The Incredible History of India's Geography

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  OFF THEY GO!

  So now, the British had finally left and the kingdoms ruled by princes had been handed over to the new Indian government. But there were still parts of India that were ruled by other European countries. The French had five such places. The largest was Pondicherry, south of Chennai. It was close to the old Mahabalipuram port of the Pallava kings. The others were Chandannagar (just north of Calcutta), Yanam (on the Andhra coast), Mahe (on the Kerala coast) and Karaikal (on the Tamil coast).

  The French didn’t want to give up these places but they knew that change was inevitable. In June 1949, Chandannagar merged with India and a year later, it became part of the state of West Bengal. The French clung on to their colonies in southern India for a few more years but finally, in 1954, they handed over all of them to India.

  Pondicherry, renamed Puducherry, is today a Union Territory. That is, it is directly ruled by the Central government. Most people don’t know that that Yanam, Mahe and Karaikal also come under Pondicherry. The French have left but their influence still lives on. The main town of Puducherry still has many buildings from the time of their rule. The roads, planned by the French, still follow the street-grid style they had introduced. Many locals are even French citizens, descendants of people who chose to stay back at the time of the handover.

  You may have heard of Aurobindo Ghosh, a freedom fighter from Bengal. He fled from the British to Pondicherry in 1910. From someone who was in the thick of politics, Aurobindo moved to spirituality and attracted a lot of followers. Though the movement has branches all over India and abroad, Pondicherry is home to many institutions as well as a commune inspired by Aurobindo.

  After the French, it was now the turn of the Portuguese. The Portuguese controlled many small places along the western coast. Goa was the largest of these but there were also Diu, Daman, Dadra and Nagar Haveli. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had used these places to control the Indian Ocean. They were not so powerful in the twentieth century but they had managed to stick around through Vijayanagar, the Mughals and the British. They saw no reason to leave just because India had become a Republic! The Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar declared that Goa represented the ‘light of the West in the Orient’.

  But the Portuguese were blind to what was happening around them. In the summer of 1954, a small group of local activists simply took over the government in Dadra and Nagar Haveli. It was not immediately absorbed into India and for a while, the area became an independent country! The Portuguese were angry. They strengthened their defences in their other territories with the help of African troops from Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). They used violence to put down protests and strikes. Thousands were arrested. Prime Minister Nehru had hoped that talks would help resolve the problem but by late 1961, he was getting impatient.

  Operation Vijay began with the Indian Air Force bombing Dabolim airport at dawn on 18 December 1961. This is the same airport that you will Land in if you fly to Goa today! Within hours, Indian ground troops were pouring into Goa from the north, south and east. The Indian Navy sailed in from the west. Similar operations were carried out at the same time in Daman and Diu.

  The Portuguese planned to fight to the end but they were simply overpowered. The lone show of defiance came from NRP Alfonso de Albuquerque, the only Portuguese warship in Goa. Built in the 1930s, it was a medium-sized, old-fashioned warship which had no hope at all against the large, modern Indian warships. The ship was put out of service in no time but the crew still tried to fire guns from it for a while. They finally had to stop when they ran out of ammunition and the death toll on their side ran too high. The Portuguese came to India with cannon firing from their ships and they went out the same way.

  Barely thirty-six hours after the battle began, the Portuguese Governor General Vassalo e Silva saw that the game was over. He signed the document handing over the territories to India. It was Christmas season but back home, in Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal, people were in mourning. Even the cinemas and theatres shut down! When Vassalo e Silva returned home, people gave him the cold shoulder. He was even court-martialled and then exiled. It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for the man!

  It’s interesting to read press reports from these times about the liberation of Goa. The West seemed to think India was out of line for trying to get back territory from the European powers. The United States and Britain, in fact, tried to push for a UN resolution against India but the USSR did not agree. Many press reports spoke sadly about Goa’s Christians, ignoring the fact that activists like Tristao de Braganza Cunha who fought for liberation were Christians themselves! TIME magazine called Nehru a hypocrite for preaching peace abroad but using violence at home. Funny they didn’t notice that Nehru had waited for fourteen years for the Portuguese to come to the table for peaceful talks!

  DRAGON DANCING

  After the French and the Portuguese, there was the Chinese to deal with. Mao’s China was very powerful, not like the French and the Portuguese who were no longer at the peak of their powers.

  The Sino-Indian border can be divided into two sectors. In the east, the border is called the McMahon line. It was named after Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, who was the chief negotiator for the British. The line is along the crest of the Himalayan range eastwards from Tawang, near the Bhutan tri-border and it also defines the northern boundary of the North East Frontier Agency—what is now called Arunachal Pradesh.

  In the middle of the Himalayas, India and China were separated by three kingdoms—Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. The border once again continued in the western Himalayas and ran along what are now the states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, finally running into Ladakh. Ladakh was under Indian control because it had been part of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir when it joined India. But who was going to control the large Aksai Chin territory that India said was part of Ladakh? Very few people lived there and it wasn’t clear if it was under Indian control or the Chinese. Nineteenth-century British surveyors had drawn the borders here in two different ways.

  The first one, called the Johnson line, was drawn in 1865 between Kashmir and Turkestan. This line used the Kunlun mountains as the natural border. This meant that Aksai Chin was within Kashmir. The famous explorer Francis Younghusband visited Aksai Chin in the 1880s and reported that apart from a few groups of nomadic herdsmen and a small fort (used at times by the troops of the Maharaja of Kashmir), there was nothing much in this cold, Deserted area. In 1899, the British drew a new border called Macartney-Macdonald line. This time, they used the Karakoram range as the natural boundary and left out Aksai Chin. They probably did this to create a better defence against the Russians, who they feared were expanding in this region.

  The British then went on to use both the lines in their maps till 1947. No Chinese map before the 1920s showed Aksai Chin as part of China. And so, it looked like nobody really was sure who the place belonged to. The Indians probably had a slightly stronger claim.

  After Independence, India’s focus was on Kashmir’s western border. The Eastern one was unmarked and not watched. India and China were on very friendly terms in the 1950s—it was the Age of ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai’ which meant that the Indians and the Chinese were brothers. But to Nehru’s shock, it was found in 1957 that, over the previous year, the Chinese had quietly built a highway between Tibet and Xinjiang that went right through Aksai Chin! The Indian government did not even know about it!

  The quarrel between the ‘brothers’ began. In 1958, an official Chinese magazine published a map that showed large parts of Ladakh and the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) as part of Chinese territory. You can now fully understand how important a role map-making plays in history! Nehru wrote angry letters to Chou En-Lai, the Chinese Premier. The Chinese responded saying that Aksai Chin had always been part of China. They did not think the McMahon Line was valid because it had been decided upon between Britain and Tibet, not the Chinese. In the middle of all this letter writing, the Dalai Lama fled t
o India in March 1959.

  The Chinese had been claiming that Tibet had been under Chinese rule for a long time. But just as the Mughals found out in the seventeenth century, it was one thing to claim this and quite another to put it to practice. Tibet was a very cold country with a very difficult terrain, so it was not an easy job to maintain control over it. Till October 1950, Tibet was, for all practical purposes, a free country. But in 1950, it was invaded by the Chinese communists. Nehru didn’t intervene though Sardar Patel did warn him about China’s intentions.

  By the time the Dalai Lama came to India, there was regular trouble between the Indians and the Chinese at the borders. General Thimayya, the Indian army chief, asked that the equipment be improved and that troops be sent to the Chinese border. Some units of the army were still fighting with weapons from the First World War! But Nehru and Krishna Menon, who was then the Defence Minister, did not listen.

  When people began demanding that Krishna Menon resign, he promoted Brij Mohan Kaul, an officer known to be close to Nehru, to the rank of lieutenant general. Thimayya was furious and threatened to resign. Kaul had not only bypassed twelve senior officials, he also had no field experience! On 3 October 1962, he was put in charge of defending the North East Frontier Agency.

  Barely a fortnight after arriving, Kaul complained of chest pains and was sent to Delhi. And so, when the Chinese launched a full-fledged attack on the night of 19 October, the Indian troops not only lacked suffecient guns and enough soldiers, but they were also without a leader. The Chinese had attacked Ladakh, too, but there the Indian army succeeded to hold them back. In NEFA, However, the Chinese managed to take control of Tawang on 25 October. Here, they stopped for a while to build supply roads.

  The Indians could have used this time to build up a more defensible position at Bomdila, where it would have been easier for them to get supplies from Assam. But Kaul insisted that the Indians should defend a position farther up at Sela Pass. When the Chinese once again started moving on 14 November, they simply went around Sela and cut off the Indian troops from behind. A large number of soldiers were killed and Bomdila fell. When this news reached Assam, there was panic. The town of Tezpur was abandoned and even the inmates of the local mental asylum were set loose. In a broadcast, Nehru said, ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam.’ This sounded like he was giving up the North East to the Chinese and the Assamese people are still angry about it!

  Then, just as suddenly as they had come, the Chinese decided that they were going back to where things were before the war. We still don’t know why they came and why they left! The most likely reason is that winter was fast approaching and the supply lines through the Himalayas would have been difficult to maintain. In the end, it was nature that saved the Indian republic rather than the politicians.

  Today, the road from Tezpur to Bomdila is a beautiful drive through dense forests and high mountains. In the lower reaches, wild elephants often hold up traffic. From Bomdila, you can travel through the Sela Pass to the monastery at Tawang. You will see army trucks making their way up the mountain to supply the military bases that dot the region. The Chinese still mark the place as ‘Southern Tibet’ on their maps and made a big fuss when the Dalai Lama visited Tawang in 2009!

  The war with China left thousands of Indian soldiers dead or wounded. Nehru’s reputation was shattered. Krishna Menon, the Defence Minister, Lt General Kaul and army chief, General Pran Nath Thapar were removed, but it was clear to everyone that Nehru had also made huge blunders. By 1963, it was obvious to everyone that Nehru was an ageing man who had been in power for sixteen years. Once again, history seemed to be repeating itself—an ageing leader who had been on the throne for a long time. And war. The 1960s was a very uncertain period. Nehru died in 1964, Pakistan and India fought a war in 1965, Lal Bahadur Shastri (who became Prime Minister after Nehru) died in January 1966, the congress split and the economy wasn’t moving.

  Out of this mess came Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, the next Prime Minister. In the early seventies, she played an important role in a major shift in the political geography of the country.

  THE BANGLADESH WAR 1971

  The Partition of India had taken place in 1947 because of different ideas about what a nation should be like. But Pakistan faced the same problem in the 1960s. The basis of its nationhood was the idea that it was an Islamic country with an Islamic culture. But though their religion was the same, there were huge cultural differences between East and West Pakistan. In the east, there was a strong sense of being Bengali. The East Pakistanis were also angry that the political power of the country was in the hands of West Pakistan. These leaders did not care about the needs of the east. It was as if East Pakistan had simply exchanged one form of colonial rule for another.

  As the Bengalis of East Pakistan began to make more and more demands, the leaders responded with violence. The West Pakistani military rulers openly stated that they thought the Bengalis were too influenced by Hindu culture. The Hindu Bengalis who continued to live in Pakistan were regarded with suspicion. Riots, often secretly supported by the government, broke out against these populations in the mid-sixties. The demands for freedom and fairness continued to grow.

  Once again, it was nature that determined the chain of events. In November 1970, the major tropical cyclone ‘Bhola’ struck East Pakistan and killed between 3,00,000 and 5,00,000 people. It is considered to be one of the worst natural disasters on record but the military dictatorship in West Pakistan took only half-hearted relief measures to help the Bengalis. When Pakistan’s military leaders finally allowed elections in late December, East Pakistan voted overwhelmingly for the awami league, the Bengali-nationalist party. It won 167 of the 169 seats in East Pakistan.

  Since East Pakistan’s population was higher than that of West Pakistan’s, the worry was that the Bengalis would now rule the entire country. This was bad news for the military and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the largest party in West Pakistan. So what did they do? They ‘cancelled’ the elections! East Pakistan broke out into open revolt.

  The military government of Yahya Khan sent in troops. The result was mass murder, in which as many as three million people, especially intellectuals, and those belonging to minority groups, were killed. The residential halls of Dhaka University were particularly targeted. Up to 700 students were killed in a single attack on Jagannath hall. Many well-known professors, Hindu and Muslim, were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. By September 1971, ten million refugees poured into Eastern India. This was one of the worst mass killings or Genocides in human history but people outside of the subcontinent barely know about it.

  The other countries of the world behaved shamefully. The Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai actually sent a letter of support to the Pakistan government and even hinted that the Chinese would give Pakistan military support if the Indians try to interfere. The West was aware of what was happening. We now have copies of desperate cables sent by diplomat Archer Blood and his colleagues at the US consulate in Dacca (Dhaka) pleading with the US government to stop supporting the genocide. But US President Nixon was determined to keep Indira Gandhi out.

  But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began to prepare for war. Pakistan’s military was in a very strong position—it had the support of the US and China, or at least their promises of support. Pakistan ordered air strikes against India on 3 December 1971. The next morning, the Statesman newspaper carried the headline ‘It’s War’. The Indian response was swift and sharp. With support from the civilians as well as the Mukti Bahini, an irregular army of Bengali rebels, the Indian army swept into East Pakistan.

  It was winter and the snow-covered mountains meant China couldn’t help immediately. Nixon was busy fighting in Vietnam and could do little more than make threats. On 16 December, the Pakistanis surrendered. And Bangladesh was born. But since the genocide was conveniently forgotten, no Pakistani official was ever punished for what happened and it is only very recently that some people
are being punished in Bangladesh itself.

  In 1975, Sikkim became a part of India. It had been ruled by the Chogyal, a ruler of Bhutiya origin who was unpopular with the Nepali people, who formed the majority. This led to constant protests and demands that he step down. The Indians were worried that the Chinese would next claim that Sikkim was part of Tibet and move in. When elections were finally held, the Sikkim National Congress, which was against the rule of the king, won all the seats but one. Later, in April 1975, the people of Sikkim voted to join India.

  India still has serious border issues with China and Pakistan. Even with Bangladesh, there are issues left over from the Partition involving small regions that are still trapped in each other’s territory. Still, this is how the map of India came to look like what you see today.

  THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

  Almost a century ago, Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘India lives in its villages.’ he wasn’t talking about the population of the country but about the soul of India. Many people seem to think that India is mostly a rural country and that it has always been and will be so. But there have been very many cycles of urbanization over the centuries in India. And it now looks like we are in a state of rapid urbanization that will make India an urban-majority country within a generation. That is, most people will be living in cities rather than in villages pretty soon.

  When India became a Republic in 1950, the percentage of people living in cities was 17 per cent. In China it was 12 per cent. The largest cities in India at that stage were Kolkata with a population of 2.6 million, followed by Mumbai at 1.5 million, Chennai at 0.8 million and Delhi at 0.7 million. The Chinese cities of Shanghai and Peking (Beijing) were much larger with 3.8 million and 1.6 million people respectively. Though Tokyo had been seriously damaged in the Second World War, it was the largest Asian city, with a population of 6.3 million. Singapore was tiny with less than one million people and not all of them were living in the city.