The Longest August (24 page)

He asked me whether we had approached the Chinese to demarcate the border and I informed him of the position. He wanted me to show him the map on which we were basing our claim and wanted to know exactly the area to which our claim extended. I told him quite frankly that we had no intention of claiming any area which we did not honestly believe to be covered by the actual line of control as determined by our experts. We might ask for certain areas beyond the line of control to provide facilities for the local population. . . . As soon as he went back to India, he started criticizing us for having approached the Chinese to demarcate the border. He mentioned the map I had shown him and said that we did not even know where the border was and that we were acting in a childish manner. That was Mr Nehru's style, he quite forgot the spirit in which we had discussed the matter and used the whole thing as a debating point.
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It was this sort of diplomacy that had brought relations between India and China to a breaking point within six years and that would lead to a war between them in the autumn of 1962.

8: Nehru's “Forward Policy”

A Step Too Far

In earlier centuries, given the inaccessibility of desolate tracts in remote high mountains along their common borders, the dispute between British India and China centered on the zone or tract rather than the line in their eastern and western sectors. Notably, the North-East Frontier Agency in British India was originally called the North-East Frontier Tract.

The modern-day boundary is the end result of a process that starts with delimitation—defining the boundary in writing, in treaties or agreements—and then proceeds to delineation, sketching the boundary in maps after joint boundary surveys. The final stage, called “demarcation,” establishes the boundary line on the ground with pillars, chains, or other markers. By this criterion, China's southern border lacked line boundaries not only with India (and later Pakistan as well) but also Burma (renamed Myanmar) and Nepal.

Tibet, a Buffer Between China and British India

In the wake of the fall of the Qing Dynasty in China in early 1912, the claim of Tibet, ruled by the Dalai Lama, to be an independent entity clashed with the 1904 treaty it had signed with London following its defeat by the British Indian Army. That treaty ceded Tibet's foreign relations and trade rights to Britain, and entitled it to an indemnity of Rs 2.5 million.

In 1913, British India's foreign secretary, Sir Henry McMahon—a tall, slim man with a long, lean face embellished with a mustache—conferred with the Chinese plenipotentiary Chen Ivan and Tibetan
Lonchen Shatra in Simla (later Shimla) to discuss Tibet's new status. Their final Simla Convention document of July 3, 1914, referred to a small-scale map. It showed lines separating China from “Inner Tibet”—roughly today's Tibet Autonomous Region—administered by the Dalai Lama government under the “suzerainty” of China and separating “Inner Tibet” from “Outer Tibet.” This map lacked an initial or signature of Chen.
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After Beijing had repudiated the first draft of the Simla Convention on April 28, McMahon and Shatra attached a note denying China any privileges under the agreement and signed it as a bilateral accord. The McMahon Line ran 550 miles east from the northeastern border of Bhutan along the Himalayas, across the great bend in the Brahmaputra River, then southeast to Burma.

In 1935, Olaf Caroe, deputy secretary of British India's Foreign and Political Department, discovered the documents of the Simla Convention while dealing with the case of a Briton's illegal entry into Tibet through the Tawang tract. He convinced his superiors to include the McMahon Line on official maps, which had not been the case so far.

Seven years later, to withstand the Japanese offensive during World War II, the Assam government undertook a number of forward policy measures to tighten its hold on the semiautonomous North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), covering 23,165 square miles. In 1945 it extended its administrative control over that part of the Tawang tract that lay south of the Se-La Mountain Pass. The subsequent Assam Rifles contingent posted at Dirang Dzong expelled the Tibetan tax collectors from the territory but left the Tibetan authorities in control of the area north of the Se-La Mountain Pass, which contained the town of Tawang with its four-centuries-old Buddhist monastery.

As the successor of the British Empire in India, Nehru's government inherited these privileges. When the long-running Chinese civil war ended with the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949, this necessitated a fresh treaty between Delhi and Beijing on Tibet.

In Delhi a Tibetan delegation met the Chinese ambassador, General Yuan Zhongxian, on September 16, 1950. Yuan passed on his government's proposal that in return for Tibet agreeing to be part of China, and letting Beijing handle its defense and foreign relations and trade, China would respect its internal autonomy and social system under the Dalai Lama. The government of Tenzin Gyasto, the eighteen-year-old fourteenth Dalai Lama, in Lhasa rejected the offer. As a consequence, the
Chinese troops of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) entered Tibet in October and defeated its army in Chamdo.

Protracted negotiations followed. On May 23, 1951, the Tibetan delegation in Beijing signed a Seventeen-Point Agreement with the Chinese government, accepting China's rule in Tibet, including the posting of the PLA there.
2

The turmoil in Tibet provided the background against which Major Ralengnao Khathing led an Assam Rifles column to Tawang in February 1951 and took control of the remainder of the Tawang tract from the Tibetans. That signaled the end of Tibet's historic control of the area.
3
At that time the Chinese government was too preoccupied with getting the Dalai Lama to accept the reduced status of Tibet to protest India's seizure of the territory north of the Se-La Pass.

On the western sector of the Sino-Indian border, the southern part of the PRC's Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region—later, Xinjiang Autonomous Region—abuts the Ladakh province of Jammu and Kashmir. There the Aksai Chin region became a bone of contention between India and China. The 1931 volume of the annual
Aichison's Treaties
, published by the government in Delhi, stated that “the northern as well as the eastern boundary of the Kashmir State is still undefined.”
4
The Survey of India maps published in the 1920s and 1930s showed wide blank spaces between Kashmir and Xinjiang and between Kashmir and Tibet.
5
In 1945, guided by Olaf Caroe, promoted to foreign secretary of India, new Survey of India maps marked the Aksai Chin as “Boundary Undefined.” That was what the Nehru government inherited from the British.

But on March 24, 1953, Nehru decided to establish, unilaterally, a nonnegotiable line for the 2,015-mile Sino-Indian border along the Himalayas, including the Aksai Chin area in the Ladakh province of Jammu and Kashmir, which was at the center of poisoned relations between India and Pakistan. “It was a fateful decision,” noted A. G. Noorani, an Indian commentator, in his book
India-China Boundary Problem, 1846–1947: History and Diplomacy
. “Old maps were burnt. One former Foreign Secretary told this writer how, as a junior official, he himself was obliged to participate in this fatuous exercise.”
6

While negotiating a fresh treaty with China on India's relations with Tibet—ostensibly in good faith—Nehru followed the strategy he had dictated earlier to N. Raghavan, the Indian ambassador in Beijing. “Our attitude to the Chinese Government should always be a combination of friendliness and firmness,” he stated in his secret memorandum to
Raghavan on December 10, 1952. “If we show weakness, advantage will be taken of this immediately. This applies to any development that might take place or in reference to our frontier problems between Tibet and Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and [the] rest of India. In regard to this entire frontier we have to maintain an attitude of firmness. Indeed there is nothing to discuss here and we have made that previously clear to the Chinese Government.”
7

Nehru practiced what he preached. Soon afterward, at his initiative, the agents of the Intelligence Bureau started helping in every possible way Gyalo Thendup, the anticommunist brother of the Dalai Lama, and other Tibetan refugees, then living in and around Kalimpong on the border of India and Sikkim.
8

Subversion in the Shadow of Peaceful Coexistence

On April 29, 1954, India signed an agreement with China on “Trade and Intercourse Between the Tibet Region of China and India,” which, in its preamble, included the famous
Panchsheel
(Sanskrit: “five virtues”), the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence: “Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual nonaggression; mutual noninterference in each other's internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence.”
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India gave up the extraterritorial rights and privileges in Tibet it had inherited from the British Indian government, and recognized Tibet as an integral part of China.

But that did not stop Nehru from playing the Machiavellian. A week before the suave, fifty-six-year-old Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was to visit Delhi on June 25—when he would be greeted by adoring crowds shouting “
Hindi Cheeni Bhai Bha
i
” (Hindi: Indians, Chinese, Brothers, Brothers)—Nehru addressed a note on Tibet and China to the three top bureaucrats at the Foreign Ministry. “No country can ultimately rely upon the permanent goodwill or bona fides of another country, even though they might be in close friendship with each other,” he wrote on June 18.

It is conceivable that the Western Atlantic alliance might not function as it was intended to and there might be ill-will between the countries concerned. It is not inconceivable that China and the Soviet Union may not continue to be as friendly as they are now. Certainly it is conceivable that
our relations with China might worsen, although there is no immediate likelihood of that. . . . If we come to an agreement with China in regard to Tibet, that is not a permanent guarantee, but that itself is one major step to help us in the present and in the foreseeable future in various ways. . . .

Of course, both the Soviet Union and China are expansive. They are expansive for evils other than communism, although communism may be made a tool for the purpose. Chinese expansionism has been evident during various periods of Asian history for a thousand years or so. We are perhaps facing a new period of such expansionism. Let us consider that and fashion our policy to prevent it coming in the way of our interests or other interests that we consider important.
10

During five apparently cordial sessions over three days, Nehru and Zhou discussed the situation in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, and other subjects. Nehru did not raise the boundary issue with his Chinese counterpart.

A week after these talks, Nehru sent a long, secret memorandum to his most senior mandarins at the Foreign Ministry. It contained three operative paragraphs, 7 to 9. All old maps should be replaced with new ones, which should no longer show “any un-demarcated territory.” The subsequent frontier “should be considered a firm and definite one which is not open to discussion with anybody.” To consolidate that position on the ground, “it is necessary that the system of check posts should be spread along this entire frontier. More especially, we should have check posts in such places as might be considered disputed areas,” such as Demchok and Tsang Chokla, “considered by the Chinese as disputed territories.”
11

On the first day of Nehru's twelve-day return visit to China starting on October 19, more than a million people lined the twelve-mile route from the airport to the Forbidden City in Beijing to greet him riding an open car along with Zhou. Besides his sessions with Zhou, Nehru had two friendly meetings with Mao Zedong, chairman (chief of state) of China, on October 19–20. “Between India and China there is no tension, there is no psychological war,” stated Mao. “We do not spread psychological war among the people.” Nehru agreed, having declared earlier that “peace is an absolute necessity.”
12
Neither these paramount leaders nor anybody else present at these sessions would have imagined then that India and China would go to war eight years later to the day.

Despite Nehru's cordial exchange of views with Mao, his government soon published maps on which the legend “boundary undefined” in the
Western (Kashmir) sector was dropped in favor of a firm continuous line to show India's frontier.

Delhi's clandestine backing of Tibetan refugees continued as before. “Regarding the spirit of resistance in Tibet, the Prime Minister [Nehru] was of the view (after the 1954 agreement with China) that even if these refugees helped their brethren inside Tibet, the government of India would not take any notice and, unless they compromised themselves too openly, no Chinese protest would be entertained,” wrote B. N. Mullik, director of the Intelligence Bureau, in his memoirs.
13
India resorted to supplying arms secretly to the Tibetan rebels. This was a clear violation of mutual noninterference in each other's internal affairs enshrined in the doctrine of
Panchsheel
, which India had ostensibly adopted along with China.

By 1956, knowingly or unwittingly, secret agents of America and Taiwan, operating mainly from Kalimpong, were engaged in the same activity as their counterparts from India and the Soviet Union—recruiting and arming Tibetan émigrés to organize a separatist rebellion in Tibet against Beijing, with the Khampa tribes in eastern Tibet providing the initial thrust. The subversion strategy progressed as planned. The rebellion, which started modestly in the east in 1956–1957, spread to the west.

On August 21, 1958, Nehru protested against China's “cartographic aggression,” which showed parts of India as Chinese territory. In his reply on December 14, Zhou wrote, “These maps were doubtless reproductions of old maps, but it [the PRC] had not yet undertaken a survey of [the] Chinese boundary nor consulted the countries, and pending such surveys and consultations, it would not make changes in the boundary on its own.”
14
Zhou's statement applied as much to India as it did to Burma and Nepal.

Replying on the same day, Nehru quoted from the records of their discussions in 1954 and 1956 in which Zhou had “proposed” to recognize the McMahon Line. “I wish to point out that the Sino-Indian boundary has never been formally delimited,” shot back Zhou on January 23, 1959.

Historically no treaty or agreement on the Sino-Indian boundary has ever been concluded between the Chinese Central Government and the Indian Government. So far as the actual situation is concerned, there are certain differences between the two sides over the border question. . . . The latest case concerns an area in the southern part of China's Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous region, which has always been under Chinese jurisdiction.
Patrol duties have continually been carried out in the area by the border guards of the Chinese government. And the Sinkiang-Tibet Highway built by our country in 1956 runs through that area. Yet recently the Indian government claimed that the area was in its territory. All this shows that border disputes do exist between China and India.
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