Joe Shearer
PROFESSIONAL
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2009
- Messages
- 27,493
- Reaction score
- 162
- Country
- Location
Recovering slowly, Sir, but steadily; this lock-down tamasha stopped me going to the surgeon for my post-month review, but otherwise matters are as stable as might be expected.
I have to agree with your basic formulation; permit me to vent my frustration before fully addressing your point.
What is most annoying is that our case for the cartography in Ladakh is completely phony, considering that that map was created by a wily British geographer who convinced the then Maharaja that his domain should extend to the Kuen Lun Mountains. By insisting on these obviously concocted boundaries, Nehru (whom I otherwise admire for his role in preserving democracy and secularism within India in the early, crucial years) built the entire Indian position on the borders issue on a foundation of sand.
Instead, we had a perfectly good foundation for the undemarcated and also undelineated border between Ladakh and Xijang in the lie of the ground of the Karakorum Mountains; sadly, that is the line that the present Line of Actual Control follows, broadly, and that is the extent of the Sino-Tibetan outreach during the incident in the 1840s, resulting in the Treaty of Leh, that was the only formal treaty between India, represented by the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, and China, represented by its vassal state, Tibet.
Matters were less sticky but still unsound in the east. Tawang Monastery had been a subsidiary of Shigatse for decades, having possibly been established by Shigatse (the seat, incidentally, of the Panchen Lama); some small part of the surrounding territory was also revenue-producing, tax-paying demesne of Tawang. It was only in the rest of the then NEFA that any Indian claim was maintainable.
For an otherwise decent person like Nehru to have issued orders to maintain the false position, and to suppress maps showing any different picture, is difficult to digest for an Indian student.
Coming to your point, there might have been an evolution to today's situation in any case, in terms of geopolitical compulsion, but that is imaginary history pitted against imaginary history. There is no doubt that Chou En Lai tried in his own, somewhat inscrutable way to bring Nehru to a reasonable modus vivendi, and he did all this against the backdrop of Mao's intense personal pique and offended ego. Unfortunately, as we all know, Nehru just could not see what was happening; misled by his wishful thinking, and by the additional gilding of Krishna Menon, the Defence Minister, and Bhola Mallik, the Director IB, he kept pushing deeper and deeper into dangerous territory, capping everything by his bizarre support for a terrible general who was also a Kashmiri Pandit.
You are right in pointing out that China then decided not only to punish Nehru, and India, and the Indian Army, but also to reach out to Pakistan and to settle with Pakistan, a settlement that was so easy that it just goes to show what tremendous damage has been done to India by those few years of self-glorification. We have ended up spending vast fortunes fortifying the northern boundaries, we worked on the Bomb, and we have created a permanent Chinese mind-set that is determined to exert influence in south Asia while denying India any diplomatic influence or presence elsewhere in Asia, especially south-east and north Asia.
Imagine, if you will, what would have happened if those vast revenue streams had flowed into development; into agriculture and industry, into education, and into science and technology. We would not have a PDF in such a case; Pakistan would have been overwhelmed - I say this with no sense of jubilation or triumph, but merely to point to the grim realities of such a scenario - by Indian economic might, perhaps even without a translation of such might into military terms.
I could go on and on, as you have tapped into a reservoir of frustration and anger at our wilfully blind national policy through the years, but these are sentiments that may not be shared by a Pakistani citizen, even though the dire consequences of today's situation have the most sinister implications for his state lesser only than the implications for India.
Thank you for your deft illumination of the key mistake that we made. It is galling to contemplate it, but it is the truth.
