The Prime Minister’s statement in Washington last Thursday on the question of the Sino-Indian border dispute can leave no room for the speculation that New Delhi under the present dispensation is prepared to make “concessions” to Peking. “Why should I make a concession? They should do it. They are a bigger nation. We are the aggrieved party”, Mr. Desai has said. Perhaps he himself regarded it necessary to be so forthright in view of a report which had appeared in June 13 issue of The New York Times. Based on what he had said in NBC-TV’s “meet the press” programme on June 11, the correspondent had concluded: “Prime Minister Morarji Desai of India indicated yesterday that his government was prepared to accept China’s seizure of 14,000 square miles of Indian territory and to acknowledge formally the present boundary in future.”
The quotations which the correspondent has provided fall into two parts. The Prime Minister is first quoted as having said: “All depends on China. But we are determined not to go to war on that issue. We do not want to take back the area which we say they have taken from us by force. We have sufficient patience to see that friendship, if they mean, it, is restored so that this question is favourably solved.” Anyone who reads the statement carefully will recognise that in the third key sentence the words “by force” have been misplaced. The sentence should have read as: “we do not want to take back by force the area which we say they have taken from us. For, the point Mr. Desai was trying to emphasise was not that China had seized the area by force (though this is true) but that India did not wish to use force to recover it. But even as it stood, the sentence could not be interpreted to mean a willingness on India’s part to accept the present border de jure “in future.” That is where the second quotation comes in.
Mr. Desai, according to the report, was asked whether his statement could be interpreted to mean recognition of the present border in a formal fashion. He replied: “I think that when the question (of friendship) is solved then that will happen and think they are also willing to discuss the question now.” Again, anyone familiar with Mr. Desai’s recent utterances on the subject will immediately realize that all he wanted to convey was that once a reasonable level of understanding had been established between the two countries, the border question could be discussed and settled and that, unlike before, the Chinese, too, were now willing to discuss the issue. But not only the correspondent but a “state department specialist” was quick to conclude that the Prime Minister’s “comment appeared to break new ground in the border dispute.” Extraordinary. Not really. In the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties America did almost all in its power to aggravate the Sino-Indian tension because that suited it in its anti-communist crusade. Now it wants the border dispute to be out of the way of Sino-Indian reconciliation without loss of time because it believes that will facilitate its task of weakening this country’s ties with the Soviet Union. But Mr. Desai could have phrased his reply more carefully.