by John Keay
Among the frigid passes of the Himalayas, almost no section of international frontier had been approved and ratified (let alone demarcated) by all those parties whose authorisation was deemed essential by the present regimes. Strung along the mountain glacis, Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan had been preserved by the British to form a defensive buffer zone between their jealously ruled Indian raj and the sometimes expansive empires of the Russian Tsars and the (Manchu) Qing Emperors. The Republic of India inherited these arrangements and gratefully adopted them. But the borders of the buffer states were themselves open to question: there were gaps between these states, and beyond them in the east there was a long tail of hitherto unadministered and largely unpenetrated territory. (In India it was designated the North-East Frontier Agency – NEFA – and later Arunachal Pradesh.) Moreover, with Jammu and Kashmir now subject to a de facto division, the Ladakh region’s inhospitable borderland with western Tibet had become an Indian responsibility, while the glacier-choked declivities of the Northern Areas’ border with Chinese Xinjiang now pertained to Pakistan.
Almost none of these borderlands was of any value. Extremely remote, rising from 4,000 to 8,000 metres above sea level, seldom frost-free and largely uninhabited, they were strategically more a liability than an asset. The maps, although far from consistent, nonetheless showed them as someone’s sovereign territory, and as such they could not easily be relinquished. ‘The first and almost instinctive reaction of every new government was to hold fast to the territory bequeathed to it,’ noted Gunnar Myrdal.2 ‘What the colonial power had ruled, the new power must rule’ – and especially so if, for any failure on this score, it was answerable to a chamber of disputatious parliamentarians and a nationalistic press.
Thus the news, confirmed in Delhi in 1958, that across 180 kilometres of howling wilderness in what Indian maps showed as eastern Ladakh the Chinese had unilaterally constructed a motorable road, did not go down well. Known as the Aksai Chin, the region was in fact a salient of high-altitude desert to which the British had once laid claim as a possible trade corridor and bargaining counter but had never actually used for either purpose. The area was, however, vital to the Chinese as offering the most practicable alignment for a direct road link between their Xinjiang province and the western end of a reclaimed Tibet. Several thousand workers had toiled for nineteen months in appalling conditions to build the road, and not once had they come across any evidence of an Indian interest in the region.
That of course proved nothing. The maps told their own stories, and Beijing seems to have been as aware of the Indian claim as Delhi was of the Chinese counter-claim. But opportunities to discuss this discrepancy were let slip, most notably in 1954 when Sino–Indian talks had amicably confirmed the Chinese reclamation of Tibet. A complacent Nehru accepted without question the wishful British incorporation of the Aksai Chin and insisted that there was nothing to discuss. Conversely, a confident Zhou Enlai took the lack of any Indian presence there as evidence of Delhi’s having written off what all peace-loving anti-colonialists must consider an imperialist impertinence.
Indian protests and Chinese repudiations followed – then Chinese protests and Indian repudiations when an Indian patrol, belatedly directed to the area, was detected by the Chinese and detained. Meanwhile within Tibet the Chinese were ruthlessly suppressing a revolt spearheaded by the Khampa people in the east of the country. The PLA’s brutality amounted to genocide, and prompted some Khampas to flee to India. Others extended their resistance west. By March 1959 Lhasa itself was in turmoil. Outraged by the treatment of the Khampas, the Tibetan government was defying its Chinese mentors, and the PLA was preparing to bombard the city. Partly to save Lhasa, partly to keep alive the spirit of resistance, it was agreed that the Dalai Lama should again be smuggled out of the country. Travelling this time under the protection of the Khampa guerrillas, the fugitive party headed for Tawang, a monastic complex east of Bhutan in what had been a Tibetan salient but was now claimed by India. Over the next few years 100,000 Tibetan refugees would follow their leader’s example and flee south. The long exile had begun.
Under pressure – from right-wing elements in India, from the international outcry and from his own conscience – Nehru offered the Dalai Lama political asylum. Beijing did not object, provided India and its guest did nothing to inflame the situation. But in fact His Holiness spoke out about conditions in Tibet. His utterances were relayed by the Indian press, so exciting anti-Chinese demonstrations in many Indian cities. Moreover, ‘It [was] evident that support and direction for the Tibetan rebels came through Kalimpong [a West Bengal ‘nest of spies’, according to Nehru], and that the Government of India connived at this.’3
So much for non-aggression, non-interference, and mutual respect for one another’s borders. In the space of just four years, Sino–Indian talk of non-alignment and peaceful co-existence had been horribly compromised. The Indian crowds that had hailed the post-Bandung era of Asian solidarity with the slogan ‘Hindi–Chini bhai bhai’ (‘India and China are brothers’) now hurled abuse at Beijing and aimed rotten eggs at Chairman Mao’s portrait. Nehru, acting as his own Foreign Minister throughout, bore the main responsibility and valiantly tried to reconcile his internationalist principles with the hardline nationalism expected of a leader defending his people’s homeland and dignity. But as the diplomatic exchanges were overtaken by more deadly exchanges along the disputed frontier itself, it was his defence chiefs, and especially their Minister, the waspish Krishna Menon, who would be found lacking.
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The first major incident came late in 1959, and not in Ladakh, but at Longju at the other end of the Himalayas in NEFA. In this remote sector India insisted that a 1914 boundary alignment proposed by Henry McMahon (the British diplomat better known for the series of contentious letters that would trigger the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in Arabia) enjoyed the same map-delineated and so unchallengeable authority as that which included the Aksai Chin. By way of substantiating this claim, outposts were being established along the supposed line, one of which at Longju came under heavy fire and had to be withdrawn; it was unclear whether it was on the Indian side of McMahon’s Line or not. But here in the east the Chinese had earlier indicated a willingness to consider the Indian contention and to accept the McMahon Line, at least temporarily. They continued to hint as much until 1961, the implied quid pro quo being that India should relinquish its claim to the Aksai Chin.
Such a straight swap had everything to recommend it, except the strength of Indian public opinion against any territorial derogation anywhere. Things like official transparency, accountable government and a written Constitution had their drawbacks. The Chinese leadership might be unfamiliar with, say, freedom of expression, but Nehru endeavoured to explain. Additionally, his hands appeared tied by a preamble to the Constitution that made any surrender of India’s presumed territory problematic. The issue had first surfaced over a possible exchange between New Delhi and Karachi of some of those anomalous enclaves and counter-enclaves on either side of the line of Partition in Bengal. With implications for Kashmir as much as for the McMahon Line or the enclaves, in 1960 the Supreme Court ruled that, for any alienation of Indian territory, an amendment to the Constitution would be required. This would not have been impossible (it required a two-thirds majority), and anyway the ruling was subsequently challenged; but at the time it served to bolster Nehru’s case for intransigence. Zhou Enlai, of course, wrote it off as eyewash.
Later in 1959 a more serious clash occurred at the Kongka Pass in Ladakh. An Indian patrol exchanged fire with a Chinese unit and suffered nine fatalities. The pass was on the southern approaches to the Aksai Chin, suggesting further forward movement from the Chinese side. Coming soon after Longju, this ‘brutal massacre of an Indian policy party’, as the Times of India put it, prompted a redeployment of Indian firepower.4 From the dusty and tank-friendly plains of Punjab an ill-prepared division was transferred to the leech-in
fested ravines of NEFA.
Against a background of acrimonious talks and increasingly bellicose threats, the military build-up on both sides continued through 1960 and accelerated in 1961. So did the stand-off in Ladakh and NEFA as India attempted to effect occupation of the territory it claimed. Defence Minister Krishna Menon, a prickly leftist who had spent more of his life in Bloomsbury than along the Himalayas, quarrelled with his defence chief, alienated most of his Congress colleagues and seemed unwilling to credit his Chinese comrades with hostile intent. Nehru stood by him for old times’ sake. Rattled and now looking all of his seventy-one years, the Prime Minister derided his critics as ‘infantile and childish’. He treated Parliament to rambling discourses on China’s impropriety and stressed his own willingness nevertheless to discuss the geographical minutiae:
Whether this hill is there, or whether this little bit is on this side or that side, on the facts, on the maps, on the evidence available – that I am prepared to discuss … But the broad McMahon Line has to be accepted and so far as we are concerned, it is there and we accept it.5
In early 1960 Zhou Enlai reiterated his offer to discuss the crisis in person. Nehru, despite reservations and widespread accusations of appeasement from parliamentary critics and the press, finally agreed. In April the Chinese Prime Minister flew in to a frigid reception. Arriving by way of Burma, he returned by way of Nepal. In Rangoon and Katmandu, Zhou was notably reasonable. Treaties of friendship were signed with both countries. Subject to minor adjustments, China also accepted a section of the McMahon Line that affected Burma and agreed on a joint demarcation of the Nepal–Tibet frontier. The alignment of the latter finally settled the status of Mount Everest: it was agreed that the frontier bisected the summit, so permitting access from both Nepal and Tibet.
All this Delhi took to be an elaborate charm offensive aimed at demonstrating Chinese flexibility and so exposing Indian intransigence. For at the Delhi talks nothing at all was achieved. Zhou, from a position of strength in the Aksai Chin, wanted to negotiate. Nehru, from one of weakness, would only discuss. As over Kashmir, he insisted that negotiations could be opened only after all foreign – in this case Chinese – troops had been withdrawn from within what India considered its frontiers. This meant the Chinese pulling out of the Aksai Chin altogether and abandoning their new road. Loss of face, no less than loss of access to western Tibet, made it unthinkable.
The Chinese nevertheless proposed a temporary withdrawal by both sides from the actual lines of occupation. India rejected it, preferring low-level discussions that bought time for a glacial build-up of its forces and for the edging forward of its outposts. Critics, within the army as well as in Parliament, remained unconvinced. A more forceful approach was urged. Yet the army was ill-equipped to take on the battle-hardened PLA and its supply chains were hopelessly overstretched.
Moreover, the country’s third general election was imminent. Due in early 1962, it could not be coming at a worse moment. Assailed by deepening economic difficulties, the Congress government was also facing riots in Bombay over the bifurcation of Maharashtra state, ongoing troubles in Punjab and Nagaland, and above all doubts over its Defence Minister at a time when the loss of Himalayan chunks of the motherland remained unredressed. A distraction was badly needed, and preferably one that would unite the nation behind Congress. It was thus hardly coincidental that in late 1961, after over a decade of restraint and with the army already overstretched, a division of troops was somehow found for an irresistible three-pronged advance not across the treeless wastes of the Aksai Chin but into the sleepy backwater of rustling palms and bell-ringing churches that was Portuguese Goa.
The Portuguese authorities offered protests but put up no resistance. The capital of their once mighty estado da India fell with scarcely a shot being fired. New Delhi’s intention of absorbing all of Portugal’s enclaves had long been taken for granted, and Goans for the most part welcomed the intervention. The Indian public was ecstatic. ‘Our Finest Hour’, trilled a headline in one English-language daily. Absurdly, it was supposed that the victorious ‘commandos’ who could so easily terminate a colonial anachronism in peninsular India could surely tackle a Himalayan intrusion. Krishna Menon was forgiven. Docile as a dove in the face of the Chinese, he had swooped like a hawk on the Portuguese. He had ignored Nehru’s misgivings about the use of force, and without in any way embarrassing his Chinese friends, had sent Beijing a powerful message.
Naturally, there was some international disquiet. Pakistan ridiculed India’s oft-avowed renunciation of force in the settling of international disputes, as did many in the West. Fifteen years later, for an almost identical swoop on the Portuguese colony of East Timor, the Indonesia of General Suharto would be internationally pilloried and its troops ejected by a UN force. The difference lay in the principals rather than the principle. In Goa it was the dictatorial rule of Salazar that was ousted, while Nehru’s impeccably democratic credentials triumphed. Conversely, in East Timor the aggression came from an Indonesian dictator, and it was the aggrieved East Timorese who espoused democracy. India, as a flag bearer in the East for Western-style democracy, could count on a degree of indulgence from ‘the free world’, plus the gratitude of the Goan people who had at last been given a say in their future.
As an electoral ploy, the seizure of Goa had the desired effect. Criticism of Indian inaction in the Himalayas was suddenly muffled, Menon’s failings were forgiven, opinions on the unpreparedness of the army were revised, and in the elections of early 1962 Congress romped home with another massive majority. Emboldened by Goa, the strategists now turned to a ‘forward policy’ in respect of the Aksai Chin and the McMahon Line. Patrols were stepped up and pickets established deeper inside the disputed territories. By the summer they overlapped those of the enemy on the Ladakh front. From PLA posts, loudspeaker appeals were directed at the Indian army’s Gurkhas, reminding them of the new Sino–Nepal alliance. The Gurkhas stood firm, and to New Delhi’s pleasant surprise it was the Chinese who backed off.
The same forward policy in NEFA had less happy results. On the Thag-la ridge east of Tawang, which the Chinese took to be on their side of McMahon’s rather thick Line, the eyeballing continued for weeks, and the PLA’s loudspeaker offensive grew ever shriller. A change of command on the Indian side brought up two new battalions on 9 September, plus orders for another strategic advance prior to removing a Chinese redoubt on the ridge. Better armed and acclimatised, the Chinese anticipated this move; next day they attacked the advance post in force. Both sides suffered some twenty to thirty casualties, but the PLA prevailed. The Indians pulled back.
This incident was either the final blow in the crescendo of Indian provocation or the opening salvo of the Chinese offensive. ‘For the first time the Chinese had forcefully resisted an Indian forward move,’ writes the China-sympathetic Neville Maxwell, then of the London Times.6 ‘In the event,’ glosses Ramachandra Guha for the Indian side, ‘it was the enemy who acted first.’7 Neither side did anything immediately. The Chinese did not follow up their success by crossing what they took to be the McMahon Line, and the Indians did not withdraw from behind it. Rather did Nehru make it clear that, despite the obvious supply difficulties faced by the Indians, force would, if necessary, again be applied to reverse the setback and ‘regain’ the Thag-la ridge; talks were out of the question, he said, until such time as ‘instructions to free our territory’ were satisfactorily met. Meant to quell the domestic outcry, this was taken by the international press as tantamount to an ultimatum, if not a declaration of war. The Chinese, too, read it as such and made no secret of their preparations for a pre-emptive strike.
On 20 October, six weeks after the earlier affray, Chinese mortars opened fire on the Indian positions and the PLA advanced in both NEFA and Ladakh. What Indians dubbed China’s ‘blitzkrieg’ of aggression met stiff yet ill-prepared and hopelessly outgunned resistance. One after another the Indian positions fell like dominoes.
Four da
ys into the war, Zhou again offered talks. Nehru’s response combined pain with defiance. Nothing in his long political career had hurt him more than China’s perfidy, he claimed; but India would talk only when ‘the Chinese invasion’ had been reversed and the PLA was back behind the McMahon Line and beyond the Aksai Chin. Gagging on a lifetime of non-aligned rhetoric, he meanwhile leapt at offers of arms from the UK and the US. Within a week the Kennedy administration, despite its preoccupation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, was sending up to eight flights a day laden with ordnance and ammunition. Meanwhile the Indian Parliament approved a state of emergency, and for days its members vied with one another in talking up India’s prospects. Patriotic gestures were all the rage. Recruitment offices were besieged and bloodbanks overwhelmed. Even the Communists rallied behind Congress. The nation was as one.
After a three-week lull, during which the Chinese built roads and the Indians juggled personnel (Menon was finally replaced, as were nearly all the field commanders), the Chinese offensive resumed. In NEFA the Indians opened a new front in the far east of the Agency; it was promptly rolled back with heavy losses. Meanwhile from Tawang the main Chinese advance continued, as did the catalogue of Indian defeats. By 20 November ‘no organised Indian military force was left in NEFA or in the territory claimed by China in the western [Ladakh] sector’. The advance in Ladakh had halted at the line claimed by the Chinese. But in NEFA the invaders were about two hundred kilometres inside the McMahon Line; the last mountain passes had been taken; ‘the famous Fourth Division was cut to pieces, the humiliation of the Indian army … complete’.8
Ahead stretched the broad Brahmaputra plain of Assam. Tezpur, the nearest administrative centre, was evacuated; further downstream the Assamese capital of Gauhati looked doomed. À propos the Assamese, Nehru announced in a broadcast that ‘We feel very much for them and we shall help them to the utmost of our ability.’ It sounded more like a valediction than a pledge.