By publishing a highly provocative partisan and distorted account of the Sino-Indian border dispute, Mr. Neville Maxwell has in some ways rendered a service to this country.
In quoting extensively from what are supposed to be highly secret documents and by advertising the fact that they were made available to him by Indian officials, he has exposed the weakness of the security arrangements within the Government and the existence of powerful lobbies which do not feel inhibited in using foreign journalists and authors for furthering their own ends. This kind of open society which leaks like a sieve may suit Mr. Maxwell and his ilk but not this country.
The Army lobby here has evidently been generous in supplying confidential documents to Mr. Maxwell. It has even provided him with a copy of the report by General Henderson Brooks on the causes of the NEFA debacle in 1962. Officials of the Ministry of External Affairs have been equally munificent. Where else could Mr. Maxwell get access to the correspondence between the late Mr. Girja Shankar Bajpai, first Secretary-General in the Ministry of External Affairs, and Mr. KM Panikkar, India’s first Ambassador to Communist China?
Mr. Maxwell’s informants have clearly been interested in denigrating certain individuals, particularly Mr. Nehru, Mr. Krishna Menon and Gen. BM Kaul. Gen Kaul has already given his version of the events in his book The Untold Story and Mr. Menon, who thrives on the West’s hatred of him, has never cared to answer his critics. Mr. Maxwell’s principal charge of adventurism against Gen. Kaul can be sustained only if it is conceded that he and his political bosses were wholly mistaken in the assumption that their effort to show the flag in forward areas would attract massive Chinese retaliation. This assumption is open to question.
Inefficient
Mr. Maxwell spares no effort to prove that Mr. Nehru made the conflict with China inevitable. But in the process he has helped to demolish the myth that the former Indian Prime Minister was sentimental and soft-headed in his approach to Peking. On the contrary, Mr. Nehru emerges from the present book as an extremely shrewd and tough-minded practitioner of the art of realpolitik. He evidently failed to carry through his plans in respect of the borders with China, partly because the execution was highly inefficient – the Army leadership in the ‘fifties must share a large part of the blame for this – and partly because his political assessment was rendered infructuous at an extremely critical stage in the war of nerves with Peking by the Soviet-US confrontation over Cuba.
It is of course not Mr. Maxwell’s intention to salvage Mr. Nehru’s reputation. He tries to make it out that the former Prime Minister set India on a collision course with China as early as in 1950 by claiming that his country’s borders were well known and did not need to be defined in negotiations with Peking. Since the book has been written specifically for the purpose of proving that it was India, and not China, which took an intransigent position from the very start, Mr. Maxwell has conveniently ignored the period of Sino-Indian friendship, the constituents of Mr. Nehru’s China policy and the causes that accounted for its success in the early ‘fifties and for its failure in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties.
This is one of the many major flaws in the book. It is hard to say whether it is intentional or not. In any case it is necessary to deal with this aspect at some length to controvert Mr. Maxwell’s lopsided view and to dispel the wholly erroneous impression in this country that Mr. Nehru’s policy was misconceived from the very beginning by virtue of being idealistic. The two propositions are contradictory and neither bears any relation to the facts.
Sympathetic
Once it became evident that the Chinese would impose their dominion over Tibet, Mr. Nehru evolved a four-fold policy to secure India’s frontiers. First, he signed new agreements with Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim to ensure that India’s special position in these strategically important border States was not jeopardised and that the regimes there remained friendly to New Delhi. Secondly, he took measures to extend the Indian administration up to the McMahon Line in NEFA. Thirdly, he decided that it would be dangerous to regard the question of borders as an open issue because it would place India at the mercy of China. And fourthly, he opted for a generally friendly approach to Peking in the hope that he would thereby be in a better position to persuade it to respect India’s frontiers and the internal autonomy of Tibet which in turn would place a certain limitation on China’s military presence there.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Nehru’s policy was inspired solely by these calculations. He undoubtedly saw the Chinese revolution as part of Asian resurgence and was sympathetic to it. He was also repelled by America’s crude anti-communism and was therefore opposed to its efforts to establish its hegemony over the newly liberated countries of Asia under the guise of security pacts. The two aspects of this policy were indeed so well integrated that most observers failed to recognise that ill spite of all his idealism, Mr. Nehru was a great realist.
It goes without saying that this policy suited China in view of its preoccupation with the US threat and that it facilitated its task of winning respectability among Afro-Asian nations. The pertinent point in the present discussion, however, is that in its early phase the policy was an unqualified success even from the Indian viewpoint. Because of it China put an end to its propaganda offensive against this country, adopted a conciliatory and even friendly approach towards its other neighbours, became the first communist State to implement the policy of co-existence, recognised India’s special position in Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim and did not protest even against New Delhi’s occupation of Tawang.
Absurd
It is therefore on the face of it absurd for Mr. Maxwell to contend that Mr. Nehru laid the ground for a Sino-Indian war by claiming that his country’s border did not need to be negotiated afresh with China. The historical and political justification for this approach will be examined later. Here it is sufficient to note that though Mr. Chou En-lai raised the border issue vaguely with Mr. Panikkar, he did not return to it again for eight years. In fact when Mr. Nehru drew his attention first in 1954 and then in 1956 to Chinese maps incorporating 50,000 square miles of Indian territory, the Chinese Prime Minister did not counter by saying that the Indian maps were also wrong. All that he said was that the Chinese maps in question were prepared by the Kuomintang Government and that the new regime had not had the time to re-examine them. He also indicated that Peking was not averse to recognising the existing borders in view of the friendly relations between the two countries.
It is not possible to say when exactly the Sino-Indian trouble began. Apparently Mr. Nehru resented the manner in which he was ushered into Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s presence during his visit to Peking in the autumn of 1954. His account of his discussions with Chairman Mao as later disclosed by Mr. Khrushchev – he quoted Mr. Nehru having told him that the Chinese leader had said that he did not care if 300 million Chinese perished in a nuclear war – suggests that there was a wide gulf between their approaches to the larger issues of war and peace. Similarly, it is possible that the Chinese saw in the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit to India in the winter of 1955 a threat to their ambitions in Asia. But broadly speaking it was the Dalai Lama’s visit to India in 1956 which was the turning point in Sino-Indian relations.
The Dalai Lama came to India against Peking’s wishes. He delayed his departure and expressed a desire to take asylum in India. He posted Mr. Nehru fully with China’s violations of the 1951 agreement whereby Peking had undertaken to respect Tibet’s autonomy. All this aggravated Chinese suspicions because it showed that the Dalai Lama and his entourage still looked towards India for moral support and even refuge, and that Mr. Nehru was prepared to espouse the cause of Tibet’s autonomy. The Chinese later complained that while India recognised their sovereignty over Tibet it wanted to ensure that they did not exercise it. They conveniently forgot that Mr. Chou En-lai had himself told Mr. Nehru that though Tibet was a part of China, Peking did not look upon it as a province.
Dalai’s Visit
The relations between the two countries steadily deteriorated after the Dalai Lama’s first visit in 1956- 57. There were many reasons for it, the construction of the road through Aksaichin by the Chinese and its belated discovery by India being just one of them. As a matter of fact it was not beyond human ingenuity to resolve this specific dispute if it had not been complicated by numerous other factors.
First, since early 1956 the Chinese had been openly challenging Mr. Khrushchev not only on the question of Stalin’s role and place in history but also on his basic formulations that war was not inevitable and that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means. Behind this ideological smokescreen they were questioning his policy of friendship and economic assistance to non-aligned countries, specially India. Inevitably they came to look upon India as a rival and to distrust Mr. Nehru who in turn welcomed the new Soviet interest in Asia as a counterweight to China.
Secondly, the Chinese steadily eroded the autonomy of Tibet, partly because they never intended to respect it and partly because their hands were forced by the Khampa rebellion. They had to push ahead with the road through Aksaichin because there was no other way to crush this revolt.
Thirdly, once the road had been built and the Chinese had become increasingly suspicious of Indo-Soviet friendship which led Mr. Khrushchev in 1958 to propose that India (not China) be invited to a meeting of the great powers to discuss the crisis in West Asia, they did not bother about India’s friendship. They also adopted a tough line at home and abroad after the brief “let a hundred flowers bloom” period in early 1957. Chairman Mao was to launch the great leap forward movement in 1958 the consequences of which China has yet to live down.
Finally, with the Lhasa revolt in March 1959, the flight of the Dalai Lama and thousands of other Tibetans into India and the upsurge of anti-China feelings here which Mr. Nehru shared in spite of his continuing desire to maintain normal relations with Peking, the old policy visibly collapsed.
But Mr. Nehru had in advance worked out an alternative policy. The uproar in the press and Parliament, which Mr. Maxwell has diligently detailed, denied him the necessary room for manoeuvre and may account for the two serious mistakes he committed by allowing posts to be set up behind the Chinese line in Aksaichin and beyond the McMahon Line as shown in the map attached to the 1914 Simla convention accords. But the overall strategy was not unsound as Mr. Maxwell would have us believe.
US Response
Briefly, Mr. Nehru’s calculations were that China’s growing isolation from the international community, specially the Soviet bloc, and India’s prestige and friendship with the two super-powers strongly favoured New Delhi and that he could compel Peking to reach an honourable agreement provided the Indian Army could fill the empty spaces and prevent China from making good its claims, specially in the western sector, before negotiations could begin.
It is self-evident that Mr. Nehru relied a great deal on the support of the United States and the neutrality of the Soviet Union. The alacrity with which Washington responded to his call for help in 1962 shows that his assessment was sound. That the Chinese did not retaliate against the new posts, some of them behind their own lines in Aksaichin is proof enough that Mr. Nehru was not guilty of adventurism in pushing his so-called forward policy. Mr. Maxwell himself appears to be baffled by the lack of a strong Chinese response in the western sector.
The risk of a Chinese retaliation was of course there. Generals who pointed out the weaknesses of the Indian position did their duty and deserve to be commended for it. But the other relevant factors should not be ignored.
As it turned out, Mr. Nehru’s calculations were proved wrong. The Chinese retaliated and made good their claims in the western sector. But it needs to be remembered that the Chinese pressed the attack against India precisely at a time when the two super-powers were thoroughly immobilised as a result of the confrontation over Cuba. The Soviet Union may even have sought Chinese goodwill on the eve of the Cuban crisis. Peking’s statement in this connection should not be disregarded. But it is relevant to recall that the Chinese withdrew as the Cuban crisis was brought under control and Washington and Moscow were relatively free to attend to other problems. It is a serious indictment of Mr. Maxwell’s book that he has ignored this larger framework.
(To be concluded)
*India’s China War by Neville Maxwell (Jaico Publishing House, Bombay, Rs. 30.)
The Times of India 6 October 1970