China's Territorial Disputes (28 page)

In an attempt to ease the growing tension and settle the border dispute before further complications arose, Zhou again sent a letter to Nehru, on 7 November 1959, proposing a meeting between them, meanwhile complying with a withdrawal of the armed forces of both sides to 20 kilometers from the McMahon Line in the east, and to the line of actual control in the west.
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Nehru’s reply was essentially to reiterate his prior position that both sides should withdraw behind each other’s claim lines.
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Zhou wrote and pleaded with Nehru again the following month for a summit meeting between the two, which Nehru initially refused but later agreed to. Deputies from the major non-Communist opposition parties such as the Jana Sangh, Praja Socialist Party, and Swatantra, as well as independent members of parliament, urged the government to refrain from negotiations unless and until the acceptance by China of India’s frontier and its vacation of Indian territory. Only the Communist Party of India supported a policy of pursuing negotiations, warning against the dangerous consequences of “war psychosis” that was building up in the country. Nehru was reluctant to hold further debates on the subject, but his objections were overridden by the Speaker of the House, who did not want to go against the truculent and combative mood of parliament.
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To show how much India was missing out by not reciprocating China’s flexibility, generosity and spirit of compromise, the PRC concluded its first boundary settlement with India’s neighbor Burma in January 1960.
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When U Nu, prime minister of Burma, went to Beijing in 1956 to propose a boundary settlement, he found that, after repudiating all past boundary agreements imposed by the British, the Chinese were quite prepared to open negotiations on the very boundary lines the British had drawn. By claiming that the border was not formally delimited, it was clear that what was unacceptable to the Chinese was the origin of those boundaries in “unequal treaties,” and not the alignment the British had proposed. China would settle, provided Burma restored to it a group of three villages, the Hpimaw tract, on the Burmese side of the British-imposed line. In exchange, China would cede to Burma an area called the Namwan tract, which was originally under “perpetual lease” to the British from the Chinese. China was initially in no hurry to conclude the on-and-off boundary talks, but public opinion in Burma was soon alive to the boundary issue, limiting U Nu’s room for maneuver and jeopardizing China’s proposition. So after General Ne Win seized power in 1958, he was told that an agreement could be had if he could attach the Panghung-Panglao tract to the Hpimaw tract to be ceded to China to make up for the larger size of the Namwan tract to be given to Burma. Although village chiefs from the areas to be handed over to China voiced public displeasure at the exchange, they were quickly overruled, effectively demonstrating the efficacy of negotiations between dictatorships. After five days of further negotiations in Beijing, Ne Win signed with the Chinese a boundary agreement on 28 January 1960, which was converted into a treaty on 1 October 1960.

When the Chinese argued that the Sino-Indian boundary had not been formally delimited, they clearly meant that there had never been a negotiated bilateral instrument recognized by them as embodying the agreed definition of the boundary. This appeared to be an opening gambit for the boundary negotiations, as in the Sino-Burmese boundary, for the Chinese had never denied the existence of a “traditional and customary” frontier along the ridge of the Himalayas between China and India, as was also the case with China and Burma. When China subsequently held up the Sino-Burmese boundary agreement to India as a model for resolving the Sino-Indian border dispute, the Indians were unresponsive, preferring not to settle on what they perceived to be Chinese terms.

During a ten-day working meeting in Hangzhou in January 1960, the CCP Politburo Standing Committee discussed the Sino-Indian border issue, and decided that it should be settled swiftly through negotiations based on the principle of “give and take.”
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Zhou was consequently tasked to seek Nehru’s agreement to hold talks as soon as possible. The summit meeting between the two prime ministers, held in New Delhi from 19-25 April 1960, failed to resolve the boundary deadlock. Zhou again demonstrated what he considered to be flexibility and initiative on the part of the Chinese government by proffering a “package” deal by which China would accept Indian claims in the eastern sector in exchange for Indian recognition of China’s claims in the western sector. Although he had agreed to talks, Nehru maintained that the boundaries were already delimited and could not be persuaded to abandon his position of nodispute, no-negotiation. After Zhou’s visit, which was met by demonstrations and rallies organized by India’s major opposition parties,
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both sides examined historical documents, records, maps and other material relevant to the boundary dispute, and drafted an official report each for their own government. However, neither side could agree to the facts as presented by the other, let alone the inferences. As such, there would be no further meeting on the border issue until after the Sino-Indian border war of 1962. Meanwhile, China began negotiations with Nepal on their outstanding boundary question, and a border treaty was signed in October 1961 whereby China conceded ten out of eleven villages which the king and government of Nepal had demanded. This agreement was denounced by the Indian government as a Chinese attempt to assert influence in South Asian affairs and to put pressure on India to conclude a comprehensive boundary treaty with China along the terms offered first to Burma and then to Nepal.

Criticism of the Indian government’s China policy became more strident as time passed, and debates in parliament became more acrimonious. Although still supported by large segments of his own Congress Party and the CPI, Nehru was assailed by all political parties for incompetence in handling the boundary issue and duplicity in playing down the Chinese menace, thus endangering India’s honor and territorial integrity. The government was repeatedly criticized for its complacency and failure to respond to the continued build-up of Chinese forces along the border, and was advised to mobilize the nation on a war footing. Pressure amounted on Krishna Menon, the defense minister, who had tremendous difficulty convincing parliament that his country’s armed forces were well trained, logistically prepared and competently led to protect India’s borders. Parliament’s hostility to any kind of negotiations with China until it vacated all “occupied” Indian territories remained unchanged. Queried in parliament on every piece of news from the northern border, a hapless Nehru was reduced to pleading that a newly discovered Chinese post did not imply Chinese territorial possession; Longjiu was only a village of a few huts and of no strategic importance to India; the government must not take adventurist action while preparing for war; and any talks that he might engage in should not be construed as a “surrender.”
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Parliament and public opinion increasingly felt that Nehru was consciously or unconsciously misleading them on the Sino-Indian border question, consciously because of his fear of exposing the weakness of the Indian Army to the world, and unconsciously because of his life-long pro-China sympathies. While people had hitherto been largely content to take their cue on foreign relations from the prime minister, they now had reason to feel betrayed. In other worlds, Nehru’s government was no longer trusted to conduct India’s China policy on its own terms, but must be subjected to the scrutiny of the public, the mass media and the politicians. The compulsions of democratic politics on India’s side to obstruct negotiations, and the subsequent careless indifference to India’s national dignity in behaving intransigently on China’s side, doomed whatever chances both sides may have had of resolving this dispute sensibly and realistically.

While the opposition parties were advocating war preparations and taking full political advantage of the situation by accusing the government of appeasement, Nehru conveyed his last border initiative to China in May 1962 by again calling for a mutual withdrawal behind each other’s claim lines. As if to sweeten the deal, he further offered to permit civilian traffic from China to pass along the Aksai Chin road, to which China’s reply was to pour incredulity on its need to ask India’s permission to use its own road.
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To put pressure on India to return to the negotiating table, the Chinese government suddenly agreed to conduct negotiations with the Pakistani government to locate and align the boundary between China and Pakistani-held Kashmir, more than a year after Pakistan first publicly brought up that subject. When Sino-Pakistani negotiations began on 12 October 1962, it was only one week until the Sino-Indian clash. Meanwhile, all trade between China and India was terminated when the eight-year trade agreement of 1954 was allowed to lapse.

Despite its public pretense of Sino-Indian friendship, at least up till the aftermath of the Tibetan revolt, the Chinese leadership had always regarded Nehru as somewhat representative of his country’s bourgeoisie and a “lackey” of imperialism. With increasing Soviet and American economic assistance to India during the late 1950s and early 1960s, which occurred during the period of China’s great famine and the withdrawal of all Soviet technical blueprints and personnel from China, the Chinese suspected that both superpowers were now colluding to build India up as a counterweight to China. When the Sino-Soviet split came into the open at the Bucharest congress in June 1960, Krushchev not only took India’s side in its border dispute with China, but denounced China’s handling of the dispute as a major plank of his attack on war-mongering “leftist dogmatism.” What was till then an essentially nationalist quarrel between two Third World countries had turned into part of a world-wide ideological conflict between Communism and capitalism, and within the Communist bloc itself, and would remain so for almost three decades.

The immediate cause of the war was an unpremeditated clash over a disputed valley near the tri-juncture of the China-India-Bhutan border lying to the southeast of the Thagla Ridge, which dominates the terrain of the tri-border area. India placed the boundary as defined by its interpretation of the McMahon Line, along the top of the Thagla Ridge. China located the boundary along a small icy stream flowing some three miles across a valley to the south, which, it pointed out, was as according to the original map of the McMahon Line, even though that boundary line was one it did not recognize. It was in this valley that Indian troops established a post call Dhola Post in June 1962, which, on being overrun by Chinese soldiers three months later, led both sides to prepare for war.

By then, convinced of the righteousness and legitimacy of the Indian claims, and boxed in by parliamentary and public opinion and his own rhetoric that negotiations would be unnecessary and unproductive, on 6 October 1962 Nehru rejected the last offer from the Chinese for talks on the border question. Even when Nehru publicly stated on 12 October that the Chinese would be driven out of Indian territories by force if necessary,
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the Indians apparently believed that the Chinese would not launch an attack to defend
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territorial claims. This was the fundamental illogical premise of India’s forward policy that led it to so much grief.

The Sino-Indian War and after

Four days after Chinese troops crossed the McMahon line in force on 20 October 1962, Zhou again proposed a cease-fire along the line of actual control, whereby the armies of each side would withdraw 20 kilometers from this line, and both prime ministers would begin peace talks. Nehru’s reply was to urge China to revert to its position along the boundary prior to 8 September 1962, to which Zhou replied that he meant the line of actual control existing on 7 November 1959. Afraid that accepting Zhou’s position would mean having to vacate more than forty Indian strongholds established in the period between the two dates, Nehru decided to recall parliament and let members have the responsibility of debating and deciding the issue of his cease-fire proposal. After Menon was force to resign as defense minister on 7 November by the Congress Party’s own executive committee, Nehru practically surrendered India’s China policy to parliament for the next quarter century when he moved a resolution the next day in the Lok Sabha affirming the Indian people’s resolve to drive the Chinese “aggressor” from the “sacred soil” of India before starting any meaningful negotiations on the border dispute. Parliament’s debate on Nehru’s proposed cease-fire line was rancorous and divisive, with members of the ruling Congress Party joined by the small Communist Party of India urging acceptance, while the mood of members of the major opposition parties remained uncompromising.
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As parliament was arguing the ways and means of stopping the war, China declared a unilateral cease-fire along the border on 21 November, and announced that its troops would withdraw 20 kilometers behind the line of actual control as existing on 7 November 1959.

Shortly after the war, between December 1962 and January 1963, a conference of six non-aligned nations, comprising Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia, met in Colombo to work out a cease-fire acceptable to both China and India. In the eastern sector, the proposal called for the line of actual control to be treated as the cease-fire line. In the western sector, the proposals stipulated a Chinese withdrawal of 20 kilometers from the traditional customary line as claimed by the Chinese without any corresponding withdrawal by the Indians, creating a demilitarized zone to be administered by civilian posts of both sides. While the Chinese accepted the proposals as conditional on the basis that the civilian posts would not involve Indians, the Indian government, after much debate in parliament again, insisted that it would negotiate with China only if China accepted the proposals without reservations, like India. With the failure of the Colombo conference to bring both countries back to the negotiating table, China signed boundary agreements with Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan in December 1962, March 1963 and November 1963, after only a year, ten months and six months of negotiations respectively. All these boundary agreements were achieved through minor territorial concessions on China’s part, and recognition on the part of the other signatories that their mutual boundaries with China were hitherto undefined, as in the case of Mongolia and Afghanistan, or as with Pakistan, the product of colonial imposition. India started to adopt the foreign policy posture of the Soviet Union after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War; and during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, after China threatened a showdown on the Sino-Indian border to show support for Pakistan, India effectively abandoned its non-alignment stance by signing a security treaty with the Soviet Union. This security stand-off on a continental scale between India and the Soviet Union on one side, and China and Pakistan, joined by the US after the Sino-American normalization of 1972, on the other, would remain the overarching dynamic of Sino-Indian relations from the war of 1962 for the next twenty-five years.