was abandoned and even the inmates of the local mental asylum were let loose. In a broadcast, Nehru stated ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam’.
¹⁵
It was interpreted to mean that the North East would be abandoned and is still strongly resented by the Assamese.

Then, as suddenly as they had come, the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew roughly to their pre-war position. We still do not know for sure why they came in and why they left. The most likely reason is that winter was fast approaching and supply lines through the Himalayas would have been difficult to sustain. In the end, nature proved a better defender of the Indian Republic than its politicians.
Today, the road from Tezpur to Bomdila is a beautiful drive through dense forests and high mountains. In the lower reaches, wild elephants often hold up traffic. From Bomdila, one can carry on through Sela Pass (4200 metres above sea level) to the monastery at Tawang. Still, the memory of the Chinese invasion lingers. Convoys of army trucks make their way up the mountains to supply military bases that dot the region. The Chinese, too, have not forgotten the past. They still mark the province as ‘Southern Tibet’ in their maps and made an awful fuss when the Dalai Lama visited Tawang in 2009.

The war had left thousands of Indian soldiers dead or wounded. Nehru’s personal reputation lay shattered. The removal of Defence Minister Menon, Lt. General Kaul and army chief General Pran Nath Thapar could not hide Nehru’s own strategic miscalculations. As 1963 dragged on, everyone became aware of the obvious—Prime Minister Nehru was an old man who had been in power for sixteen years. History appeared to be repeating itself: an ageing leader who had been on the throne for a long time, unclear succession and war. Indeed, the sixties was a time of great uncertainty. Nehru died in 1964, Pakistan and India fought a war in 1965, Nehru’s successor Shastri died in January 1966, the Congress Party split and the economy stagnated.

Out of all this, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi emerged as prime minister. In the early seventies, she would play an important role in a major shift in the political geography of the subcontinent.

Different perceptions of nationhood had led to the partition of India in 1947, but Pakistan faced the same problem in the 1960s. The basis of its nationhood was the idea of Islamic civilization. However, while they shared a religion, there were major cultural differences between East and West Pakistan. In the east, there was a strong sense of being Bengali. This was strengthened by resentment that political power lay in the hands of politicians and generals based in West Pakistan, who were blatantly insensitive to the needs of the east. It seemed that East Pakistan had just exchanged one form of colonialism with another. As Bengali demands gathered momentum, the response became more repressive. The openly expressed view by the West Pakistani military rulers was that the Bengalis were too influenced by Hindu culture. Particularly suspect was the significant Hindu Bengali population that had continued to live in East Pakistan. Frequent riots, supported tacitly by the State, broke out against the minorities in the mid-60s. Nonetheless, demands for autonomy and fairness continued to grow.

Once again, an act of nature triggered the sequence of events. In November 1970, a major tropical cyclone ‘Bhola’ struck East Pakistan and killed between 300,000 and 500,000 people. It is considered one of the worst natural disasters on record but, what really incensed the Bengali population was the lukewarm relief efforts of the military dictatorship. So when Pakistan’s military leaders finally allowed elections in late December, East Pakistan voted overwhelmingly for the Bengali-nationalist Awami League, which won 167 of 169 seats in the province. Since East Pakistan was more populous
than West Pakistan, it raised the prospect that the Bengalis would now rule the country as a whole. This was certainly not palatable to the military brass or to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the largest party in West Pakistan. The elections were ‘cancelled’ and East Pakistan broke into open revolt.

The military government of Yahya Khan responded by sending in the troops. The result was a genocide in which as many as three million people, particularly minorities and intellectuals, were killed. The residential halls of Dhaka University were particularly targeted. Up to 700 students were killed in a single attack on Jagannath Hall. Several well-known professors, both Hindu and Muslim, were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of women were systematically raped in the countryside. By September 1971, ten million refugees had poured into eastern India. Although this was one of the worst genocides in human history, it is barely remembered by the rest of the world.
Time
magazine of August 1971 quoted a US official saying ‘This is the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland’.
¹⁶
The article goes on to describe the streams of refugees who were pouring into India, carrying with them their few remaining possessions, their children and the infirm:

They are silent, except for a child whimpering now and then, but their faces tell the story. Many are sick and covered with sores. Others have cholera, and when they die by the roadside there is no one to bury them. The Hindus, when they can, put a hot coal in the mouths of their dead or singe the body in lieu of cremation. The dogs, the vultures and the crows do the rest. As the refugees pass the rotting corpses, some put pieces of cloth over their noses.

The response of the international community to the massacres was shameful. The Chinese premier Chou En-lai sent a letter of support to the Pakistan government and even hinted at military support should the ‘Indian expansionists dare to launch aggression against Pakistan’. Meanwhile, the Western world was aware of what was happening. We now have copies of desperate cables sent by diplomat Archer Blood and his colleagues at the US consulate in Dacca (now Dhaka) pleading with the US government to stop supporting a military regime that was carrying out genocide.
¹⁷
Instead, President Nixon concentrated on threatening Indira Gandhi to stay out. He would even send the US Seventh Fleet to cow her down.

Fortunately, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi held her ground and began to prepare for war. Strengthened by promises of support from the US and China, Pakistan’s military commanders ordered pre-emptive air strikes against India on 3 December 1971. The next morning, the
Statesman
newspaper carried the headline ‘It’s War’. The Indian response was swift and sharp. With support from the civilian population as well as the Mukti Bahini, an irregular army of Bengali rebels, the Indian army swept into East Pakistan. It was winter and the snow-covered Himalayas prevented any immediate Chinese intervention. Nixon was too bogged down in Vietnam to do more than issue threats. On 16 December, the Pakistanis signed the instrument of surrender in Dacca. Thus, Bangladesh was born. However, given its implied acquiescence, the international community has conveniently forgotten about the genocide and no Pakistani official has ever been indicted for it.

In 1975, India absorbed the protectorate of Sikkim into the
Union. The principality had been ruled by the Chogyal, a ruler of Bhutiya extract, who was unpopular with the ethnic Nepali majority. This led to constant friction and demands for popular representation. The Indians were also concerned that the Chinese would press claims that Sikkim was part of Tibet and move in. When elections were finally held, the anti-monarchist Sikkim National Congress won all the seats but one. The Chogyal was forced to abdicate and a referendum in April 1975 overwhelmingly voted to join India. My father was one of the first Indian officials sent in to manage the handover and administer the new state. Thus, my earliest memories are of the beautiful snow-clad peaks of the Kangchenjunga. As one can see, it took almost three decades after British withdrawal for the national borders of the subcontinent to look like what we know them today. They are still not set in stone. India has serious border disputes with China and Pakistan. Even with Bangladesh, there are issues left over from Partition involving tiny enclaves that lie trapped within each other’s territory.

Almost a century ago, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have commented that ‘India lives in its villages’. This was not a comment on population statistics but one about the soul of India. It is a deeply ingrained view that India is somehow a fundamentally rural country, unchanging and eternal. Yet, for all the extraordinary continuities of Indian civilization, the country has gone through many dramatic changes and cycles of urbanization over the millennia. By all indications, it is now embarking on a phase of rapid urbanization that will make
India an urban-majority country within a generation. At one level, this will transform the economic, social and physical landscape of the country. At another level, Indian civilization has seen many such changes before and will take the shift in its stride.

When India became a republic in 1950, the share of urban population stood at 17 per cent, while China at 12 per cent was even more rural. The largest cities in India at that stage were Kolkata with a population of 2.6 million, followed by Mumbai at 1.5 million, Chennai at 0.8 million and Delhi at 0.7 million.
¹⁸
The Chinese cities of Shanghai and Peking (now Beijing) were much larger, at 3.8 million and 1.6 million respectively. Despite the damage done by war, Tokyo was the largest Asian city, with a population of 6.3 million. Tiny Singapore had less than one million, and not all of this population was urban.