The Longest August (25 page)

By December 1958 the anticommunist partisans had become active in western Tibet. In early March 1959 an estimated twenty thousand Tibetan guerrillas engaged PLA troops in the northeastern and southern environs of Lhasa. As the Chinese commanders prepared to shell the Dalai Lama's palace and the surrounding administration complex on March 15–16, the Dalai Lama prepared to escape along with an entourage of twenty aides. They did so on March 17. In the three days of fighting between the Tibetan rebels and the Chinese army in Lhasa, an estimated two thousand people died.
16

After trekking for fifteen days, the Dalai Lama and his aides crossed into NEFA. Within days, Nehru granted asylum to the Dalai Lama and his companions. “We have no desire whatever to interfere in Tibet, but at the same time we have every sympathy for the people of Tibet, and we are greatly distressed at their helpless plight,” he told the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament.
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At his press conference on April 18 in the Assamese city of Tezpur, the Dalai Lama repudiated the Seventeen-Point Agreement between Tibet and China signed in May 1951. By so doing he stoked the hostility of the Chinese government toward him and, by implication, soured its relations with Nehru.
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Consequently, the controversy over the Sino-Indian border sharpened. When China's ambassador Pan Tsue-li warned Nehru of India's possible two-front estrangement (with Pakistan and China) in May 1959, Nehru rebuffed him.

Early Skirmishes

As friction escalated between the two Asian giants, an armed clash occurred between their troops on August 25, 1959. Following the arrest of one of their comrades, a squad of Indian soldiers at Longju crossed the McMahon Line and fired at the Chinese guards stationed at the Tibetan village of Migyitun for several hours.
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In retaliation, the Chinese killed some Indian troops. This incident received massive publicity in India, with
Nehru stoking popular sentiment by infusing the clash with “national pride . . . self-respect . . . and . . . people's passions.”
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The upside for Nehru was that his peroration earned China censure not only by the West but also by the Soviet Union.

On October 21 the western sector flared up. That day India's Central Reserve Police Force lost ten policemen when it challenged an incursion by Chinese border guards in Aksai Chin.
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This territory, described by Nehru as “a barren, uninhabited region without a vestige of grass, and 17,000 feet high,” had no strategic value for India, and it had left the area unpatrolled.

In the larger diplomatic arena, though unhappy at the increasing warmth between Delhi and Moscow, the United States continued to give India economic aid, including food grains under Public Law 480 of 1954. That legislation allowed Washington to sell agricultural commodities at a discount and accept the bulk of payments in the recipient country's currency. In India's case, it reimbursed 80 percent of the amount to Delhi in grants and loans for development projects, using the remainder to maintain its embassy and consulates in the country. Washington wished to see India win the economic race against communist China and illustrate the superiority of Western-style democracy to communism for the benefit of the other Afro-Asian nations.

China emerged as the chief villain for both America
and
the Soviet Union when it refused to subscribe to the concept of “peaceful coexistence” between socialism and capitalism—as agreed to by US president Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at their meeting in Camp David, Maryland, in October 1959. Two months later Eisenhower received a rousing reception on the streets of Delhi against the background of rising tensions between India and China.

To resolve the border dispute peacefully, Zhou spent almost a week in Delhi in April 1960. In the first of his meetings with Nehru he presented his case in six points, the most important being number 4.

“Since we are going to have friendly negotiations, neither side should put forward claims to an area which is no longer under its administrative control,” it stated. “For example, we made no claim in the eastern sector to areas south of the McMahon Line, but India made such claims in the western sector. It is difficult to accept such claims and the best thing is that both sides do not make such territorial claims.” He suggested that each side should keep to the line of actual control in all sectors, eastern, western, and middle. Nehru disagreed. “Our accepting things as they are
would mean that basically there is no dispute and the question ends there; that we are unable to do,” he argued. He proposed a radical alternative. “We should take each sector of the border and convince the other side of what it believes to be right.”
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Such an approach in international diplomacy is unheard of. Instead, the two sides examine the differences that exist in their respective positions and then try to reduce the gaps until they reach a point of concurrence. In this case, each had its vital, nonnegotiable interest securely under its control. India held fast to the McMahon Line, while China had built the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway passing through Aksai Chin in Ladakh in 1957.

Recalling his last meeting with Nehru on April 25, 1960, Zhou told the Soviet ambassador in Beijing on October 8, 1962, that Nehru rejected out of hand all his proposals. “We suggested that bilateral armed forces respectively retreat for 20 km on the borders and stop the patrols to escape conflicts. They did not accept the suggestion. Later, we unilaterally withdrew for 20 km and did not appoint troops to patrol in the area in order to evade conflicts and help negotiations develop smoothly. However, India perhaps had a wrong sense that we were showing our weakness and [we] feared conflicts. . . . India is taking advantage that we withdrew for 20 km and did not assign patrols, and has invaded as well as set up posts.”
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It was this stalemate that led Nehru to raise the subject of Pakistan's boundary with China with President Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan in September 1960. But instead of learning from the Pakistani leader's successful handling of the issue with Beijing, Nehru mocked him by saying that the Pakistanis “were acting in a childish manner.”
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In his conflict with China, Nehru found himself being cosseted by both Moscow and Washington. On the eve of the US presidential elections in early November 1960, the Democrat candidate Senator John F. Kennedy described India as representing “a great area for affirmative action by the Free World” in his interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News. “India started from about the same place that China did. The Chinese Communists have been moving ahead the last 10 years. India . . . has been making some progress, but if India does not succeed with her 450 million people, if she can't make freedom work, then people around the world are going to determine, particularly in the underdeveloped world, that the only way they can develop their resources is through the Communist system.”
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Nehru's Clenched Fist: Forward Policy

By July 1961 the Chinese had advanced 70 miles west of their Xinjiang-Tibet Highway passing through Aksai Chin, thus occupying 12,700 square miles of India's claimed territory. Nehru's resolve to implement his country's territorial claims in the eastern and western sectors had turned the frontier areas into conflict tracts, resulting in periodic clashes.

On November 2, 1961, a high-level meeting of Indian officials, chaired by Nehru, adopted the “Forward Policy” on the Sino-Indian border issue. That is, Delhi decided to establish forward military posts north of the McMahon Line in the eastern sector and behind the Chinese posts in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh. It planned to set up five new all-weather posts of eighty to a hundred soldiers each behind nine existing forward Chinese posts in Ladakh. These outposts were to be located strategically to sever the supply lines of the targeted Chinese posts and starve their personnel with the aim of seizing these posts. From there Indian patrols planned to probe the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway.
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From November 5 to 19, Nehru was away, touring America, Mexico, and Britain. He started his itinerary with a visit to the United States, where he was warmly welcomed by President Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island, where he maintained a family mansion.

On his return home, Nehru presented his Forward Policy on the Chinese border issue to the Lok Sabha. “They [the Chinese] are still in areas which they occupied [in Ladakh] . . . but progressively the situation has been changing from the military point of view and from other points of view in our favor,” he told the chamber on November 28. “We shall continue to take steps to build up these things so that ultimately we may be in a position to take action to recover such territory as is [now] in their possession.” In other words, Nehru publicly declared his intention to achieve his aim by force. He seemed to rest his strategy on the hypothesis that an armed conflict between India and China would escalate into a world war. His thinking was dangerously flawed. Astonishingly, he was unfamiliar with Henry Kissinger's groundbreaking book
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
published in 1958. In it Kissinger argued that, given the “balance of terror” between nuclear-armed America and the Soviet Union—with its scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction—it was incumbent on Washington to develop the doctrine of limited wars. “Is it imaginable that a war between India and China will remain confined to these two countries?” Nehru asked rhetorically while addressing the Rajya Sabha (Hindi: States'
Council), the upper house of Parliament, on December 6. “It will be world war and nothing but a world war.”
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In Beijing, Chairman Mao concluded that since India was rejecting his government's repeated reiteration of a policy of peaceful coexistence, it should be given a taste of “armed coexistence.” When peaceful means deployed by China had failed to bring about a reversal in Delhi's Forward Policy, Mao ordered that the PLA must “undertake a long period of armed coexistence.”
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On June 26, 1962, during the clandestine talks between the ambassadors of the United States and China in Warsaw, Poland, the American envoy received instructions to secretly assure his Chinese counterpart that Washington would not support any attempt by the Nationalist government (of the Republic of China) based in Taiwan to invade the mainland.
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This allowed PLA generals to move some troops posted along the coastline to the Sino-Indian border. They added two divisions to the six already posted in Tibet to fight the local rebels.

Along the disputed border the Dhola post had been held by the Indians since June. It lay opposite the Thagla Ridge north of the McMahon Line at its western extremity. On September 8 sixty Chinese soldiers appeared at the Thagla Ridge opposite this post with orders to use threats to induce the Indians' withdrawal without engaging into a fight. Briefed by government officials, the Indian media inflated the size of the Chinese contingent by a factor of ten, to six hundred.

Nehru, then attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in London, told the media that the British Indian Army had instructions to “free” India's territory under Chinese occupation. On September 11 it was decided to give permission to all forward posts and patrols to fire on any armed Chinese who entered India's claimed territory. Overall, India had established sixty forward posts, forty-three of them north of the McMahon Line, and occupied four thousand square miles of Chinese territory. Its eastern command upgraded this order on September 20 to “engage” any Chinese patrols within range of their weapons. This radical step was tantamount to a declaration of war.

On October 3 China sent its final diplomatic warning coupled with a plea for immediate, unconditional negotiations. Nehru rejected the offer. Before leaving for a trip to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on October 12, he told the media he had ordered the armed forces to clear the Chinese from NEFA. Excepting the Communist Party of India (CPI), he had the unanimous and raucous backing of the opposition as well as the press.

On the ground, however, Nehru's lordly order resulted in two lightly armed and poorly clothed and shod India battalions posted in the plains marching through mud, mountains, and rains at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet to accomplish the mission. All the same, Nehru's declaration was unambiguous. “We don't want a war with India,” said Zhou. “But Nehru has closed all roads. This leaves us only with war.”
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Addressing the meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China on October 18, Chairman Mao said, “Now that Nehru is determined to fight us, we have no way out but to keep him company. As the saying goes, ‘from an exchange of blows, friendship grows.' Maybe we have to counter-fight them before we can have a stable border and a peaceful settlement of the boundary question
.
However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”
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At the other end of the globe, October 18, 1962, marked the beginning of the thirteen-day-long crisis between the White House and the Kremlin on the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Nehru Battles Mao; Kennedy Challenges Khrushchev

On October 20, 1962, under cover of ear-splitting mortar fire, two heavily equipped Chinese divisions, armed with medium machine guns, launched simultaneous offensives in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line. In a rerun of their fight in the Korean War (1950–1953) against the American and South Korean troops, they attacked in waves. In NEFA they advanced on the Chumbi Valley between Sikkim and Bhutan, and further east to Tawang. Outnumbering the Indians by five to one, they quickly captured twenty of their outposts in NEFA and eight in Ladakh.