Page 2 of
2 China 'pivot' trips over
McMahon Line By Peter Lee
Tawang is triple-Tibetan: it
is in a Tibetan cultural area, it has been a major
center of Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist practice for
centuries (the 6th Dalai Lama was reincarnated
there; the town hosts a large monastery); and it
holds a special place in the history of the modern
Tibetan resistance. The Dalai Lama entered India
from the PRC at Tawang in 1959, and actively
patronizes the monastery and the town.
In
addition to its ethnically Tibetan residents,
Tawang also hosts a considerable number of Tibetan
refugees.
In 1914, at Simla, the
Tibetan government had acquiesced to the inclusion
of Tawang into British India by endorsing the
McMahon Line. However, as the Simla Accord
languished, it subsequently
understood on both sides of
the McMahon Line that Tawang was under the
administration and effective control of Tibet - if
not by Lhasa, then by the local monastery.
In
1935, a British botanist/spy Frank Kingdon-Ward
was arrested in Tawang; the Tibetans compounded
their error by complaining to a British mission in
Lhasa. This disturbing state of affairs came to
the notice of Olaf Caroe and led to the
resurrection of the Simla Accord and the McMahon
Line - and the Indian claim on Tawang.
In
1947, after Indian independence, the government in
Lhasa appealed to the new government to
acknowledge its rule over Tawang.
Didn't happen.
The
India-friendly Wikipedia entry on Tawang states:
[Tawang] came
under effective Indian administration on
February 12, 1951, when Major R Khating led
Indian Army troops to relocate Chinese
squatters. India assumed control and sovereignty
of the area and established democratic rule
therein to end the oppression of the
Monpa.
An article in the Guardian
provides an interesting picture of the political
dynamic that the Indian government found and
exploited in Tawang:
Pema Gombu says
he has lived under three flags: Tibetan, Chinese
and Indian. Although his living room is decked
with pictures of the current Dalai Lama, the
81-year-old says the Tibetan administration in
the early 20th century was the worst.
"The [Tibetan] officials in
that time were corrupt and cruel. I am sure his
holiness did not know this. In those days if a
Tibetan stopped you they could ask you to work
for them like a slave. They forced us to pay
taxes. Poor farmers like me had to give over a
quarter of our crops to them. We had to carry
the loads 40km [25 miles] to a Tibetan town as
tribute every year."
It
was this treatment that turned Tawang away from
Tibet. Mr Gombu said he helped guide Indian
soldiers into the town in 1950 who carried
papers signed by the Tibetan government which
transferred Arunachal's 35,000 square miles
[90,000 square kilometers] to India. "It was the
happiest day of my life."
Judging from
Pema Gombu's references to Tibetans, he is
presumably ethnic Monpa. Monpa are an ethnic group
that adopted Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism in the 17th
century and center their religious practices on
Tawang. They form the demographic backbone of
Tawang. Although they are "Tibetan Buddhists" ie
followers of the Gelugpa sect, they aren't
Tibetans, as the history of Tawang makes clear.
It would appear that the
Indian government used the same justification to
take control of its Tibetan areas as Beijing did:
to rescue the local inhabitants - the Monpa, in
this case - from the corrupt and brutal rule of
their Tibetan overlords - possibly the government
in Lhasa, but more likely the overbearing bosses
of the monastery in Tawang.
This
history provides an interesting and melancholy
perspective on the Dalai Lama's 2009 visit to
Tawang.
The visit attracted an
enormous amount of media interest because there
was the Dalai Lama, going up to the Chinese
border, stating that the contested territory of
Arunachal Pradesh belonged to India, thereby
sticking his finger (in a non-violent, Buddhist
fashion) in the Chinese dragon's eye!
But
for the Dalai Lama it must have been, at best, a
bitter-sweet experience.
He
is clearly unwillingly to accept that Tawang is
Indian territory. In 2003, as the Times of India
tells us, the Dalai Lama asserted that Tawang was
part of Tibet, before backpedaling:
NEW DELHI: For
the first-time, Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai
Lama has said that Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh,
a territory that's still claimed by China, is
part of India.
Acknowledging the validity
of the MacMohan Line as per the 1914 Simla
Agreement in an interview to Navbharat Times, he
said that Arunchal Pradesh was a part of India
under the agreement signed by Tibetan and
British representatives.
In
2003, while touring Tawang, the Dalai Lama had
been asked to comment on the issue, but had
refused to give a direct answer, saying that
Arunachal was actually part of Tibet. China
doesn't recognize the MacMohan Line and claims
that Tawang and Arunachal Pradesh are part of
its territory.
The statement is bound to
impact the India-China dialogue, as Beijing has
already stated that if Tawang is handed to it,
it will rescind claim on the rest of Arunachal
Pradesh. The Chinese proposal is strategically
unacceptable to India, as Tawang is close not
just to the northeastern states but also to
Bhutan.
After the Dalai Lama's 2009
trips to Japan and Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian
press reported that he had stated categorically
that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang are part of
India.
In a rather bitter irony,
amid the myriad failures of the McMahon Line in
securing the borderlands, its only triumph is the
modest advance Olaf Caroe intended in 1938: the
alienation of Tawang from Tibet.
Nehru's unwise fetishizing of
the McMahon Line has been carried on by many in
India's political, military, and security elite.
In an interesting inversion of the secretive
Communists versus transparent democracy framing,
the PRC has declassified many official documents
relating to the war. The Indian government, on the
other hand, has still classified the official
inquiry into the war - the Henderson-Brooks report
- presumably because it documents the shortcomings
of Nehru, the civilian government, and the Indian
military in embarrassing fashion.
The
cock-up was so complete, in fact that the line
between incompetent provocateur and innocent
victim has blurred, to India's advantage. Plenty
of self-serving assertions have filled the
informational vacuum left by the continued
classification of the Henderson-Brooks report,
allowing nationalistically minded or Sino-phobic
Indian commentators to describe the Chinese attack
as unprovoked aggression and warn darkly that
Chinese perfidy can and probably will be repeated.
On the 50th anniversary of
the war, the Deccan Herald declared:
Make no mistake
about it. That China is a hydra-headed monster
with massive expansionist plans across South
Asia is no longer a secret. It was Mao who
termed Tibet as the "palm" of a hand with its
five fingers as Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan,
and what has so long been as NEFA [North East
Frontier Agency] that pertain to our north
eastern states. [4]
Brahma Chellaney
found a Western home for this particular brand of
historiography at the Daily Beast, the electronic
rump of the now-defunct Newsweek, in an article
intended to use the Indian experience to educate
the democracies of East Asia about how to protect
their precious atolls from the PRC: Mr Chellaney
declares: China gave India a "lesson" in 1962.
Study it now.
My advice: by all means study
the 1962, but please don't study Mr Chellaney,
especially since he says things like:
China's
generals believe in hitting as fast and as hard
as possible, a style of warfare they
demonstrated in their 1962 blitzkrieg against
India. The aim is to wage "battles with swift
outcome" (sujuezhan). This laser
focus has been a hallmark of every military
action Communist China has undertaken since
1949. [5]
In a spirit of scholarly
skepticism, I presume to direct Mr Chellaney's
attention to the PRC intervention in Korea: three
years (1950-53), 500,000 casualties. 'Nuff said.
The key lesson from the 1962
is not that China's neighbors should muscle up in
order to counter a PLA "blitzkrieg": rather that
it is dangerous to fetishize territorial
boundaries in order to make them into national
rallying points. As Mr Hoffmann observed in his
largely sympathetic account of the Indian
government's border catastrophe:
[The] Indian
government came to believe that the McMahon Line
was not merely a British Invention ... the
McMahon line itself constituted recognition that
the watershed crest of the Assam Himalaya formed
the natural geographical divide between Tibet
and [the Assam Himalaya].
...
the weight of all the evidence amassed by the
Indians ... made for a plausible case ... But to
the extent that India claimed absolute rather
than relative worth for its border case, by
holding that linear borders had been
conclusively "delimited' by history and
discovered through documentary investigation,
the Indian case became vulnerable ...
India drew the line in the Himalayas
- but it turned out to be the wrong line. As for
the Senkakus/Diaoyus ...?
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
