| |
Laying the ghost of the India-China
war
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - India is in the process of building a new, open
chapter in its relationship with China, exactly 40 years
after its humiliating defeat in a border war and four
years after Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes
described the Middle Kingdom as "potential enemy number
one".
A former firebrand socialist, Fernandes
has been an unabashed supporter of Tibetan separatism,
even while in government, naturally to the annoyance of
Beijing leaders. His above-mentioned statement, later
explained away as merely "potential threat number
one", is directly attributed to a subsequent downturn in
Sino-Indian relations. He has also accused China of
"aggressive actions" in Pakistan and Myanmar.
Yet Fernandes is due to visit Beijing soon,
perhaps as early as the middle of November, once the
changing of the guard among the Communist Party is
completed there. Relations began to improve in June
1999, during India's Kargil skirmish with Pakistan, when
External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh visited Beijing
and stated that India did not consider China a threat.
Fernandes will be followed by Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who cited China in a letter to
then US president Bill Clinton as the reason for India
conducting nuclear weapons tests in May 1998. These are
reciprocal visits as nearly all of China's top leaders
have visited New Delhi in the past couple of years.
While these visits are undoubtedly important,
the real source of optimism lies elsewhere. While India
has been remembering in the past fortnight the debacle
of its 1962 war with China, not a single statement has
emanated from any politician, even the firebrands,
reiterating Indian resolve to wrest back from China the
thousands of square kilometers of territory it occupied
in the war. Such declarations of intent used to be
routine, but have now completely stopped.
Also,
for the first time, one finds among influential Indians
a growing acceptance of the validity of the Chinese
position that India should try and settle its border
disputes with China, rather than trying for ever to
skirt the issue and still hope to develop good
relations.
Some strategic affairs analysts feel
that it will be easier to resolve the Sino-Indian border
dispute than, say, the Indo-Pak Kashmir issue. "In
Kashmir", says constitutional and foreign affairs expert
A G Noorani, "there is a clash of vital interests. But
on the border [with China], each side has its vital
interest securely under its own control. India has the
McMahon Line. China has the Xinjiang-Tibet road through
Aksai Chin in Ladakh."
Why, then, is the dispute
unresolved? Noorani answers, "Because, while China has
consistently sought a package deal involving concessions
by both sides, India has insisted on preliminaries to
mark time. Neither Jawaharlal Nehru [the first prime
minister of India] nor any of his successors felt
confident that he could sell a compromise to the people.
The current exercise of drawing a Line of Actual Control
[LAC] falls in this four-decade tradition. It is doomed
to failure."
China, too, remains convinced that
India is not yet ready for a permanent settlement. Vice
Minister for Foreign Affairs Wang Yi, for instance, told
an Indian correspondent in September last year that
China was not sure "if the Indian political
establishment had arrived at a democratic consensus that
would be required to sustain the difficult negotiations.
I am not sure if the conditions concerning 'mutual
understanding and mutual accommodation' are agreed to by
Indian friends".
Wang Yi is not wrong. No Indian
politician would have the guts to make the territorial
concessions that would be necessary to arrive at a
permanent settlement. Vajpayee, for instance, despite
the inclination to leave an imprint on South Asian
history, doesn't yet have the consensus to back him.
The first step in building such a democratic
consensus would be to debunk the myths surrounding the
1962 war and the origins of the dispute. Fortunately,
that seems to be happening now. At least a healthy
debate is going on among some commentators, rather than
simple parroting of the Nehruvian myths of Indian
naivete and Chinese betrayal.
Two generations of
Indians have grown on these myths, which have merely
served to deepen Indian distrust of the "perfidious"
Chinese. They have also exacerbated their national
trauma and sense of defeat. That some mainstream
newspapers are now prepared to allow their analysts to
come out with more balanced write-ups and the story of
the Indian leadership's follies that led to the war in
the first place and their mishandling of the war that
primarily led to their defeat is good news.
It
may not only help create a public opinion favorable to
making hard decisions in order to solve the border
dispute, but also go a long way toward healing the
psychological wounds inflicted by the war and the
ignominious defeat which in Indian minds simply means
the loss of 38,000 square kilometers of territory.
Indian public opinion has been almost entirely
molded for decades by apologists for Nehru and his many
failings. The most pervasive myth of all, which will
have to be debunked if India and China are to move
towards long term good-neighborly relations, is that of
Chinese perfidy. For no reason at all, out of sheer
greed of Indian territory, the Chinese betrayed a
peace-loving brotherly country that had even antagonized
the mighty United States by pleading Beijing's cause for
a place on the United Nations Security Council.
Noted analyst Brahma Chellaney articulates this
traditional view in a recent article: "In fact, Nehru,
the architect of the Hindi-Chini bhai bhai
[Indians and Chinese are brothers] festivity, had gone
out of his way to propitiate communist China, accepting
even the Chinese annexation of Tibet in a 1954 agreement
without settling the Indo-Tibetan border. So betrayed
was Nehru by Mao's war that he had this to say on the
day the Chinese invaded: 'Perhaps there are not many
instances in history where one country has gone out of
her way to be friendly and cooperative with the
government and people of another country and to plead
their cause in the councils of the world, and then that
country returns evil for good'."
Noorani,
though, disagrees with the view that Nehru was duped. He
says, "Nehru was distrustful of China from the very
outset; he substituted old Indian maps with a new one in
1954 and ruled out any compromise. He was a hardliner,
but his opponents were chauvinistic."
Noorani
describes the course of events prior to the war, "China
did not protest when on February 12, 1951, Major R
Khating took over Tawang, evicting Tibetan
administrators. The entire area south of the McMahon
Line was now in Indian control. The famed Nehru-Patel
[Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, independent India's first
home minister] correspondence in November 1950 centered
on the McMahon Line. Neither was interested in Aksai
Chin and for good reason.
"Patel's ministry of
states had published White Papers on the states in July
1948 and February 1950. Official maps were attached to
both. The 1948 map did not even extend the yellow color
wash to the entire state of J&K [Jammu and Kashmir].
In 1948 and 1950, Kashmir's northern and eastern
boundaries - as also that stretching from Kashmir to
Nepal - were explicitly shown as 'undefined', in
contrast to the clear depiction of the McMahon Line in
the east. This was the true position in law and in fact.
Changes in maps by either side cannot alter the
position.
"Nehru's cable to N Raghavan, India's
ambassador to China, on December 10, 1952, provides a
glimpse of his policy: 'Our attitude towards the Chinese
government should always be a combination of
friendliness and firmness. If we show weakness,
advantage will be taken of this immediately. In regard
to this entire frontier we have to maintain an attitude
of firmness. Indeed, there is nothing to discuss there
and we have made that previously clear to the Chinese
government'. He could not have been unaware of his own
maps.
"On April 29, 1954, India and China signed
the famous Panchsheel [five-point] agreement on trade
with Tibet. On June 18, 1954, Nehru sent a note on Tibet
and China to the secretary-general of the MEA [Ministry
of External Affairs], the foreign secretary and joint
secretary. 'No country can ultimately rely upon the
permanent goodwill or bona fides of another country. It
is conceivable that our relations with China might
worsen'. That very month a new official map was
published claiming a firm line in the western sector as
well.
"On July 1, 1954, Nehru issued a
directive: 'All our old maps dealing with this frontier
should be carefully examined and, where necessary,
withdrawn. New maps should be printed showing our
northern and north-eastern frontier without any
reference to any line. These new maps should also not
state there is any undemarcated territory. This frontier
should be considered a firm and definite one which is
not open to discussion with anybody'. India was thus set
on a collision course with China.
"Nehru's
demarche to Zhou Enlai on December 14, 1958, centered on
the McMahon Line and on China's maps. He did not mention
Aksai Chin or China's road through it. It was Zhou who
raised that in his reply of January 23, 1959, while
promising 'to take a more or less realistic attitude
towards the McMahon Line'. Nehru's rejoinder of March
22, 1959, cited a treaty of 1842 on Ladakh and claimed
'the area now claimed by China has always been depicted
as part of India on official maps'. This foreclosed
compromise.
"Zhou proposed a meeting 'so as to
reach some agreement of principles as a guidance to
concrete discussions and a settlement of the boundary
question. Without such a guidance there is a danger that
concrete discussions of the boundary question by the two
sides may bog down in endless and fruitless debates'.
Nehru replied: 'How can we, Mr Prime Minister, reach an
agreement on principles when there is such complete
disagreement about the facts?'
"In Delhi in
April, 1960, Zhou offered an 'overall settlement' based
on two 'principles' - recognition of the McMahon Line in
the east and the Karakoram watershed in the west. Nehru
was politically too weak to accept it. He set up a joint
group of officials to examine the 'evidence'."
It is a sign of the times that a major Indian
website rediff.com carries a special three-part report
on the genesis of the 1962 war by former Times of London
correspondent Neville Maxwell, the only journalist to
have had access to a secret Indian army report on the
debacle. The Indian army had commissioned
Lieutenant-General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P S
Bhagat to study the debacle. With the well-known Indian
obsession with secrecy, their report has not yet been
made public. Maxwell has made an in-depth study of the
subject and is the author of India's China War
(1970), widely available on the Internet.
Introducing his article, he says, "Indians will
be shocked to discover that, when China crushed India in
1962, the fault lay at India, or more specifically, at
Jawaharlal Nehru and his clique's doorsteps. It was a
hopelessly ill-prepared Indian army that provoked China
on orders emanating from Delhi, and paid the price for
its misadventure in men, money and national
humiliation."
On the origins of war, its summary
is indeed shocking to Indians nourished on the Nehruvian
myths. It needs to be quoted in some detail: "In the
Indian political perspective, war with China was deemed
unthinkable and, through the 1950s, New Delhi's defense
planning and expenditure expressed that confidence. By
the early 1950s, however, the Indian government, which
is to say Nehru and his acolyte officials, had shaped
and adopted a policy whose implementation would make
armed conflict with China not only 'thinkable' but
inevitable.
"From the first days of India's
independence, it was appreciated that the Sino-Indian
borders had been left undefined by the departing British
and that territorial disputes with China were part of
India's inheritance. China's other neighbors faced
similar problems and, over the succeeding decades of the
century, almost all of those were to settle their
borders satisfactorily through the normal process of
diplomatic negotiation with Beijing.
"The Nehru
government decided upon the opposite approach. India
would, through its own research, determine the
appropriate alignments of the Sino-Indian borders,
extend its administration to make those good on the
ground and then refuse to negotiate the result. Barring
the inconceivable - that Beijing would allow India to
impose China's borders unilaterally and annex territory
at will - Nehru's policy thus willed conflict without
foreseeing it.
"Through the 1950s, that policy
generated friction along the borders and so bred and
steadily increased distrust, growing into hostility,
between the neighbors. By 1958, Beijing was urgently
calling for a standstill agreement to prevent patrol
clashes and negotiations to agree on boundary
alignments. India refused any standstill agreement,
since it would be an impediment to intended advances and
insisted that there was nothing to negotiate, the
Sino-Indian borders being already settled on the
alignments claimed by India, through blind historical
process. Then it began accusing China of committing
'aggression' by refusing to surrender to Indian claims.
"From 1961, the Indian attempt to establish an
armed presence in all the territory it claimed and then
extrude the Chinese was being exerted by the army, and
Beijing was warning that if India did not desist from
its expansionist thrust, the Chinese forces would have
to hit back. On October 12, 1962, Nehru proclaimed
India's intention to drive the Chinese out of areas
India claimed. That bravado had by then been forced upon
him by public expectations which his charges of 'Chinese
aggression' had aroused, but Beijing took it as in
effect a declaration of war. The unfortunate Indian
troops on the frontline, under orders to sweep superior
Chinese forces out of their impregnable, dominating
positions, instantly appreciated the implications: 'If
Nehru had declared his intention to attack, then the
Chinese were not going to wait to be attacked'.
"On October 20, the Chinese launched a
preemptive offensive all along the borders, overwhelming
the feeble - but, in this first instance, determined -
resistance of the Indian troops and advancing some
distance in the eastern sector. On October 24, Beijing
offered a ceasefire and Chinese withdrawal on the
condition that India agree to open negotiations: Nehru
refused the offer even before the text was officially
received. Both sides built up over the next three weeks,
and the Indians launched a local counterattack on
November 15, arousing in India fresh expectations of
total victory.
"The Chinese then renewed their
offensive. Now many units of the once-crack Indian 4th
Division dissolved into rout without giving battle and,
by November 20, there was no organized Indian resistance
anywhere in the disputed territories. On that day,
Beijing announced a unilateral ceasefire and intention
to withdraw its forces: Nehru, this time, tacitly
accepted."
A Lieutenant Commander of the US
Navy, James Barnard Calvin, summarizes the war in his
1984 study "The China-India Border War (1962)": "In the
war that began with skirmishes in the summer of 1962,
the significant fighting occurred in October and
November, 1962, along three widely separated fronts. In
virtually every battle the Chinese forces either
outmaneuvered or overpowered the unprepared Indians. In
less than six weeks of bloody fighting, the Chinese
completely drove Indian forces back behind Chinese claim
lines. After achieving their limited strategic
objectives, the Chinese dramatically declared ceasefire
on November 21, 1962. Following the ceasefire, China
kept most of their claim in Aksai Chin but gave India
virtually all of India's claim in the North East
Frontier Agency [NEFA, now Arunachal Pradesh] - about 70
percent of the disputed land."
China returned to
India occupied and still "disputed" Indian territory in
the northeast even after Nehru had bid goodbye to the
people of Assam in an afternoon radio broadcast. Clearly
this war was not about territory, though India did lose
territory it had come to consider as its own.
What exactly did India lose? During the 30-day
border conflict, in two phases over October and
November, 1,383 Indian soldiers were killed, 1,696 went
missing and 3,968 were captured. There are no figures of
Chinese casualties. Six months later, by May 25, all the
captured Indians had been released. In the icy heights
of Ladakh - called the western sector - where, even
Nehru acknowledged in parliament later, "not a blade of
grass grew", India had to give up some 38,000 square
kilometers of territory. In the eastern sector in
Arunachal Pradesh, China continues to claim some 90,000
square kilometers of territory, at the heart of which
lies the disputed Tawang swathe of land.
Coming
across these facts of history, most Indians reject them
outright as biased accounts. Some do think, however,
that it is important to find out the truth. If India and
China have to normalize their relations, they must solve
their border disputes. This is only possible if Indians
leaders are backed by a democratic consensus. In order
for this consensus to evolve, Indians must know the
truth of the war. No better beginning can be made than
the official publication of the Indian army's own
account in the Henderson-Brooks report.
Another
important input could be the publication of the official
history of the war, written by a high-powered editorial
team at the behest of then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi,
a quarter century after the war. This remains
classified, although another committee was appointed to
see if it could be released to the public.
India
must understand that the absence of objective and
authentic accounts is doing the country no good; it is
merely reinforcing the trauma of defeat and failure that
Indians have undergone for 40 long years, apart from
making normal relations with an important neighbor
difficult to achieve.
(©2002 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
