The McMahon Line- a Century of Discord

by J J Singh

  When India had published new maps in 1954 delineating its boundary with Tibet Autonomous Region, clearly showing the Aksai Chin as part of India and the McMahon Line as the international border in the east, the Chinese had not protested. They very well knew their western highway from Sinkiang to Lhasa via Rudok was transgressing through Indian territory. But they chose to lie low as it was not the appropriate time to raise the matter. Later, in December 1958, when Zhou Enlai was asked to comment on the McMahon Line, he replied that it was British imperialism that had established the line, but that since it was an accomplished fact and beceause of the friendly relations that existed between India and China, he was prepared to give provisional recognition to the line.

  Zhou said they had not consulted the Tibetan authorities on the matter yet but proposed to do so.18 This was another instance of the Chinese taking our leadership up the garden path.

  When the Chinese completed the road connecting Sinkiang with Tibet, they broadcast the news to the world with much fanfare on 6 October 1957. As soon as weather conditions permitted, Indian patrols were dispatched during the summer of 1958 to verify whether the highway traversed Indian territory. They encountered Chinese frontier guards. A patrol of ours, overwhelmingly outnumbered, was forcibly detained. A second Indian patrol was able to return safely on completion of its mission. The existence of the road, and that it traversed about 160 kilometres through Indian territory in the Aksai Chin area, was confirmed by the patrols. They reported that the area itself appeared to be under Chinese control. The mystery as to why our mission in Peking and the Government of India remained unaware of the planning and construction of this strategic road over a period of four to five years, from 1952 to 1957, remains unresolved. Quite a few key personages of the time, including B.N. Mullik, then director of the Intelligence Bureau, and S.S. Khera, then cabinet secretary, have written about China’s construction activity of this road being known to the Indian government and other agencies concerned from 1952 onwards. Clearly, adequate concern was not shown by the decision makers, and this information was kept under wraps.

  As a matter of fact, D.R. Mankekar has stated that the Indian defence attache in Peking, Brigadier S.S. Mallick, had forwarded a special report on the construction of the road through a reluctant ambassador, R.K. Nehru (who perhaps did not wish to displease the prime minister!), in April 1956,19 in addition to a routine report he had made five months earlier. This report did create some alarm in the corridors of power in New Delhi, but only for some time. In fact, the response of the stakeholders to this strategic development was grossly lackadaisical and irresponsible. This road was undoubtedly a vital north–south artery along the western periphery of the extended Chinese Empire. The new republic sorely needed the ancient caravan route to be upgraded into a motorable road in order to transport the military resources, men and material from Sinkiang to Rudok to consolidate their hold on western Tibet. How many more reports may have met with a similar fate or may have been concealed from the public gaze so that certain individuals or organizations could save face is the question. How, then, can we expect to learn the right lessons from history?

  It was reasonable to expect that India could at the very least have demanded a strategic quid pro quo. China should have been made to pay a price, but instead it managed to stage a fait accompli and get away with it. On China’s completion of the road, all India did was to lodge a diplomatic protest! Without any doubt this was a serious breach of faith on the part of the Chinese, who chose to unilaterally and secretively execute the project and claim the territory over which the road lay. The Chinese were definitely aware that the road traversed about 160 kilometres of territory claimed by India. That is perhaps why they had not agreed to an Indian trading outpost at Rudok.

  Surprisingly, Nehru did not inform Parliament until 28 August 1959 about this Chinese road-building activity, their physical occupation of our territory, the patrol clashes and other incidents. ‘Without our knowledge they (the Chinese) have made a road,’ said Nehru—which, as mentioned earlier, is not entirely true. Unquestionably, the spirit behind the Panchsheel agreement and the ‘Hindi Chini bhai bhai’ slogan were thrown overboard by the Chinese, and a trust deficit was injected between the two nations. This quiet acceptance of the state of affairs by India certainly emboldened the Chinese and exposed Indian weakness. In view of the situation, it should have been clearly realized by our leadership that the armed forces needed to be beefed up and their capability to defend the border raised many notches, commensurate with the emerging threat. Unfortunately, this did not happen, as Nehru and Krishna Menon did not heed professional military advice. They chose to be guided by the miscalculations of some diplomats, bureaucrats and intelligence agencies, or went by hunch or gut feeling, or, as they did later, by the advice of pliant and incompetent generals.

  From 1959 to 1964, covert support in terms of training and provision of arms and equipment was provided by the CIA to the Khampa rebels. Training camps were located in remote areas like Mustang in Nepal, among other places. Despite India’s vehement denials, the Chinese believed the Tibetan rebels were secretly operating from a control centre in Kalimpong with India’s support or tacit approval. However, it is well known that the Chinese had established guerrilla training camps in the Kunming area along the Kachin border to arm, train and equip the Naga and Mizo underground rebels during the 1950s and 1960s. When I was serving as a captain in 9 Maratha Light Infantry during 1965–68 in the Tuensang district of Nagaland, we participated in one of the finest counter-insurgency operations done by India. During 1967–68 we intercepted, trapped and captured the entire gang of over 200 Naga rebels led by the self-styled general Mowu Angami who were returning after their training in China. They were carrying a huge consignment of Chinese-made small arms, machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers and ammunition. And significantly, each member had a small red pocket book on Mao’s thoughts!

  On reaching China after an arduous trek of two months through leech-infested, jungle-covered mountains (according to one young insurgent captured by us), the famished Nagas were herded into thatched huts. They were urged to pray to their god to give them food, which most of them, being good Christians, did. As no food appeared, they were then asked to beseech Chairman Mao, and their prayer was fulfilled within minutes! One hopes all that remains as something belonging to the past.

  To achieve their objectives the Chinese work within the framework of a strategy that is carefully evolved. They do not accept any deviations at the functional level. The originator of the strategy alone can revise plans or change the goalposts, something the Chinese have been doing so often. Subordinates are seldom given such authority. They simply have to accomplish their assigned duties or tasks. As narrated by Bertil Lintner, ‘Old treaties that China doesn’t like are branded “unequal treaties” and therefore there is no reason to honour them. More recent international decisions that have not been in China’s favour are branded as an “interference in China’s internal affairs”.’20 The Chinese psyche is best illustrated by the manner in which Mao Zedong held a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in his private pool in 1958, at a time when Sino-Soviet relations were on the rocks. Mao, an accomplished swimmer who had once swum across the Pearl river, made his guest, who didn’t know how to swim, wear water wings and enter the pool, just to embarrass Khrushchev and keep himself in an advantageous position. While the two statesmen conversed, their interpreters swam or moved alongside. While Mao got even with his ideological adversary, Khrushchev was not amused.21 There couldn’t have been a more ingenious and effective way to convey to the mighty Soviet Union that China was no pushover. The Chinese message was understood.

  In its dealings with bilateral issues—the boundary dispute in particular—China continues to enjoy a distinct advantage over India. Whereas China’s internal strategic thinking and discussions on all sensitive issues remain a secret and are very rarely publicized, everything is an open book in a noisy and ‘argumentative’ democratic
polity like India. Issues that get debated or raised in Parliament are broadcast in the public domain, and that is what gives China its edge. The Chinese know our strengths and weaknesses, and what our next step is going to be. On the other hand, there is nothing open about the Chinese system, which carefully vets information before it is released for public consumption. The Chinese governments have thus mastered the art of exploiting the transparency of parliamentary democracies and their free press. In fact, as mentioned earlier in this work, they have been doing this in the case of both the UK and the US, as well as with other nations, perhaps for more than a century. They definitely did this during the Younghusband expedition, the two world wars, the Korea and Vietnam wars, and thereafter. India therefore is no exception to their scheme of things!

  In 1959 or a bit earlier, China’s leadership had decided in principle to ‘teach India a lesson’. They wanted to achieve a number of objectives: to reduce the prestige of India amongst the Afro-Asian nations; to humiliate Nehru; to assume leadership of the developing world; and to make the world powers, the US and the Soviet Union in particular, aware of China’s capabilities. This campaign also included securing territory in Aksai Chin, ensuring that there would be no impediment or threat to the strategic artery connecting Sinkiang province with western Tibet. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai also saw this conflict as an ideological clash as much as a military challenge. It had to be won decisively so as to ensure peace for China for a few decades at the very least. Mao bluntly articulated this when he said, ‘I think the characteristic of the current situation is that the east wind prevails over the west wind; that is, the strength of socialism exceeds the strength of imperialism.’22 China’s victory would leave a lasting impression on the Tibetan people and possibly hasten Tibet’s amalgamation into China.

  The Chinese then set about systematically preparing their army and civilian administrative machinery to achieve their national objective. And, while the preparations for an armed conflict—the gradual and unobtrusive build-up of troops, weapon systems, munitions, construction of roads and logistics infrastructure—were taking place, the leadership of China kept sending signals to the Indians that the dispute could be resolved by peaceful diplomatic measures. Their deliberate acts of deception succeeded in making the Indian leadership, the country’s intelligence agencies and diplomats, and a few politically influenced high-level military leaders believe that skirmishes along the disputed areas could take place but an all-out war was a remote possibility. This they almost ruled out! At the same time there were a few perceptive, visionary and pragmatic political leaders and high-ranking military and civil service officers in India who did sense the lurking Chinese threat to our borders. But their counsel went unheeded. The Chinese were also successful in misleading the international community to a large extent.

  In September–October 1962, while the Chinese army was settling into their launch pads and battle positions, their leadership was closely monitoring the situation, calibrating their military actions along the border. The level of their preparedness can be gauged from the fact that they had Chinese personnel fluent in several regional Indian languages positioned at the front and used them for propaganda purposes prior to and during the war of 1962. Such expertise couldn’t have been achieved overnight! The Chinese leaders were now on the lookout for an excuse that would function as the trigger to commence the border war. The Indian leadership, both civil and military, was of course blissfully ignorant of the impending Chinese military onslaught. Claude Arpi aptly wrote: ‘Nehru, Panikkar and their followers were philosophers, dreamers, and idealists, but, for Mao or Deng, only action and if necessary violent action could bring the change they were aiming at.’ Arpi quoted Deng in this context: ‘It does not matter if a cat is black or white as long it catches mice.’23 Hard-nosed pragmatism, coupled with deft cunning, characterized Chinese leadership. As Kissinger has incisively pointed out, having just overcome a famine, China ventured into a conflict with India, where the adversary underestimated its strength and capabilities and made ‘grave errors in grasping how China interprets its security environment and how it reacts to military threats’.24 For the Chinese, surprise, deception and shock effect were the cardinal principles to focus on in their preparations for the 1962 border war. They had practised this strategy earlier in Korea and had taught to the Vietcong for use in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, the Chinese were hugely successful in ensuring that till the very end the Indians had their guard down, and when the Indians did realize the Chinese meant business, it was already too late!

  Even to this day, the Chinese create unsettling or unexpected situations to mentally pressure the leadership of nations whose leaders might be visiting, or when there are key events relating to them. For example, China conducted a nuclear test during President R. Venkataraman’s visit to that country in 1992, made an intrusion in the Daulat Beg Oldi area before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s China visit in 2013, and created a military stand-off in the Chumar and Demchok areas of Ladakh during President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in 2014. It is hard to imagine that these events were merely coincidental and could have taken place without the nod of the political bosses! As noted by Teresita and Howard Schaffer in their book India at the Global High Table: ‘During the period from 1988 to 2015, China’s practice of negotiating with signals and facts [actions] on the ground continued.’25

  The Chinese have become adept at the strategy of psychologically exploiting the vulnerabilities of their adversaries or of weaker nations, in what constitutes a kind of ‘psychological imperialism’. They have been quite successful in using the free media in India to its advantage for conveying alarmist news or to broadcast confusing signals to the lay citizens, whether they relate to territorial claims, intrusions across the LAC or diversion of river waters. Sensational, amateurish and poorly researched stories have been carried by some sections of the Indian media as a result of this. Misreporting ‘bridges’ over the Tsangpo river as ‘dams’ is just one example of this. The Chinese make no efforts to correct such misperceptions or false impressions, as news items of this kind admirably serve their purpose. The diversion of the waters of the Tsangpo to the mainland across a series of mountain chains over more than 1,000 kilometres is such a geographical challenge that it should have been questioned, both logically and from the point of view of feasibility and financial viability. But this is a subject that has been overplayed by some of our analysts and media. Here again, the issue did not evoke a clear response from the Chinese side, very likely deliberately. The net result is an alarmed Indian public that is even more antagonistic towards China. Kissinger has quoted Sun Tzu in his book On China, highlighting another important principle which the Chinese have deployed successfully: to focus on ‘the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion’.26

  As the China war was creeping upon India, quite unknown to its leaders, Prime Minister Nehru and Defence Minister Krishna Menon were abroad during the autumn in 1962 on considerably long official visits; and General Kaul, Chief of General Staff, and Brigadier D.K. Palit, the Director of Military Operations, were out of Delhi too, as described earlier. On the front, the military commanders were made to believe till as late as August 1962 that the Chinese would not be in any position to launch a major attack for another year or two, and that skirmishes in the disputed areas of the frontier might be the only challenge. A front-line commander like Brigadier John Dalvi had been granted leave for September–October that year, despite the ominous forebodings of war whose signals the Indian side did not pick up. His brigade had been given the unenviable task of defending the disputed Thagla Ridge sector. All these developments—which the Chinese were well aware of, courtesy of our media and our democratic polity—could not be construed, by any stretch of the imagination, as indicators of a nation that was planning to start a war shortly, as propagated by China! Thus the Chinese allegation that India attacked first, compelling
it to ‘counter-attack in self defence’, is absurd and illogical. As China’s entire leadership was at their duty stations, the cover was blown off their lie; the ludicrous Chinese theory did not cut much ice with the rest of the world, and most countries saw through the clever game that China had played.

  Today’s China is following an entirely different path, one that Deng Xiaoping charted out in 1978–79, of ‘peaceful rise’ and of greater emphasis on economic development. The scholar Zheng Bijian, chair of China Reform Forum, has said that unlike the historic rise of Germany and Japan leading to the two world wars in the twentieth century, China ‘will transcend ideological differences to strive for peace, development, and cooperation with all countries of the world’.27

  We are currently witnessing a new era of India–China relations, with two strong nationalistic leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping, at the helm of affairs in the two countries. With the rise of the two Asian giants under a new generation of leadership, the paradigm shift in the balance of power is definitely going to impact the world order. Modi has a massive mandate behind him, and in case he is re-elected he would remain in power till 2024. He has injected a new approach, one of greater confidence and robustness, in our relations with our neighbours. The guiding philosophy adopted by the Modi regime is for India to achieve a key position in the region while retaining ‘strategic autonomy’ and adopting a more understanding approach. This shift has been demonstrated in the accommodative streamlining of India’s border with Bangladesh by the exchange of irksome enclaves, and, on a contrasting note, by the firm stand taken against the Chinese intrusion at Doklam. India is now an acknowledged regional power. At the same time, we see in President Xi Jinping a colossus riding the landscape of China as the unchallenged leader of the republic, the Communist Party of China and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). At the nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held in 2017, his position as the ‘core’ leader of China was sanctified and his ‘key thoughts’ on ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era’ statuted in the Constitution of the CPC, alongside the thoughts of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Xi waxed eloquent on the ‘Chinese dream’, on ‘rejuvenation’ of the nation, and spelt out the two ambitious centenary goals being nursed by China. The first, to build a moderately prosperous society by 2020, and the second, to transform China by 2049, the republic’s hundredth anniversary, into a ‘great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful’, and also into ‘a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence’. He emphasized that to ensure effective governance, the ‘party must be both politically strong and highly competent’.