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00:00 The Perils of an Unresolved Boundary
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Nirupama Rao looks at the India-China relationship of the 1950s-60s, the border issue, and negotiations on Tibet

The Fractured Himalaya: India, Tibet, China 1949-1962Nirupama Rao Viking/Penguin ₹999
The India-China relationship is in a difficult place, with the past shadowing the present. The period from 1949 to 1962 is crucial as Jawaharlal Nehru sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to establish a workable relationship with the Chinese. Nirupama Rao, former Foreign Secretary and Ambassador to China, traces the history of Tibet, the genesis of the McMahon Line, Communist China’s military takeover and domination of Tibet, and the border row between India and China in her new book, The Fractured Himalaya. An excerpt from the book:

It was to be over a year before negotiations between India and China on relations between India and Tibet opened in Beijing. These commenced on December 31, 1953. Jawaharlal Nehru’s approach to frontier questions between India and China was already well-entrenched by then. Tibet had become more a ‘psychological’ buffer from a political one during British rule — psychological because Nehru was convinced that any military attack on India from Tibet was not feasible. For him, while the status of Tibet and Tibetan autonomy, as also Indian interests in Tibet inherited from the British were issues for discussion with China, the frontier, as his biographer S. Gopal noted, ‘was firm, well-known and beyond dispute’.

Loosely put, Nehru’s attitude was that there was no room for controversy over the McMahon Line: ‘Our maps show that the McMahon Line is our boundary and that is our boundary — map or no map. That fact remains and we stand by that boundary, and we will not allow anybody to come across that boundary.’ Gopal notes that this assertion of rights was more definite regarding the eastern sector of the boundary.

Flawed advice

The problem lay in the fact that, except for Sikkim, the border had not been demarcated — jointly with China — on the ground; the boundary in the western and middle sectors had not been defined in detail by treaty and only, as Nehru stated, by custom, usage and tradition. The McMahon Line was shown only on a map that the Chinese government had initialled in 1914 but not subsequently accepted. The Chinese would set their strategy in such a way subsequently, when the officials of the two sides met in 1960, to seek ‘fresh acceptance of every stretch’ of the boundary. K.M. Panikkar, without the benefit of hindsight, only had this advice to give Nehru: the issue would pose no difficulty. Could Panikkar [the first Indian Ambassador to China] have sensed the actual Chinese attitude? In retrospect, his advice to Nehru would have serious repercussions for India. As advice, it was fatally flawed.

Throughout his stay in China, Panikkar took the stand that the Tibetan issue was a simple one. Leaders like Zhou Enlai, in his view, recognised the ‘legitimacy’ of India’s trade and cultural interests in Tibet and only suggested that the political office in Lhasa, ‘an office of dubious legality’ in Panikkar’s words, should be regularised by its transformation into an Indian Consulate-General. Other posts and institutions like the telegraph lines set up in the British era, the military escort at Yadong in the Chumbi Valley, ‘were to be abolished quietly in time’, and the trade agents in Tibet and their subordinate agencies brought ‘within the framework of normal consulate relations’. In his seeming obsession with the big picture of two big Asian nations forging deeper understanding and cooperation, Panikkar was content to say that he left ‘no outstanding issue’ pending at the time of his departure. It was a strategic miscalculation which would have serious consequences.

When Zhou Enlai told Panikkar in September 1951 in a ‘shrouded sentence’ that the question of the stabilisation of the Tibetan frontier — a matter of common interest to India, Nepal and China — could be settled by discussion between the three countries, it was assumed, in diplomatic guesswork, that stabilisation meant that there was no territorial dispute between India and China.

‘Cunning’ move

Many records indicate that the view of the officials in the Ministry of External Affairs was that while negotiations for an agreement between India and China on Tibet were necessary, they should also include a border settlement. There should be a quid pro quo for India’s recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. A note by the Foreign Secretary, K.P.S. Menon on April 11, 1952 observed that the Chinese government’s attitude was far from straightforward, and could, in fact, be termed ‘cunning’. A child could see through the game, said Menon. Zhou Enlai had suggested in September 1951 tha.........
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