Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography

by Sanyal, Sanjeev

  THE LAST COLONIAL

  With the British withdrawal complete and the princely states absorbed, the Indian government now turned to the tiny enclaves along the coast held by other European powers. These were remnants of an era of European exploration and conquest before Robert Clive changed the rules of the game. The French had five such enclaves. The largest was Pondicherry, south of Chennai and close to the ancient port of Mahabalipuram. The others included Chandannagar (just north of Calcutta), Yanam (on the Andhra coast), Mahe (on the Kerala coast) and Karaikal (on the Tamil coast).

  As pressure from the Indian government and the local population grew, the French attempted to delay re-integration. However, they showed remarkable restraint compared to how they reacted in Algeria and Vietnam. Perhaps they recognized the inevitable. In June 1949, Chandannagar opted to merge with India, and a year later it was integrated with the state of West Bengal. The French hung on to their enclaves in southern India for a few more years, but the situation was growing increasingly tense on the ground. Finally, in 1954, the French handed over the rest of the territories.7

  Pondicherry, renamed Puducherry, is today a Union Territory (i.e. a province directly ruled by the central government) but most Indians do not realize that it also includes the three other enclaves of Yanam, Mahé and Karaikal. French influence lives on in many ways. The main town of Puducherry retains many colonial-era buildings as well as the rigid street-grid designed by the French. Many locals even hold French citizenship, descendants of those who chose to remain French at the time of the handover. Perhaps the most thriving of French legacies, however, is also the most unexpected: a community set up by a Bengali revolutionary, Aurobindo Ghosh, who fled British India in 1910 to avoid arrest and was granted asylum by the authorities in Pondicherry. Here he shifted his focus from politics to spirituality and attracted a huge following. Although the movement has branches all over India and abroad, Pondicherry remains home to many institutions as well as a commune inspired by the spiritual leader.

  Having tackled the French, New Delhi now turned its attention to the Portuguese. The Portuguese held several small enclaves along the western coast. Goa was the single largest territory, but there were also Diu, Daman, Dadra, and Nagar-Haveli. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had used a network of such enclaves to enforce their control over the Indian Ocean. Although much diminished in power by the twentieth century, they had survived Vijayanagar, the Mughals and the British. They saw no reason why they should leave just because India had been declared a Republic. The Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar condescendingly declared that Goa represented the ‘light of the West in the Orient’.

  For all their bravado, the Portuguese should have recognized their situation when, in the summer of 1954, a small group of local activists simply took over the government in Dadra and in Nagar-Haveli. It was not immediately absorbed into India and for a while it remained an independent country in the eyes of international law! The Portuguese responded by bolstering their defences in the remaining territories with African troops from Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). Protests and strikes were severely put down and thousands were arrested. Prime Minister Nehru had hoped that the matter would be eventually resolved through negotiation but, by late 1961, patience had run out.

  Operation Vijay began with the Indian Air Force bombing Dabolim airport at dawn on 18 December 1961. This is the same airport that tourists use today when they fly to Goa. Within hours, Indian ground troops were pouring into Goa from the north, south and east. The Indian Navy pressed in from the west. Similar operations were carried out simultaneously against the other enclaves of Daman and Diu. Lisbon had instructed the defenders to fight to the end, but they simply had no chance against such overwhelming force. The only show of defiance came from NRP Alfonso de Albuquerque, the sole Portuguese warship in Goa. Built in the 1930s, it was a medium-sized frigate that was outmoded and hopelessly outgunned by the large, modern fleet it faced on the morning of 18 December. By noon, it was engaged by two Indian frigates at the entrance of Marmagao port. The two sides exchanged fire but, within half an hour, Alfonso de Albuquerque was no longer a functioning ship. The crew then ran it aground near Dona Paula beach and used it as a fixed battery. They defiantly kept firing the guns for another hour and a half till they stopped due to mounting casualties and a lack of ammunition. The Portuguese had come to India with cannons firing from their ships, and they left in the same way. Yet another of the circularities of Indian history.

  Barely thirty-six hours after the invasion began, the Portuguese Governor General Vassalo e Silva saw the futility of his position and signed the document of unconditional surrender. It was Christmas season, but Lisbon was in mourning. ‘Cinemas and theatres shut down as thousands marched in a silent parade from Lisbon’s city hall to the cathedral, escorting the relics of St. Francis Xavier’.8 Vassalo e Silva returned home to a hostile reception. Salazar had him court-martialed and then exiled. I must admit that I feel somewhat sorry for the last colonial.

  Reading press reports about the liberation of Goa half a century after the event, I was struck by the extreme hostility with which Western diplomats and media of that time reacted to Indian actions. The United States and Britain pushed for a UN resolution against India, but it was vetoed by the USSR. Press reports railed against Indian aggression and shed many a tear for Goa’s Christians, ignoring the fact that leading pro-liberation activists like Tristão de Braganza Cunha were themselves Christian.9 A Time magazine article ‘India: End of an Image’ dated 29 December 1961, openly called Nehru a hypocrite who preached peace abroad but used force at home. The magazine appears not to have noticed that after waiting for fourteen years for the Portuguese to come to the table, the Prime Minister was looking increasingly ridiculous.

  DUELS WITH THE DRAGON

  Taking Goa from a spent power like Portugal was one thing, but it was quite another to deal with Mao’s China. The Sino–Indian border can be divided into two sectors. In the east, it is defined by the McMohan Line which had been agreed upon between the Tibetans and the British as per the Simla Agreement of 1914. It was named after Sir Arthur Henry McMohan who was the chief negotiator for the British side. It generally followed the crest of the Himalayan range eastwards from Tawang near the Bhutan tri-border and defined the northern boundary of the North East Frontier Agency10 (what we now know as the state of Arunachal Pradesh). An early version of the Line had also been endorsed by a Chinese representative, but the final detailed version was signed only by Tibet and British India.

  In the middle Himalayas, India and China were separated by three kingdoms—Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim (the last was then an Indian protectorate). The border resumed in the western Himalayas and ran along what are now the states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh and finally ran into Ladakh. Here, India had inherited the territorial claims of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir. However, there was uncertainty about a large but uninhabited territory that is now Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin. Nineteenth-century British surveyors had demarcated the border on two separate occasions, using two different natural contours.11 The first demarcation is called the Johnson Line, drawn in 1865 between Kashmir and Turkestan (this was during the Dungun revolt, when the Chinese were not in control of the area). This line used the Kunlun mountains as the natural boundary which left Aksai Chin within Kashmir.

  The famous explorer Francis Younghusband visited Aksai Chin in the 1880s and reported that the area largely uninhabited except for a few bands of nomadic herdsmen, and a small fort in the cold and barren landscape, intermittently manned by the Maharaja of Kashmir. In 1899, however, the British drew a new border called the Macartney–Macdonald Line. This time, they used the Karakoram range as the natural boundary and left out Aksai Chin, possibly to create a defensible buffer against Russian expansion in the region. The British then went on to use both the lines in their maps till 1947. It must be added here that no Chinese map showed Aksai Chin as part of China before the 1920s, an
d a map of Xinjiang from the 1930s also shows the Kunlun rather than the Karakoram as the customary boundary.12 In short, Aksai Chin’s status was unclear and it was up for grabs, although the Indian claim was probably a bit stronger.

  After independence, India’s focus remained on Kashmir’s western border, leaving the eastern boundary essentially unmarked and unpatrolled. Sino–India relations in the early 1950s were marked by great shows of friendship by Premiers Nehru and Chou En-Lai. It was the age of ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai’ (meaning Indians and Chinese are brothers). It appears that Nehru was led to believe that the Chinese accepted the McMohan Line in the east and that any disagreements over the western border could be ironed out by friendly negotiations. Thus, it came as a shock when 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 such a major project being constructed on territory that it claimed!

  Matters really heated up from there. An official Chinese magazine published a map in 1958 that showed large parts of Ladakh and the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) as part of Chinese territory. If any reader was not convinced about the importance of cartography in history, I hope they have changed their mind by now. Nehru wrote angry letters to Chou En-Lai. The Chinese responded that Aksai Chin had always been Chinese territory and that the McMohan Line was not valid as it had been concluded between British imperialists and the Tibet Region of China (implying that a mere province had no business negotiating the national boundary). In the middle of all the letter-writing, in March 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India via Tawang and was granted asylum.

  The Chinese had long claimed suzerainty over Tibet and had occasionally exercised it. However, as the Mughals had discovered in the seventeenth century, the hostile terrain made it very difficult to enforce control. Thus, Tibet had been effectively independent for a long time when the communists invaded and annexed it in October 1950. Nehru had, at that time, preferred to look away despite Sardar Patel’s warning, just a few weeks before he died, that ‘In the guise of ideological expansion lies concealed racial, national or historical claims’.13

  By the time the Dalai Lama arrived in India, there were regular skirmishes between Indian and Chinese border patrols. Alarm bells were going off everywhere. General Thimayya, the army chief, repeatedly requested an equipment upgrade and the redeployment of troops to the China border. Some units of the army were still armed with .303 Enfield pea-shooters from the First World War. Yet, Prime Minister Nehru and Defence Minister Krishna Menon disregarded the warnings. When asked to introduce Belgian FN4 automatic rifles, Menon retorted that he did not want ‘NATO arms’ in the country. Dogma came first.

  One of the reasons for Thimayya’s growing unease was that he had received a first-hand account of Chinese activities in Tibet from a very unlikely source: the adventurer Sydney Wignall. Thimayya had recruited the Welshman who wanted to climb Himalayan peaks on the Nepal–Tibet border (although he had almost no mountaineering experience). He was arrested by the Chinese and interrogated. Wignall was unfazed and told them outrageous stories that Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was a coded message and that his password, straight out of Welsh rugby, was ’Keep passing to left, boyo’. The Chinese eventually decided that he was mad and let him go—but Wignall reported back to Thimayya that the Chinese were building significant military infrastructure along the border.14

  With calls for his resignation mounting, Menon decided to promote 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 superseded twelve senior officers but had no field experience. His main experience so far had been in developing real estate on army land. Worse, on 3 October 1962, he was put in charge of defending NEFA!

  On 18 October, barely a fortnight after arriving, Kaul complained of chest pains and was evacuated to Delhi. Thus, when the Chinese launched a full-fledged attack on the night of 19 October, the Indian troops were outgunned, outnumbered and leaderless. The Chinese had attacked Ladakh too, but there the Indian army had fallen back to defensible positions and held their ground. In NEFA, however, they were overrun and the Chinese took control of Tawang on 25 October. Here, they halted their advance to construct supply roads. The Indians should have used the time to build up a more defensible position at Bomdila where it would have been easier to resupply from Assam. However, Kaul insisted that the Indians should defend a position farther up at Sela Pass. When the Chinese restarted their advance on 14 November, they simply went around Sela and cut off the Indian troops from behind. There was a massacre and Bomdila fell soon after. When this news arrived in Assam, there was panic. The town of Tezpur was abandoned and even the inmates of the local mental asylum were let loose. In a broadcast, Nehru stated ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam’.15 It was interpreted to mean that the North East would be abandoned and is still strongly resented by the Assamese.

  Then, as suddenly as they had come, the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew roughly to their pre-war position. We still do not know for sure why they came in and why they left. The most likely reason is that winter was fast approaching and supply lines through the Himalayas would have been difficult to sustain. In the end, nature proved a better defender of the Indian Republic than its 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, one can carry on through Sela Pass (4200 metres above sea level) to the monastery at Tawang. Still, the memory of the Chinese invasion lingers. Convoys of army trucks make their way up the mountains to supply military bases that dot the region. The Chinese, too, have not forgotten the past. They still mark the province as ‘Southern Tibet’ in their maps and made an awful fuss when the Dalai Lama visited Tawang in 2009.

  The war had left thousands of Indian soldiers dead or wounded. Nehru’s personal reputation lay shattered. The removal of Defence Minister Menon, Lt. General Kaul and army chief General Pran Nath Thapar could not hide Nehru’s own strategic miscalculations. As 1963 dragged on, everyone became aware of the obvious—Prime Minister Nehru was an old man who had been in power for sixteen years. History appeared to be repeating itself: an ageing leader who had been on the throne for a long time, unclear succession and war. Indeed, the sixties was a time of great uncertainty. Nehru died in 1964, Pakistan and India fought a war in 1965, Nehru’s successor Shastri died in January 1966, the Congress Party split and the economy stagnated.

  Out of all this, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi emerged as prime minister. In the early seventies, she would play an important role in a major shift in the political geography of the subcontinent.

  BANGLADESH

  Different perceptions of nationhood had led to the partition of India in 1947, but Pakistan faced the same problem in the 1960s. The basis of its nationhood was the idea of Islamic civilization. However, while they shared a religion, there were major cultural differences between East and West Pakistan. In the east, there was a strong sense of being Bengali. This was strengthened by resentment that political power lay in the hands of politicians and generals based in West Pakistan, who were blatantly insensitive to the needs of the east. It seemed that East Pakistan had just exchanged one form of colonialism with another. As Bengali demands gathered momentum, the response became more repressive. The openly expressed view by the West Pakistani military rulers was that the Bengalis were too influenced by Hindu culture. Particularly suspect was the significant Hindu Bengali population that had continued to live in East Pakistan. Frequent riots, supported tacitly by the State, broke out against the minorities in the mid-60s. Nonetheless, demands for autonomy and fairness continued to grow.

  Once again, an act of nature triggered the sequence of events. In November 1970, a major tropical cyclone ‘Bhola’ struck East Pakistan and killed between 300,000 and 500,000 people. It i
s considered one of the worst natural disasters on record but, what really incensed the Bengali population was the lukewarm relief efforts of the military dictatorship. So when Pakistan’s military leaders finally allowed elections in late December, East Pakistan voted overwhelmingly for the Bengali-nationalist Awami League, which won 167 of 169 seats in the province. Since East Pakistan was more populous than West Pakistan, it raised the prospect that the Bengalis would now rule the country as a whole. This was certainly not palatable to the military brass or to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the largest party in West Pakistan. The elections were ‘cancelled’ and East Pakistan broke into open revolt.

  The military government of Yahya Khan responded by sending in the troops. The result was a genocide in which as many as three million people, particularly minorities and intellectuals, were killed. The residential halls of Dhaka University were particularly targeted. Up to 700 students were killed in a single attack on Jagannath Hall. Several well-known professors, both Hindu and Muslim, were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of women were systematically raped in the countryside. By September 1971, ten million refugees had poured into eastern India. Although this was one of the worst genocides in human history, it is barely remembered by the rest of the world. Time magazine of August 1971 quoted a US official saying ‘This is the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland’.16 The article goes on to describe the streams of refugees who were pouring into India, carrying with them their few remaining possessions, their children and the infirm: