Nehru

by Walter Crocker

  That troubles over the Indo-Tibetan border were to be expected, and that it was not fixed incontrovertibly, was shown before the Chinese communists took over. Thus when the Indian government informed the Dalai Lama’s government at Lhasa that India had become independent and that Lhasa could count on relations being not less friendly than they were in the days of the British raj, the Tibetan authorities replied, in effect, ‘Thank you. This is all very fine; but what about the border?’ The Lhasa authorities then proceeded to enumerate, as points at issue, just about every point which came up for dispute between India and China after 1955.* I have been told by some officials concerned that Nehru himself from the early 1950s expected trouble over the border, and his policy was to play for time and let sleeping dogs lie. But other officials have told me that he was indifferent or complacent about the problem. Historians will certainly want to look into Bajpai’s minute written at the time of the Chinese occupation,** allegedly warning the government, and opposing Panikkar’s reasoning; and into what Nehru’s reactions were. (They will also want to know Nehru’s real thinking on the Korean War.) It was said in my day by some retired senior officers, both from the external affairs ministry and from the general staff, that when Nehru had been advised against losing Tibet as a buffer state, or losing the privileged Indian position in Tibet, he refused to listen, and in some cases was scornful of the advisers concerned and virtually reprimanded them. Did he, as used to be said in high places in Delhi, refuse to discuss with U Nu of Burma, or, later, Ayub of Pakistan or the king of Nepal, not to mention the prime minister of Japan, relations with China in general or the border question in particular when these dignitaries visited Delhi and sought to discuss them?

  It must be remembered, on the other hand, that at the time when the Chinese invaded Tibet, in 1949–50, India was preoccupied with her millions of refugees and with strained relations with Pakistan, including the Kashmir affair. A war with China over Tibet, for instance, would at that date have been impossible for India. The external affairs ministry, too, was small, amateurish, and overstretched, while the cabinet ministers were mostly new to government itself, over and above their ignorance of foreign and military affairs. The Indian embassy in China, notably Panikkar, appears to have recommended to Nehru to give in to Chinese claims because the gratitude and goodwill of the Chinese communists thereby resulting would provide the best guarantee for the Sino-Indian border. The Indian embassy also explained how Chinese plans for internal developments would keep them busy for years and make expansionism both impracticable as well as unwanted. Nehru certainly made this last point about Communist China to various ambassadors and foreign visitors as well as to his party. What the historians will want to know is not whether Nehru should have fought a war with China in 1950 but what were the motivations of his policy and his estimates of the India–China situation. These are not fully known yet.

  A great deal of material on the Sino-Indian border affair has already been published. Exchanges between India and China, and government speeches in the Indian Parliament and to the Indian public, run into thousands of pages; and Indian newspaper comments at the time, and Indian books since then, run into hundreds of thousands of words. But some essential facts are still unrevealed. Indians in high places showed themselves, not for the first time, to have a capacity for secretiveness which is remarkable. Did any diplomat in Delhi in 1955–58, not to go back further, guess at the state of Sino-Indian relations which was revealed in the White Books?85 The same secretiveness had been practised over Kashmir. Was it due to orders from Nehru? Again and again serious diplomats known to be well disposed to India tried to find out from the Indian external affairs ministry what was happening on the border; they were invariably put off with banalities.

  Nehru’s fundamental approach to China seems to have been compounded of beliefs that Asians would in this Asian century be brotherly, especially the polite and now socially minded Chinese; that China would be busy for years with her internal socialist revolution; and that the only conceivable subject of dispute was Tibet, and Tibet had been liquidated through India’s renouncing all rights and claims there. In the absence of documented facts one can only guess, and my guess, for what it is worth, is that until about 1959 Nehru did not see the border as a subject of much importance to either country, let alone as a likely cause of bitter disputation. The Panch Shil declaration, proposed by the Chinese in the first instance, had been approved in draft form in February–March 1954. Chou En-lai visited India and signed the declaration in June of that year. In the following month, July (it was revealed some years later), the first border incident took place, at Bara Hoti. Nehru, however, attached, as far as one can see, no significance to it; he felt secure in the Panch Shil declaration. For the same reason he continued to feel secure as the other border incidents took place, in 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, and perhaps into 1959. When Chinese maps showing as Chinese territory what the Indians regarded as theirs had come to the notice of the Indians and they pointed it out, the Chinese would reply, in effect, ‘Don’t worry. These are old KMT maps and we’re too busy now to bring out our own maps.’ It is probable that by 1957 or 1958 Nehru would have felt uneasy at times over the border incidents, but if so he could well have judged it wiser to keep the matter from the public, and to avoid any excitement, against the day when the whole border question could be taken up and settled sensibly. Perhaps he had in mind a deal with the Chinese, such as Aksai Chin to China in return for India’s incontrovertible title to NEFA. This would have suited China and it would have betrayed no real interest of India. As for the Panch Shil declaration, this was a better move from the viewpoint of India’s interests than Indian critics were allowing in the next decade. It was tantamount to a no-war declaration.

  It must be remembered that in these years, on the whole the most satisfying and the most confident in his prime ministership, Nehru was concentrating on internal Indian matters, like the plans, and on standing up against much of the foreign policy associated with Dulles. He almost certainly had more distrust for Dulles than he had for Chou En-lai.

  Was China trying to trick India all along, as is now commonly thought? Or were there genuine misunderstandings?

  There are several puzzles still to be solved, as regards India’s as well as regards China’s part.

  Why did Nehru publish the White Books? They were bound to unleash nationalist passion in India, probably to a degree which could deprive him of any leeway for negotiating. Pique? Nationalist passion in himself? Or Calculation, for instance to exert pressure on China as well as to anticipate criticisms of his border policy in India? Perhaps all three were part of the motivation; but probably the biggest factor was that after the leak of information about the road in Aksai Chin, and still more after the exposures made in Parliament in 1959, the safest course was to make a clean breast of it.

  But why did India set up the forty new checkposts in the disputed area in 1962? Could China accept this Forward Policy without reaction? This must surely have risked a military confrontation.

  And if India was going to play this provocative game why did she still have most of her armed forces facing Pakistan and not China? Further, if the border dispute was serious should not India have tried to work out a common border policy with India’s fellow-neighbours of China, notably Nepal, Burma, and Thailand, if not Pakistan itself?

  What seems certain is that the Chinese had lost trust in the Government of India and had become as convinced that they were being tricked by it as the Indians had become convinced that they were being tricked by the Chinese government.

  It would throw some light on motivations if we knew whether the Dalai Lama, when he escaped from Tibet in 1959, slipped through the fingers of the Chinese to get into India, or whether the Chinese intentionally let him, and perhaps in essence encouraged him, to go. One of the men best informed on the subject, a former head of the Nepal Foreign Office, expressed to me the latter view. The ruler of one of the border states, a protectorate of Ind
ia, and also well informed, expressed to me the former view, which also accords with the Dalai Lama’s account in his autobiography.* The Chinese, it seems, already knew of the Dalai Lama’s wishes to fly to India in 1950, and again in 1956. In 1954 they took him to China. (It was on that occasion that the Indian secretary general of external affairs on meeting the Dalai Lama at Peking and asking him politely, through a Chinese interpreter, how he was doing, received the answer, through the interpreter, equally politely, that he was doing well and was ‘most happy to be in the capital of the Motherland’.) Moreover, the Dalai Lama had been infiltrating some treasure into Sikkim; which the Chinese knew of or suspected. Did the Chinese decide in 1956 or thereabouts that they would not succeed in getting the Dalai Lama to collaborate in, or to refuse to oppose, their policies, and therefore fell back on the traditional enemy of the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, using him until they were ready to destroy him? For this reason, and for some others, they would have had an advantage in getting the Dalai Lama out of Tibet and into India. His going would be a sensation at the moment, but would be no more than a nine-day wonder. They could assume that nothing concrete would come out of his presence in India; in a few months, or years, he would be forgotten. Whatever the background to the Dalai Lama’s flight, the train which accompanied the Dalai Lama to India consisted of about 80 mules, and a retinue of 95 Tibetans. As this conspicuous group followed well-known paths it is possible, but it seems hardly probable, that the Chinese were unaware; the less so as by that time they knew the geography of the Tibetan border country well besides having a fairly efficient control of the totalitarian kind. The Chinese seem, too, to have had knowledge, presumably by interception, of wireless telegraphy messages passing between the Dalai Lama and India. As far as Sino-Indian relations are concerned, the Dalai Lama’s flight would in any case have sharpened Chinese suspicions of India, which were already sharp by then.*

  Virtually nothing is known about why the Chinese took this or that step in Sino-Indian relations. Did Chou En-lai in 1954 think that he was outwitting Nehru? Or did the two men fail in directness, or even in communication, with each other? There are signs that the barrier of language did exist, and that there was genuine misunderstanding on both sides. That the barrier continued to exist was suggested in the condolences which Chou En-lai telegraphed to Nehru’s daughter in 1964. He then described her father’s death as ‘unfortunate’. At all events, by 1956–57 the Chinese were highly suspicious of India. By the time the Indian Forward Policy86 was launched they were convinced of trickery and bad faith.

  There is evidence that after his talks with Nehru in 1954 and in 1955, increasingly in 1956, and again in 1960, Chou En-lai came to feel that he had got little understanding with Nehru, and that Nehru was not straight. Nehru’s manner and indirectness had over the years caused more than one interlocutor to feel like that. Nehru, on the other hand, came to feel the same about Chou En-lai. There is evidence in fact for an oddly personal factor on the side of both men, difficult though this might be to credit in a world of power politics. According to a foreign minister of a certain Asian country, Chou En-lai, speaking about the Sino-Indian boundary dispute, told him that Nehru was impossible to negotiate with, being both unreliable and impenetrable. This is not the only suggestion that a personal disenchantment grew up, and developed into personal dislike, between the two prime ministers. In 1963 I found, in the course of a talk with Nehru when I returned to Delhi on a visit, for all his guardedness, an unusual personal note in his remarks. He was puzzled over China because the points at issue—this or that piece of land—were not important in themselves; but, still more, he was disappointed and aggrieved. He spoke of the strain of arrogance in the Chinese character, and about the stage through which the communist revolution there was going, and he wondered about their deeper purposes. In talks with India they had been both rigid and calculating. From other sources one heard in 1963 that Nehru had become rigid himself and did not want to negotiate though he must have known that Aksai Chin was beyond recovery. A member of Nehru’s family circle made it still more personal: Chou En-lai from Bandung onwards had shown himself jealous of Nehru, and the jealousy increased because of India’s getting aid from Russia which China coveted as hers of right.

  The important point about the Sino-Indian border dispute is not what areas belong to India or China but that China, at the risk of making enemies of a neighbouring state numbering 500 million, hitherto well disposed to her, and speaking up repeatedly for her full acceptance in the comity of nations, should go to the lengths of treating India as an enemy. Was any real interest of China involved which justified so high a cost? Did it not matter if India should be provoked into giving up non-alignment and into making an alliance with the West? Did it not matter that the communist movement in India should have the ground cut from under its feet? Did it not matter that the Panch Shil declaration should be seen as a mere piece of paper?

  The explanations favoured in the West, or in India, at the time need not be examined here. There were many, and some seem oversophisticated.

  As for the fundamental factors in the relations between China and India, China, under population pressure, or under fear of attacks from enemy bases in weak neighbouring states, could conceivably spill over into the rice bowl of South-East Asia, but what motive could she have for coming down into poverty-stricken overpopulated India? Nehru was surely right in thinking that China and India can live and let live; and surely he was not surprising in feeling that his goodwill had been recompensed with guile and brutality. But China is bound to be more powerful than India; and the two peoples, moreover, are antithetical in temperament. The theme song in 1950–58 of three thousand years of unbroken peace between the two Asian brothers had been a manifestation of Indian nationalism in its racial or anti-European form as well as nonsense.

  Anti-colonialism

  A third specific concern of Nehru’s foreign policy was anti-colonialism.

  This cannot be understood without account being taken of the deeply formative effect of his long years as a fighter against the British empire, and of feelings born of his resentments of European domination. His suspiciousness about European policies got near at times to being racialist; though it must be admitted that there were at times reason for his suspiciousness.

  Nehru had scarcely become head of the Congress–Muslim coalition government in 1946, which, as we have seen, was formed before the Muslim League broke away in the following year to set up Pakistan, and he therefore had more than enough to occupy him with in India, when he took in hand the calling of the Asian Relations Conference. It met in March–April 1947, while the rumblings of hatred between Hindu and Muslim were already sounding ominously. He addressed it enthusiastically on Asia-ism. This looked to some like anti-Europe-ism but was nothing much more than anti-European-colonialism. A few weeks later the die was cast for the division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan; and a few months later the great Hindu–Muslim massacres began.

  In January 1949, not many months after the massacres, though sporadic killings were still taking place, Nehru called a Second Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, this time as a move against the Dutch in Indonesia. Amongst the 19 powers invited were Australia and New Zealand. Australia, then under a Labour government, attended but China, Nepal, New Zealand and Thailand sent only observers, while Turkey declined the invitation. Australia and New Zealand were the only non-Asian countries invited. Nehru had already decided that anything like a line-up of ‘coloured’ peoples would be deplorable and could be disastrous. It was for the same reason that he put out feelers in 1954 for inviting Australia to the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955; a significant gesture on his part which has not been sufficiently noted.

  Year after year the anti-colonial passion of India manifested itself in one episode or over one place after another—South East Asia, Tunisia, Algeria, Negro Africa, South Africa. At times there was good reason for Indian passion, as what went on in Algeria for
example was of a horrifying bestiality; but at times it was ill-informed and unconstructive, and occasionally unreasonable. India did all she could to break up the European empires, with little thought as to what might follow their break-up, and with little done to save Indians in Ceylon from treatment which was worse than the treatment meted out to Africans in European colonies in Africa. Not a few Africans, who to the astonishment of India disliked the Indians in their midst sometimes more than they disliked the Europeans, soon showed signs that they would mete out similar treatment to Indians as the Ceylonese were meting out once they had got the independence which Nehru was demanding for them. Nehru himself was often in high indignation at some manifestation or other of what he saw as colonialism or Europe-ism, but feelings ran even higher amongst the Indian intelligentsia, which was anti-colonialist to a man.