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New
Delhi, 26 October 2002
This
is the third and last part of our three part series of the India–China Border
dispute. (Click here for Part I and Part
II)
How
We
Can Settle This
By
Mohan Guruswamy
The
Dalai Lama's flight to India was followed by two ominous incidents.
On August 25, 1959, Indian and Chinese forces clashed over
possession of Longju, a small village in the eastern sector. We said
it was on the McMahon line and, therefore, ours, the Chinese said it
was two miles north of it and, therefore, theirs. There were a few
casualties on both sides. On October 20 the same year, the Chinese
at Kongka La ambushed an Indian patrol sent to probe the Aksai Chin,
in which nine Indian frontier policemen were killed and seven taken
prisoner. With this, Indian public opinion was inflamed. A democracy
is nothing but a government sensitive to public opinion and
governments that ignore this do so at their own peril. But public
opinion, even when not inflamed, is quite often ill informed. Even
many among the leadership never really understood the historical
background of the dispute.
We
claimed that what the Chinese were claiming and occupying was our
"sacred land" and this was accepted by almost all, except
the doctrinaire Marxist Communists who may have done this for
reasons not at all related to history. The Indian government knew
better, but allowed itself to be swept by the tide of public
opinion, and true to the manner the great game of democracy is
played here, the opposition did nothing to bail it out.
The
influence of the domestic imperative in the international politics
of democratic countries must never be underestimated. It is also an
inherent characteristic of democratic societies that very little
flexibility is given to the decision-makers in choosing a policy
from a wide spectrum of options. If for instance, Nehru accepted
Chou-en-Lai's offers of a settlement on a give and take basis, he
would have been accused of giving up our "sacred"
territory. As it is the opposition was exploiting Nehru's
discomfiture over his failed China policy and his naïve reliance on
Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai and Panchsheela with the worlds
foremost practioners of realpolitik.
In the highly partisan atmosphere that characterized our politics
then, as it is even now, any stick is good enough for the opposition
to beat the government with and vice versa. The opposition, then
though small in numbers, made up for lack of quantity by quality.
Eminent leaders, known for their incisive intellects and oratorial
abilities, like Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya Kripalani, Asoka Mehta,
Deendayal Upadhyaya, Minoo Masani and C. Rajagopalachari, all
smarting at their electoral inconsequence tore into the government
in parliament and outside. Some others like Atal Behari Vajpayee
were well known for their fiery demagoguery.
Many of Nehru's colleagues, upset by his "loftiness" and
his fondness for Krishna Menon, often preferred to be bemused
observers enjoying these blistering attacks. China was treated as
Nehru's problem. To be fair to them, Nehru for long had kept the
problems with China to himself as he did with most matters
pertaining to external relations. To get over this uncomfortable
"debating" situation in parliament, Nehru often had to
sound tough and uncompromising. This would have been fine, if he had
the military strength to back him up. Unfortunately for the country,
this was not so.
The
Indian Army then was poorly equipped, short-staffed and generally in
a bad way. Krishna Menon as defence minister squabbled with the
generals in public and wrought havoc with the morale of the brass.
Aiding him in good measure was a Nehru kinsman, Lt. Gen. B M Kaul, a
soldier with no combat experience, who in his bid to be one up over
his peers, would agree to do things the politicians wanted done, but
the general staff baulked at.
The
press in those troubled days was not very helpful either. The major
English language papers almost in unison shrilly demanded that the
Chinese be expelled and often accused the government of not doing
its duty. The influential English language media with few notable
exceptions, being still conditioned by their pro-British past was
generally pro-Western and thus found this a good opportunity to
needle the government on its policy of non-alignment seen by them in
Dullesian terms as being pro-Soviet. The editors and pundits, never
comfortable with Nehru's non-alignment went hammer and tongs at him.
Given this atmosphere, partisan political interests took precedence
over national interests. This is not unfamiliar even today. The need
to develop a non-partisan national consensus based on a rational
survey of facts and events never was greater, yet was as far away as
it often seems even now
Against
this surcharged backdrop, Nehru had to come up with something. This
something was the Forward Policy. This policy called for
establishing posts in the disputed areas often behind the Chinese
line of forward posts. Thus a number of small forward posts were set
up with meagre resources, poor communications and extremely
vulnerable supply lines. Most of these posts had to be supplied by
air drops and quite a bit of the supply would end up in Chinese
hands and often the PLA would hand these over to our men to derive a
psychological advantage.
Nothing
describes the Forward Policy better than the words of an Indian Army
officer: "We thought it was a sort of game. They would stick up
a post and we would stick up a post and we did not think it would
come to much more". It came to be much more, as it had to, and
the consequences were felt in 1962 when a full-scale border war
broke out. The Forward Policy was against all sound military advice.
Lt.
Gen. Daulat Singh, GOC, Northern Command in a memo to the government
on Aug 17, 1962 bitterly criticized this policy. He wrote: "It
is imperative that political direction is based on military
means". Daulat Singh's warning like those of many other senior
officers was ignored. Defence Minister Krishna Menon, Intelligence
Bureau Director B N Mullick and Lt Gen B M Kaul who had conjured up
this policy, had Nehru's ear and that was what mattered. If Nehru
had learnt a little from the much-publicized Bay of Pigs fiasco the
new American administration of John Kennedy had landed itself into
in 1961, he would have been very wary of this threesome.
In
Kennedy's case, he allowed the legendary Richard Bissell, the CIA's
director of operations, awe him, his cabinet and his military chiefs
into approving an operation that was based on little hard
intelligence and a lot of wishful thinking. Also in Kennedy's case
the pressures of the domestic imperative was overwhelming. The
planning of the operation had begun in Eisenhower's time with
Richard Nixon playing a leading part in it. If Kennedy aborted the
plan he would have been accused of being "soft on
communists" and what greater crime can there be in that bastion
of "freedom and liberty" than this? He succumbed to the
fear of an inflammable public opinion just as Nehru was to do later.
In both cases, the policies ended up as unmitigated disasters that
almost irretrievably hardened positions and thus shaped the future
course of national direction and domestic politics.
Incidentally,
the order to "throw the Chinese out", was given on
September 22, 1962 by K Raghuramiah, then Minister of State in the
Defence Ministry. Raghuramiah was in the chair, Krishna Menon being
in New York to deliver yet one more of those long harangues he was
so fond off, when the Army Chief, Gen. K N Thapar gave his
appreciation of the situation in the Dhola area. The Foreign
Secretary then gave his appreciation that the Chinese were unlikely
to react strongly and for good measure repeated the Prime Ministers
"instructions" on the subject. And so we went to war!
In
the 40 years that have followed the debacle of 1962, little has
changed. We in India have not yet been able to get together a
non-partisan consensus on crucial issues such as this. We do not
seem to have as yet grasped the real and futile nature of the border
dispute. In an over populated, overcrowded and primarily
agricultural country with a relatively small landmass to share, the
concern and obsession with land is understandable. Land is our
primary economic resource and hence it is an ingrained national
characteristic to be possessive about land. Our leaders, notorious
for their land grabbing ways, not surprisingly have acquired an
estate agents mentality as far as territory goes. It seems that to
us country no longer means people but land. Or else why would we
care so little about our people and their interests and honour, and
care so much for an uninhabitable desert?
While
it is possible for us to settle our eastern border disputes with
China on the basis of a clearly demarcated McMahon line, there seems
little or no chance that the Chinese could be persuaded to handover
Aksai Chin to us, and thereby de-linking Tibet from Sinkiang. There
also seems an equally remote chance that we might be able to
retrieve it from the Chinese by military means. Even if we summon
the political will to stake a fortune, the sheer lack of any
tangible benefits, material or spiritual, will only make this even
more foolhardy.The nub of our border dispute with China is the Aksai
Chin. It does seem to appear that if this is settled, the rest will
disappear into the mists of history. On the western sector the
Chinese line of actual control now lies west of the Karakorum Range.
This is even better than the British foreign office line of 1873,
midway through the Karakorum Range till the Galwan River and
extended up till the Karakorum pass.
There
are many indications that the Chinese would settle along these
lines. We in India still seem prisoners of our past and continue to
take an excessively legalistic view of past events and present
inheritances. We have even bound ourselves in knots with a
jingoistic and unrealistic parliamentary resolution that binds us to
an undefined boundary bequeathed to us and to the
"liberation" of occupied territory, so desolate and
inhospitable that let alone animal life, even plant life is hard
pressed to exist upon it! By freeing ourselves from this mindset we
could meaningfully negotiate a settlement with the Chinese, whose
only aim in this sector seems to secure the Sinkiang–Tibet highway
through the Aksai Chin. While this will not entirely dissipate the
rivalry between the two countries, it will remove a cause of
frequent tension that only serves to underline our unfavourable
strategic position.
The
challenge now for our national leadership is to harmonize reality
with sentiment, pragmatism with unhistorical belief and national
aspirations with imperialistic legacies. To be able to do this we
first need to extricate such sensitive and critical issues from the
ambit of partisan politics. The responsibility for this lies with
the government of the day, which alone can orchestrate such an
exercise. By doing this, we can once again bring into alignment our
political objectives, with military means and reality. We can then
negotiate from a position of strength and give ourselves secure,
defensible and natural boundaries in the north at least. And who
knows this may even lead to lasting good relations between the two
great countries.
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