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.
Even chinese people strongly disagree to you!at your childish statement.. i hope ppl like you will be very less in china..!
