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2 China 'pivot' trips over
McMahon Line By Peter Lee
China
is looking for a "Western" pivot to counter the
United States' diplomatic and military inroads
with its East Asian neighbors such as Japan,
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Myanmar.
For
China's strategists, as an interesting analysis in
the Indian Express tells us, the "Western" pivot
means nurturing the PRC's continental Asian
relationships with the interior stans and, across
the Himalayas, India. Pakistan's descent into
basket-case status and the PRC's concurrent
anxiety about Islamic extremism in Xinjiang
indicates that the old China/Pakistan lips and
teeth united front against India (and offsetting
threats of destabilization in Kashmir and Tibet)
may be past its sell-by date. [1]
But,
if Inner Asia lacks disputed islands and the
Seventh Fleet, it
has
disputed borders and an aggravated Sinophobe
faction in India eager to spurn China and
strengthen ties with the United States.
This
is Sino-Indian friendship year, a good omen for
rebooting Sino-Indian relations. Unfortunately for
Beijing, it is also the fiftieth anniversary of
the Sino-Indian war, a golden opportunity for
refighting the battles of 1962.
Sino-Indian relations, like
Sino-Japanese relations are potentially hostage to
territorial disputes. The disputes date back to
imperial escapades from the turn of the 20th
century. In the case of Japan, it goes back to the
seizure of the Senkakus as war spoils in 1895. For
India, it is the McMahon Line, first drawn in
1914, and the grim precedent of the 1962 war.
Although the Sino-Indian
border war of 1962 is largely forgotten by Chinese
- a Global Times poll apparently showed that 80%
of Chinese youth didn't even know it had happened
- it is still an occasion for handwringing in
India that borders on the masochistic. [2]
That
is because India, though it only suffered 7,000
casualties and lost no effective control of
territory, lost the brief war in as complete and
humiliating a fashion as can be imagined.
The
short-form version of the war is that the Indian
government escalated its border disputes with the
People's Republic of China by establishing
military outposts north of the McMahon Line, the
Line itself a piece of unilateral boundary-making
mischief executed by the British Raj.
The
Nehru government calculated that its exercise in
establishing "facts on the ground", combined with
diplomatic backing from the Soviet Union and the
United States and India's position of moral
authority, would cause Beijing to back down and
accept Indian claims in Aksai Chin (a bleak desert
north of Kashmir) and the North East Frontier
Administration (the southern face of the Himalayas
east of Nepal; now Arunachal Pradesh).
In
one of many ghastly miscalculations, the Nehru
government had concluded that the PRC would not
respond militarily to the encroachment of military
posts into the disputed territories.
Unfortunately, Nehru's
crystal ball, especially when it came to Chinese
supremo, Mao Zedong, was remarkably foggy,
especially as it related to the PRC's touchiness
over Tibetan issues, the equivocal Indian stance
over Tibet and, critically, Nikita Khrushchev's
delight in rubbing the Chairman's nose in the
debacle of his Tibet policy.
In
his study China's Decision
for War with India in 1962, John Garver
(currently professor of international relations at
the Georgia Institute of Technology) describes the
encounter:
The question of
responsibility for the crisis in Tibet figured
prominently in the contentious talks between Mao
Zedong and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in
Beijing on 2 October 1959. After a complete
disagreement over Taiwan, Khrushchev turned to
India and Tibet, saying: "If you let me, I will
tell you what a guest should not say - the
events in Tibet are your fault. You ruled in
Tibet, you should have had your intelligence
[agencies] there and should have known about the
plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama" [to flee
to India].
"Nehru also says that the
events in Tibet occurred on our fault," Mao
replied.
After an exchange over the
flight of the Dalai Lama, Khrushchev made the
point: "If you allow him [the Dalai Lama] an
opportunity to flee to India, then what has
Nehru to do with it? We believe that the events
in Tibet are the fault of the Communist Party of
China, not Nehru's fault."
"No, this is Nehru's
fault," Mao replied.
"Then the events in Hungary
are not our fault," the Soviet leader responded,
"but the fault of the United States of America,
if I understand you correctly. Please, look
here, we had an army in Hungary, we supported
that fool Rakosi - and this is our mistake, not
the mistake of the United States."
Mao rejected this: "The
Hindus acted in Tibet as if it belonged to
them."
Mao was determined to assuage
his feeling of embarrassment (and his jealousy of
Nehru's leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and
his anger at Khrushchev's pro-Delhi tilt) by
knocking India off its perch.
Nehru apparently misread the
conciliatory stylings of Zhou Enlai as an accurate
representation of China's military determination,
and the Indian military was completely unprepared
in every conceivable way - manpower, materiel,
logistics, conditioning, positioning, tactics, or
strategy - to withstand the People's Liberation
Army when it attacked on October 20, 1962.
Actually, Indian failures
were not limited to diplomatic and military tunnel
vision. They also extended to profound conceptual
shortcomings, ones that have relevance to today's
standoff between the PRC and Japan over the
Senkakus/Diaoyu Islands.
Nehru leaned on the McMahon
Line for his definition of the PRC-Indian
boundary. The McMahon Line, originally designed to
contain China, turned out to be a generous gift to
the PRC.
In the early years of the
20th century, protecting India by creating a
Tibetan buffer zone between China and Russia and
the precious Raj was a priority for imperial
British thinkers. To this end, the British
government took advantage of China's post-1911
disarray to convene a conference of
representatives of China, Tibet, and Britain in
New Delhi in 1914 to negotiate the Simla Accord.
Its key objective was to
partition Tibet into Chinese-governed Outer Tibet
and locally governed Inner Tibet "under Chinese
suzerainty" and define a border between India and
ethnic Tibetan regions that had the buy-in of the
largely autonomous Tibetan government in Lhasa.
The Tibetans were eager to sign, since the Accord
implied the ability of the Lhasa government to
conduct its own foreign policy and conclude
treaties; the Chinese government repudiated the
treaty.
The British Foreign Office
did not support Tibetan independence, however, and
was more mindful of maintaining cordial relations
with China; it let the initiative fade away. The
Accord was published in the official compendium of
Indian treaties, Charles Umpherston Aitchison's Collection of Treaties,
Engagements, and Sanads, with the notation
that no binding accord had been reached at Simla.
The Accord and the McMahon
Line languished in obscurity until Olaf Caroe, a
strategist in the Indian Foreign Office, decided
to invoke them in 1937 as a binding precedent for
settling persistent border tiffs between India ...
and Tibet.
Since the historical record
showed that the British government itself did not
acknowledge the validity of the Simla Accord, some
unseemly imperial legerdemain was called for. A
new version of Aitchison was commissioned; instead
of noting the Accord was not binding on any of the
parties, it stated that Britain and Tibet, but not
China, had accepted the Accord.
As
Steven A Hoffmann wrote in his India and the China
Crisis:
The Aitchison
changes were allowed to appear in 1938. In order
to publish them quickly, and to give a greater
sense of authenticity to the new entry without
having it attract undue notice, the India Office
(and possibly Caroe) contrived to issue an
amended version of the appropriate 1929
Aitchison volume, without giving it a new
publication date. Copies of the original 1929
volume - located in offices and libraries in
India, England, and elsewhere - were then
replaced by request and discarded.
Perhaps only
three original versions of the relevant 1929
Aitchison volume exist in the entire world
(including one at Harvard University). The McMahon
Line found its way onto India Survey maps and
never left.
After
Indian independence, Nehru inherited the
now-sacrosanct McMahon Line, largely by default,
and used it as the baseline for many of his
boundary discussions with the People's Republic of
China. (Caroe's deception was not discovered until
1964, after the war, when a British diplomat
compared the two versions of the Aitchison volume
at Harvard.)
But the McMahon Line had a
fatal flaw: it was in a terrible, terrible place.
The line was conceived as a
series of heroic outposts strung along the bleak
Himalayan ridgeline. The vision of a hundred fists
of stone raised in defiance against the enemies
from the north on the edge of the Tibetan plateau
perhaps enthralled armchair strategists, but
fortifying and defending the McMahon Line demanded
that troops and supplies had to be pushed from the
southern valleys up to the 4,000- and even near
5,000-meter commanding heights.
For
the purposes of a military commander defending
Indian territory, it would have been infinitely
preferable to have the boundary at the base of the
foothills, within reach of reasonably expeditious
resupply and reinforcement, and leave to the enemy
the glory of clambering across the jagged
mountains and battling out of the valleys.
Neville Maxwell, the London
Times South Asia correspondent at the time and
author of India's China
War, a widely-read (and, in India,
widely-resented) depiction of the 1962 war as
Nehru's folly, described the military state of
affairs in an interview:
The very idea of a strategic
frontier was out of date by the 1930s. Any
sensible soldier will tell you if China is going
to invade India from the Northeast the place to
meet them and to resist them is at the foot of
the hills. So when the invaders finally come
panting out of breath and ammunition, you can
meet them from a position of strength. The last
place, strategically, to meet the Chinese was
along the McMahon alignment. Caroe is very much
the guilty party in all of this. [3]
In an atmosphere of
escalating tensions and distrust between India and
the People's Republic of China in the aftermath of
the Tibet rebellion and the Dalai Lama's flight to
India, Nehru compounded his geographic
disadvantage by sending troops beyond the McMahon
Line to establish outposts on the Chinese side -
the so-called "Forward Strategy".
The PLA
pounced, and the result was a humiliating defeat
followed by a unilateral Chinese withdrawal to
north of the "Line of Control", the unofficial but
effective boundary that divides India and the
People's Republic of China even today.
On
the 50th anniversary of this debacle, it is hard
for Indian nationalists to find silver linings.
One noteworthy example was an article describing
the closer integration of the tribes of Arunachal
Pradesh into the Indian linguistic, cultural, and
political mainstream: "India Lost War With China
But Won Arunachal's Heart"
When
the Dalai Lama thinks of India's consolidation of
Arunachal Pradesh, however, he probably feels
little joy and more than a twinge of bitter
melancholy in his heart, relating to the great
religious town and market center of Tawang, which
occupies a thumb of territory sticking out on the
northwest corner of the state and which has always
been the critical pivot upon which the northeast
Indian version of the Great Game has
revolved.
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