China's Territorial Disputes (29 page)

India not only lost territory in the war; it suffered a humiliating blow to its national dignity, made worse by China’s magnanimously voluntary retreat from captured Indian soil and subsequent call for further negotiations on the last proposal put forth by Zhou Enlai in 1960. All three non-Communist main Indian opposition parties - Swatantra, the Praja Socialist Party (PJP), and Jana Sangh - condemned the Chinese invasion, castigated their own government for trusting Chinese intentions, and cast expletives at Pakistan and its increasingly warm ties with China.
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Jana Sangh even went so far as to call for diplomatic ties with “Formosa.”
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In an ironic twist, China’s attack on India did the most damage to the political standing of the Communist Party of India (CPI) leadership and Nehru, who until then had been the most consistent supporters of Chinese ideological aims and foreign policy actions, especially the Indian Communists. In the face of increasing pressure on the country’s northern borders and the upsurge of nationalism, and the open rift between Beijing and Moscow, the CPI condemned the Chinese “aggression,” and in April 1964 split into two parties with internationalist and nationalist positions, neither of which was pro-Chinese. Shocked and saddened by what he considered the “Chinese betrayal” of his friendship, Nehru became despondent after the Sino-Indian War and died within two years. The Chinese did not use their Indian allies in parliament and CPI-controlled states like West Bengal to create more favorable political conditions for border negotiations, like making more concessions on the western sector. Instead, they allowed themselves to be perceived as being aggressive and demanding, thus putting their Indian supporters in the very difficult position of being viewed as too sympathetic to the adversary’s cause. Perhaps the Chinese failed to create “synergy” with their most steadfast constituents in India because they did not appreciate the difficulties that Nehru and the CPI leadership were encountering in trying to manoeuver through India’s rancorous democratic system in its mood of nationalistic fervor. Perhaps they just did not care that what they destroyed was not only Nehru’s vision of a non-aligned India promoting pan-Asianism with China and Third World nationalism through peaceful means, but that his vision was also that of India’s self-perceived role of its own identity in the community of nations. Whatever the case, the attack would leave China with no more real friends in India.

I think the second hypothesis is the more accurate one, at least up till the start of the war. In a study on the perceptions of threat in the Chinese press in 1962,
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it was found that while the authoritative
People's Daily
was all excited about possible American collusion with the Chiang Kai-shek “clique” to launch an invasion of the mainland from Taiwan, it devoted little space or emphasis on Indian verbal and diplomatic actions. While the Chinese press had always treated Indian military activities along the border with some concern, it was only after Nehru rejected the last Chinese proposal for troop withdrawals and border negotiations in July 1962 that the Chinese press sharply escalated its tone of alarm. We should also be reminded that although mass demonstrations were orchestrated throughout Chinese cities to support Cuba during the US-USSR confrontation over the missile crisis, at no time before or during the border war did this become the subject of a mass rally.
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Symptomatic of Chinese perception of India, the country just did not evoke much of a relevance or concern, let alone alarm, for the Chinese as a whole, which perhaps best explains their “insensitivity” toward India’s national dignity or institutional gridlock in foreign policy making.

Although the chances of promoting a favorable outcome to the border dispute practically ended with the failure of Zhou’s final mission to India in April 1960, China’s decision to turn border skirmishes into a major war is still very much a puzzle of China’s foreign policy undertaking. We do know that it was taken at the highest level. General Zhang Guohua, the Tibet Military District commander, was recalled to Beijing and returned to Lhasa on 8 October 1962 with orders to prepare for war.
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According to a Chinese documentary film on the Sino-Indian War, it was Mao himself who, despite wiser counsel not to create too many enemies for China, gave the order to drive the Indians out of NEFA and back from Aksai Chin, saying: “Let’s not fight if we don’t have to; but if we have to, let’s give them a good one.”
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This had seemed to be Mao’s one sure calculus of deterrence, to secure his country’s frontiers from possible foreign “nibbling,” be the foreigners Indians, Soviets or others; and to make China’s strength felt throughout Asia and the world. In the case of India, it also seemed to have become a safe but calculated challenge to Moscow to come out clearly on where it stood with regard to its support for Beijing or New Delhi in the immediate border conflict and the larger issue of Sino-Soviet relations. At least, we know this was what Khrushchev believed was Mao’s calculation.
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Neville Maxwell made a cogent argument in assigning principal culpability for the war to Nehru for agreeing only to hold mere “talks” rather than real negotiations which would have required him to make the meaningful concessions he was not prepared to. However, I am more partial to Indian Chinese scholar Nancy Jetly’s argument that Nehru had a genuine desire to negotiate an end to the border dispute while holding fast to India’s national dignity and adopting a “forward policy” he thought best protected India’s security position. However, Nehru’s initiative and room for maneuver
vis-a-vis
China over the boundary issue was severely compromised by the hostile mood of the parliamentary opposition, the vacillating attitude of sections of his own Congress Party, and nationalist sentiment throughout the articulate portion of the country. Nehru’s failure to settle the border crisis was that, in spite of his towering nationalist standing and his party’s overwhelming majority in parliament, he still sought parliamentary and public advice and approval for his foreign policy direction, and accepted the constitutional constraints providing for parliamentary supremacy and a free press. On the other hand, the blame for turning a dispute into war on the Chinese side must be laid at the foot of a helmsman with a penchant for reckless pronouncements and grandiose fantasies who wanted to teach territorial “nibblers” a lesson, and at the same time sought to challenge Soviet leadership in the Socialist bloc and limit Nehru’s influence in the Third World. Unfortunately, the war not only did not solve the boundary dispute, it would lead to a virtual freezing of Sino-Indian diplomatic, military, cultural and trading ties for the next fifteen years.

While Mao was still alive, there was one last subtle attempt by the Chinese to normalize relations with the Indians. During the May Day parade in Peking on 1 May 1970, Mao summoned the Indian charge d’affaires to the Tiananmen Square rostrum and chatted with him. From the Chinese cultural point of view, it was a very major gesture and message - an audience by the Great Helmsman to a mere diplomat. However, although then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi welcomed the Chinese peace feelers, the Indian government reacted cautiously, to avoid any possible public ridicule, and there would be no follow-up to this attempted opening.
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Normalization and Sino-Indian dialogue: 1976-1987

By the spring of 1976, of the two protagonists of the 1962 War on the Chinese side, Zhou Enlai was dead and Mao Zedong was dying. Prime Minister Gandhi and her advisors decided that the time was ripe to normalize relations with China, even in the absence of a guaranteed Chinese response. Later, foreign minister Y B. Chavan was to point out that the decision was taken in the face of “considerable skepticism” on the part of the “pro-Soviet” faction in the Ministry of External Affairs, and stubborn resistance within the bureaucratic machinery.
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To explore possibilities of restarting discussions on the border question, K. R. Narayanan was dispatched by the Indian government as ambassador to China in April 1976, after a hiatus in diplomatic representation of fourteen years, during which both countries made do with charges d’affaires to head their respective missions. China in return named Zheng Zhaoyuan as ambassador to India. When Morarji Desai became Indian prime minister in March 1977, as head of the first non-Congress Party government since India’s independence, he was determined to correct what he thought to be India’s over-reliance on its alliance with the Soviet Union. Then foreign minister Atul Vajpayee was dispatched to China in February 1979 to explore the possible basis for settling the territorial issue and further improvements in relations. Although he won concessions from the Chinese not to support any longer the tribal insurgents and Maoist agitators in NEFA and elsewhere in India, Vajpayee’s visit was cut short by his decision to return to India on being notified of China’s attack on Vietnam, which he took as a deliberate insult reminiscent of China’s behavior in 1962. The limited weight India carried in the policy-making decisions of the Chinese leadership was harshly criticized by Indira Gandhi as opposition leader, but after her return to the premiership in January 1980, and following the visit of Chinese foreign minister Huang Hua in June 1981, both sides agreed to restart discussions on the border issue.

That the China visit by the Indian foreign minister took place two years after it was first mooted demonstrates how factionalism can undermine a leader’s control over foreign policy. The Janata party in power from mid-1977 to mid-1979 was a loose political coalition constantly threatened with defection by its constituent units. Furthermore, Prime Minister Desai and his foreign minister Vajpayee often disagreed on foreign policy, for example on the importance of the border issue to the pace of Sino-Indian normalization. The fragile consensus within Janata made it pertinent to build a consensus within the political party, and even without, on issues over which contention may arise. For this reason, the views of ordinary members of parliamentary committees and cabinet advisors had real influence on foreign policy decisions for the first time since the Sino-Indian War.
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With Mrs Gandhi’s return to power in January 1980, foreign policy was back again firmly in the hands of the prime minister. Since then, the government had not considered it necessary to mobilize or assuage public, or even parliamentary, opinion for its major foreign policy undertakings, such as initiating a dialogue with the PRC on the disputed border question.
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More than anything else, it was Mrs Gandhi’s confidence in her parliamentary majority, and also the willingness on the part of the Chinese leadership, which made possible the resumption of boundary negotiations.

India officially maintains that China had occupied and held on to more than

38,000 square kilometers of the Indian territory of Aksai Chin and adjacent parts of the western sector. China asserts that more than 90,000 square kilometers of Chinese territory in the eastern sector is still under Indian occupation, the former NEFA that was subsequently incorporated as the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. While India stressed that resolution of the boundary question was central to the restoration of confidence and normalization of relations between the two countries, China maintained that by seeking common ground and reserving differences, a favorable atmosphere would be generated for resolution of the dispute when time was “ripe” for its settlement. Their negotiating positions were indeed far apart.

Then in June 1980, Deng Xiaoping resurrected Zhou Enlai’s 1960 proposal for a resolution of the Sino-Indian border dispute along the line of actual control and reciprocal abandonment of claims in the eastern and western sectors, a proposal that Indian foreign minister Narasimha Rao welcomed as a point of departure for the forthcoming series of border talks. Although never acknowledged by either government, it was understood that any permanent border settlement between India and China must be acceptable to public and political opinion in both countries, impinging as it did on national pride and dignity, which must be openly espoused and upheld by the authorities in power. As such, negotiations would have to proceed slowly, and any trade-off or concessions to be made toward an eventual agreement would have to be given careful attention by both sides, taking into consideration the probability of ratification by each other’s domestic constituencies.

Hoping to preempt the forthcoming boundary talks, a group of Indian parliamentarians including members of the ruling Congress Party, sent a publicized message to the government in Taiwan on 10 October 1981, greeting the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the “Republic of China.”
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Chinese animosity was not aroused, the Indian government was not intimidated, and the attempt failed. However, this just demonstrates one possible expression of domestic political opposition in a democratic country to any form of territorial compromise.

The first round of official talks on the border issue was held on 10-14 December 1981, and five subgroups were formed consisting of representatives from both sides to deal with matters concerning the boundary, trade and economic cooperation, cultural exchanges and science and technology.
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China offered to accept Indian claims over NEFA and the validity of the McMahon Line in anything but name in exchange for India’s recognition of China’s claims over Aksai Chin. India was looking for some recognition of its rights over

Kashmir and Sikkim, but China refused to deal. As it has been said that many in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs had bitter memories of the humiliating defeat inflicted on India by China, it was apparent that the “doves” in the MEA who were in favor of the Chinese proposal failed to convince the “hawks” to settle. The second and third round of talks, held in New Delhi in May 1982 and Beijing in January 1983 respectively, made no progress on the border question. However, both sides used the occasions to expand cultural, technical and economic exchanges, hoping that so doing would create the constituency and augment the momentum conducive to the continuation of negotiations by widening the support for bilateral links and increasing the cost of non-agreement.