As usual in India, however, one could count on some cool and objective heads.** But the excitement was enough to ensure the defeat of the proposals put up to India at this time by the United States for an independent Kashmir guaranteed jointly by India and Pakistan under the UN. These proposals were in fact close to what Sheikh Abdullah, at that time prime minister of Kashmir, cautiously but quite unmistakably adumbrated to me twelve years earlier in 1952 when I met him in Kashmir. India’s reaction to the American proposals was, once more, that Kashmir is an integral part of India—rather as Portugal had said that Goa was an integral part of Portugal—that the union is irrevocable and so there is nothing to discuss.
After the fever of nationalism fomented by the Sino-India border dispute Nehru would have seen the acutest political difficulties in changing his old stand on the plebiscite, or to make significant concessions to Pakistan. Yet after the massacres in Bihar and Orissa74 in 1964 he came to believe that the change must be made; that communal feeling was rising so dangerously that it risked war with Pakistan as well as massacres inside India on a scale which might end the secular state. So he had Sheikh Abdullah released in April,75 after eleven years of jail. This was a very courageous step.
According to one of the members of the first UN Commission sent out to Kashmir (1949–51), Nehru was adamant already by 1950. This Commission consisted of five members,* and one of the members happened thirteen years later to be a fellow ambassador of mine in a certain European capital and used to talk about his experiences on the Commission. He said that the Commission had come to the conclusion privately that the plebiscite ought to be held; that a plebiscite would result in a majority for Pakistan; and that Nehru, knowing this, was determined to get out of a plebiscite. He recounted how he and two other members had a meeting with Nehru in Delhi and, on a personal basis, made the suggestion that the only solution was to hold the plebiscite. This apparently provoked Nehru into one of his tempers. The outburst impressed my informant deeply. ‘We saw all at once,’ he said, ‘that inside this fine man was a gorilla.’ Nehru was no gorilla; but for years he always bared his fangs at the mention of a plebiscite or of any real UN intervention in Kashmir.
The damage done by Kashmir to Nehru’s enviable moral prestige throughout the world was great. His prestige in Pakistan itself, which was second only to his prestige in India, was also thereby sullied and largely squandered. For Kashmir he threw away the one chance since Partition, presented to him by Ayub, of moving towards reasonable relations with Pakistan through an able and honourable ruler of Pakistan. And when Nehru was forced to make the offers he did in 1963 Ayub was no longer strong enough inside Pakistan to accept them, though they would have been a sensation five years earlier. Nehru lost a big chance when he visited Ayub in Pakistan in 1962; just as Ayub has lost a big chance by failing to attend Nehru’s funeral. The long years of Nehru’s rule thus left the Kashmir question exactly where it was in 1947, even to returning Sheikh Abdullah, that experienced and not unattractive but diffuse politician, to the scene.
But having said this we must be clear the Kashmir was not the basic divider between India and Pakistan. It was the symbol of the basic division between them: a testimony of the fear and the hate which had yet to be exorcized. Will the historians, even when allowing for the extreme difficulties of Nehru’s dilemma, conclude that he had become too static, too legalistic, too weary in dealing with Pakistan? There was little or no growth in his Pakistan policy over seventeen years until a few weeks before his death. There was none of the dynamism which could have worked for at least some confederal arrangement. Even the Pakistan proposals for a no-war declaration had received little courtesy and no attention. Suggestions for looking into common defence arrangements between the two countries met with the same reception. A boldly imaginative stroke like offering to see whether Bengal could be reunited occurred to no one, not even to Nehru, in that world of fear and hate. Kashmir did most to keep alive the fear and hate.
Is there any escape from the conclusion that the price paid by Nehru for Kashmir was out of balance?
What value, strategic or economic, did Kashmir have for India? For years India was pouring money into the coffers of a satellite government which was as corrupt, as repressive, as inefficient, and as unreliable to India, as it was unrespected by its subjects. Far from being a parliamentary democracy it was a one-party regime and virtually a dictatorship. The rule was as bad as that of the bad princely governments which Nehru used to condemn so passionately. Bakshi,76 though not without likeable traits, after supplanting, some say betraying, his old master, Sheikh Abdullah, and keeping him in jail for eleven years, turned his family of cab men and stable boys into magnates. Pilfering and exploitation went so far that ministers interfered with school and university examiners to see that their relatives or protégés were given passes. There is no doubt that there were some ministers of quality in Kashmir who preferred their country to be part of India; but the indications, which could be proved or disproved only by a plebiscite, were that they did not represent the majority.
How much Nehru distrusted, and perhaps feared, Pakistan was illustrated by his violent outbursts against United States military aid to it in 1953–54, and by his attitude to Pakistan’s membership of SEATO and CENTO. The high commissioners sent by Pakistan to India would, with one or two exceptions, not have predisposed him to different feelings. Such was the mental climate that the emergence of China as an enemy did little to soften or to reorientate his own feelings, or Indian feelings in general. So Nehru’s lack of directness with Ayub in 1960–62; his pouring ridicule on efforts and notions for an Indo-Pakistan military agreement; and his acquiescing in Krishna Menon’s line that the real enemy was Pakistan. This line allowed Krishna Menon, from his world-wide coverage at the UN and his bellicose speeches in India, to build up a picture of himself invaluable to a man who was mostly unknown to the Indian public before then, but damaging to Indo-Pakistan coexistence.
During the ten years I was watching India relations between India and Pakistan got worse, not better, and by 1961 I was prepared for a war between the two. It was only China’s rout of Indian troops at the end of 1962 which mitigated this risk. But it did not obliterate it. War could be precipitated by Pakistan in some or other onrush of resentment over a massacre of Muslims in India, for these have been happening every year; or by an accident on the frontier, where the bulk of the armed forces of both countries have been facing each other, and where shooting incidents have been common; or by a nationalistic or a leftist group in India, for instance the Jan Sangh on the one hand or some demagogic leftist group on the other, seeking votes or popularity by operating on the familiar principle that nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The documentary film on Kashmir brought out in 1961 by the government, apparently under the direct supervision of a minister, and seen by millions of Indians in the movie-houses, was not a reassuring precedent. For the essence of the predicament, which is tragic and beyond any moralising on our part, or denials by Indians themselves, is that for the average Hindu in north India the enemy of the heart is the Muslim. This is true to a surprising degree even of normally balanced persons, even of sophisticated rationalists, and not merely of the people. Nehru, who never got over his experiences with Jinnah, but alarmed by the massacres in March 1964, saw that nothing less than a drastic reversal was called for. He alone could hope to force through the reversal. No one else had the authority to try to do it. He arranged to meet Ayub in June. But it was too late. He was dead by May.
Relations with China
The second subject of main concern in Nehru’s foreign policy was China.
India’s relations with Communist China seemed, until the end of 1959, at least to the outside world, and to nearly all Indians, to be very friendly. Pakistan and the European colonialists were the only enemies; China was not often thought of but when it was it was only as a friend and sterling Asian. When it was urged that a common defence arrangement for the subcontinent
should be made with Pakistan Nehru crushed the suggestion with the sarcastic retort, ‘Defence against whom?’
Nehru had had amicable personal relations with Chiang Kai-shek,77 but this did not prevent India from being among the first to recognise the communist regime. Sardar Panikkar,78 that brilliant quicksilver Indian intellectual, after being ambassador to the Kuomintang of China (KMT) government stayed on as ambassador to the communist government. India showed an equal speed in recognising China’s ‘liberation of the Tibet Region of China’, as the Chinese styled the invasion and occupation of Tibet in October 1950. When the Dalai Lama put out feelers in 1950 for fleeing to India the Indian government discouraged him. When in November, a month after the Chinese invasion, the Dalai Lama appealed to the UN against Chinese aggression, adding that Tibet did not recognise China’s claim, that it had been exercising independence since 1914, and that in any case China’s claims did not justify the use of force, India obstructed the appeal and got consideration of it adjourned sine die. The British delegation supported India, apparently at the request of the Indian government; and the United States announced that she too would accept India’s plea. So the UN heard nothing more of Tibet until nine years later when the Dalai Lama, having fled to India, appealed to the UN once again. It was being said in Delhi in 1952–53 that Nehru, in private and semi-private, justified the Chinese invasion of Tibet; but I did not hear him do this.*
In 1952 and 1953 cultural delegations were exchanged between India and China, and there were many speeches by Indian political leaders, and many articles in the Indian press, on the theme that ‘for thousands of years’ there had been undisturbed peace and brotherhood between the two great Asian friends and neighbours. It was implied, and sometimes said explicitly, that only Europeans could be imperialists; Asians never. This was a familiar theme of one of Nehru’s kinsmen, a senior member of the Indian foreign office. The wife of the Indian ambassador in Peking claimed a little later to be running enthusiastic classes in Hindi for the wives of highly placed Chinese Communist dignitaries, including Mrs Chou En-lai; these Chinese ladies so loved India that they wanted to learn ‘the national language’. But the theme of India–China brotherhood was common not only in the circle around Nehru but throughout India in these years, including in the newspapers which were attacking Nehru most strongly in 1962–63 for his China policy.
In 1954 Chou En-lai came to India as a state guest and was accorded receptions and banquets, at some of which I happened to be present. He was given a warm welcome by the public. The famous declaration of Panch Shil,79 the Five Principles of Coexistence, sealed the visit. In 1955, largely through the efforts of Nehru, Chou En-lai, with a sizeable entourage, came to the Afro-Asian Conference80 at Bandung and, as I could see during that memorable week, he had a similar success there. His intelligence and drive were manifest; he had not a little charm; but whether his voice had the same depreciatory effect or not on those who understood Chinese it came as a shock to others to hear someone so good looking and with such deportment speaking in so high-pitched a tenor—rather like the shock of hearing big burly men like Chesterton81 or Belloc82 piping in their trebles. Bismarck seems to have had a similar effect; and Chou En-lai might well have had more of Bismarck about him than the voice.
India, step by step, renounced the hard-won special position in Tibet which Britain had bequeathed to her, and she accepted Chinese suzerainty in principle and Chinese sovereignty in fact. Nehru dismissed the notion of Tibet as a buffer state—‘A buffer between whom?’—and described India’s previous special position there as an outmoded relic of imperialism. India’s renunciation was sealed in a series of Sino-Indian agreements, the most important being the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India signed in 1954. From 1952 onwards, India gave up all her old rights. Thus the Indian Mission at Lhasa was reduced to a Consulate-General and the trade agencies, at Gyantse, Gartok, and Yalung, were brought under it; and a Chinese Consulate-General was opened at Bombay and trade agencies at Kalimpong (notorious as a spy centre), New Delhi, and Calcutta (where China already had a Consulate-General). India, moreover, agreed to withdraw her military escorts and to hand over her rights and equipment for posts, telegraphs and telephones; and the twelve Indian rest houses or compounds and the land she owned were also handed over.
In the UN India pleaded year after year for seating Communist China.
In 1956 Chou En-lai was back in Delhi as a state guest. The Dalai Lama happened to be in India at the same time; he asked Nehru secretly if he could stay on in India. Nehru advised him to go back. The Dalai Lama dragged on his stay so much that it was March 1957 by the time he got back to Tibet.
Two years later, in March 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India as a refugee. This was a world sensation for the next three months or so.
Then followed in India, for the ensuing year, and with increasing heat, a series of statements in Parliament, a series of press articles, and a series of public meetings, which were new to Nehru’s India. I had returned to India for a second term a few months before the Dalai Lama made his flight; the criticisms of Nehru voiced in Parliament and in the press from then onwards were unthinkable to anyone who had seen Nehru dealing with foreign affairs and his critics three years earlier. Much confidence had manifestly been lost in Nehru’s conduct of foreign policy; his monopoly was cracked. By 1960 his monopoly was broken. He now had to explain, and to defend, his foreign policy moves instead of just announcing them or, as at times in the past, saying nothing about them.
In September 1959 the first of the White Papers on Sino-Indian relations was published.* It covered the period 1954–59 and came as one more sensation, revealing that India and China had been having border disputes, unknown to the public, indeed unknown to all but a handful of officials and political leaders, as far back as five years. Three more White Books followed, bringing the story up to the end of 1960. In 1961 this was capped by the lengthy report, published as a White Book, of the discussions on the boundary question carried out between the officials of the Government of India and of China.**
The result of these revelations was an upsurge of nationalism in India of a bitter, at times of a frenzied, kind. It equalled the nationalism against Britain at its most fervid a couple of decades earlier, and that against Pakistan after Partition. In China, on the other hand, there was some, but apparently less, or at least a less vocal, upsurge of nationalistic feeling against India. The exchanges between the two governments, however, became rancorous; so much so that, possibly at the instance of the Communist Party of India, the Chinese government early in 1960 made conciliatory gestures. Chou En-lai offered to come to India to discuss the border. He came in April 1960. It was rumoured, and it is probable, that he offered to accept India’s claims to NEFA in return for a recognition of China’s claims to Aksai Chin; for it was through Aksai Chin that the Chinese had built the important strategic road linking Tibet and Sinkiang. There were no results. In view of the political compulsions there scarcely could have been any. Such was the nationalistic excitement in India that Nehru could have negotiated a settlement with Chou En-lai only at the risk of his own party unseating him. The press clamoured that not an inch of India’s sacred soil must be lost.
I will touch on some of the main points in the question of Sino-Indian relations briefly, only at enough length to show, in so far as is now known, what Nehru did, why he did it, and what he was up against.
The border between India and China is about 2,500 miles long, and runs through wild, largely mountainous, largely unsettled, and largely unproductive land. The disputed areas can be divided into three sections, of which only two have importance, namely, the north eastern border (the so-called NEFA area), which involves the complexities of the McMahon Line,83 and, second, the Ladakh (West Tibet) border, which, involves the greater complexities of the MacDonald Line84 and much other vagueness. India is more interested in the former; China is more interested in the latter. A quid pro quo settle
ment would have been practicable, and sensible, if Indian public opinion, or Chinese patience or goodwill, would have allowed it.
Since the boundary dispute became important, and especially since the Chinese attack of 1962, claims are commonly made in India that the boundary—to quote from a recent Indian book—is ‘definitively settled by history … determined by geography, confirmed by tradition and custom, sanctified by treaties, and reinforced by continuous exercise, through the centuries, of administrative jurisdiction’. The truth is much more amorphous. There has been little that has been definitive. And, whatever the truth, it is hard to dig it out from the vast sandheap of legalistic and propaganda verbiage which has been piled up on both sides. As the boundary question is technical it will be enough for our purposes merely to say that there is no such definitiveness as that claimed by the Indian author cited, just because no one cared very much about the boundary, certainly not until China became a neighbour of India through occupying Tibet. Both sides, India and China, put up cases which were weaker in law, and in history, than either allowed. It is not excluded that the Chinese believed that Aksai Chin did not belong to India, though they, no less than India, subsequently overstated their case. This wild and virtually uninhabited land had not been brought under Indian control. The fact that the Chinese could have built the Sinkiang–Tibet road through it without the Indians knowing for some years is significant. As for the NEFA Area, where India had a stronger case than China, though whether or not a ‘definitive’ case can be left to the experts, that area is peopled by Mongolian tribes who have little or no affinities, in blood or languages or culture or past history, with the Indians. Temperamentally they are unlike Indians. The rebellion of the Nagas is connected with this fact. In British times most of the area was left unoccupied and unadministered; subsidies—a species of Danegeld—were given to dissuade the Mongolian tribesmen from raiding into India proper; and in Nehru’s time it was not until from 1954 that the Indians occupied much of it, apparently in order to anticipate possible Chinese occupation.
Nehru Page 9