The medium-term dimension related to the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet in 1950. So long as it was semi-independent, Tibet served as a buffer state for India. Besides, there were close and continuing connections between India and Tibet, as in an active cross-border trade, and regular visits of Hindu pilgrims to the holy mountain of Kailas. There were thus strategic as well as sentimental reasons for India to be concerned about what, from their point of view, was an excessive Chinese presence in Tibet after 1950.
The short-term dimension was the flight of the Dalai Lama into India in the spring of 1959. That he was given refuge the Chinese government could perhaps accept; that he was treated as an honoured visitor, and that a steady stream of influential Indians queued up to meet him, they could not abide. What upset them most was the mobilization of anti-Chinese and pro-Tibetan sentiment by the Opposition parties in India.
Nehru could have perhaps been less trusting of the Chinese in the early 1950s. But he could scarcely have gone to war on the Tibetans’ behalf. India was newly independent; it was a poor and divided country. There were a clutch of domestic problems to attend to, among them the cultivation of a spirit of national unity, the promotion of economic development, and the nurturing of democratic institutions. War would have set back these efforts by decades. It would have led to political instability, and economic privation.
After the Dalai Lama fled into India, the balancing act became more delicate still. Nehru could scarcely hand him back to the Chinese. Nor could be keep him imprisoned and isolated. The exiled leader had to be provided refuge, consistent with his dignity and stature. In a democracy that encouraged debate, and in a culture that venerated spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama would attract visitors, who would make public their admiration for him and their distaste for his persecutors. Nehru could hardly put a stop to this; nor, on the other hand, could he use the situation of the Dalai Lama to wag a threatening finger at the Chinese.
The open manifestation of support for the Tibetans and their leader brings us to the second structural reason behind the failure to solve the border dispute—the fact that China was a one-party state and India a multiparty democracy. When, on his visit to New Delhi in 1960, Zhou Enlai complained about the protection afforded to the Dalai Lama, the senior Cabinet Minister Morarji Desai compared the status of the Tibetan leader to that of Karl Marx, who was given sanctuary by the British after he was exiled from his native Germany.
This, perhaps, was a debating point—and Morarji Desai was a skilled debater—but the fact that the two political regimes differed so radically had a powerful bearing on the dispute. Thus, when a group of anti-Communist protesters raised Free Tibet slogans and defaced a portrait of Mao outside the Chinese consulate in Mumbai, Beijing wrote to New Delhi that this was ‘a huge insult to the head of state of the People’s Republic of China and the respected and beloved leader of the Chinese people’, an insult which ‘the masses of the six hundred and fifty million Chinese people absolutely cannot tolerate’. If the matter was ‘not reasonably settled’, the complaint continued, the ‘Chinese side will never come to a stop without a satisfactory settlement of the matter, that is to say, never stop even for one hundred years’.
In its reply, the Indian government accepted that the incident was ‘deplorable’. But it pointed out that ‘under the law in India processions cannot be banned so long as they are peaceful … Not unoften they are held even near the Parliament House and the processionists indulge in all manner of slogans against high personages in India. Incidents have occurred in the past when portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and the Prime Minister were taken out by irresponsible persons and treated in an insulting manner. Under the law and Constitution of India a great deal of latitude is allowed to the people so long as they do not indulge in actual violence.’
That one state was totalitarian and the other democratic had a critical impact on how the debate was framed, on why it escalated, and why it could not be resolved. After the border clashes of 1959, Opposition MPs asked that the official correspondence between the two countries be placed in the public domain. The demand was conceded, whereupon the evidence of Chinese claims further inflamed and angered public opinion. Now Zhou arrived in Delhi, with his offer of a quid pro quo. You overlook our transgressions in the west, said the Chinese leader, and we shall overlook your transgressions in the east.
In a dictatorship, such as China, a policy once decided upon by its top leaders did not require the endorsement of anyone else. In India, however, treaties with other nations had to be discussed and debated by Parliament. In purely instrumental terms, Zhou’s proposal was both pragmatic and practicable. However, Nehru could not implement the agreement on its own; he had to discuss it with his colleagues in party and government, and, pending their acceptance, place it on the floor of the House, with the ensuing debates reported and widely discussed in the newspapers.
Cabinet, Parliament, and public opinion were three facets of social and political life in India, that were wholly absent in China. Mao and Zhou did not have to contend with these facets or forces, whereas Nehru was confined and circumscribed by them. Thus, knowledge of Chinese maps that made claims that clashed with India’s, knowledge of a Chinese road on land claimed by India, knowledge of Indian soldiers killed by Chinese soldiers, knowledge of the persecution of supporters of the Dalai Lama—all this led to a rising tide of nationalist outrage inside and outside Parliament. And with members of his own Cabinet firmly opposed to a settlement, Nehru had no chance of seeing it through.
IX
Behind the border dispute lay the respective national and civilizational aspirations of the two countries. Now, in 2012, with surging growth rates and sixty years of independent development behind them, China and India seek great power status. In the 1950s, however, they sought something apparently less ambitious but which, in the context of their recent colonial history, was as important, namely a respect in the eyes of the world comparable with their size, the antiquity of their civilization, and the distinctiveness of their national revolution.
Towards the end of 1959, after the first clashes on the border, and the arrival into India of the Dalai Lama, Jawaharlal Nehru was interviewed by the American journalist Edgar Snow. In Snow’s recollection, Nehru told him that ‘the basic reason for the Sino-Indian dispute was that they were both “new nations”, in that both were newly independent and under dynamic nationalistic leaderships, and in a sense were meeting at their “frontiers” for the first time in history; hence it was natural that a certain degree of conflict should be generated before they could stabilize their frontiers.’ Nehru added that in the past there were ‘buffer zones’ between the two countries/civilizations, but now India and China were ‘filling out, and meeting [for the first time] as modern nations on the borders’.
Nehru was speaking here not as a politician—whether pragmatic or idealist—but as a student of history. In this, more detached, role, he could see that a clash of arms, and of ideologies and aspirations behind it, was written into the logic of the respective and collective histories of India and China.
X
In 1961, when relations between the two countries had more or less broken down, India withdrew its ambassador to Beijing. China did likewise. For the next fifteen years, the two countries ran skeletal offices in each other’s capital. Finally, in 1976, full diplomatic relations were resumed. In the same year Mao Zedong died.
Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as the most important leader in China soon after Mao’s death, wished to overcome the baggage of 1962, and set relations between the two countries on a new footing. In the early 1980s, he invited Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to visit Beijing. Serving diplomats were sympathetic, but Mrs Gandhi’s foreign policy advisor—who had been the last ambassador in Beijing before the war—rejected the proposal, saying that the Chinese could never be trusted. ‘They killed her father’, were the words he used, when the gist of Deng’s invitation was conveyed to him.
After Nehru’s gran
dson, Rajiv Gandhi, took over as prime minister of India, the invitation was renewed. In December 1988, Rajiv Gandhi visited China, the first Indian leader of any substance to do so for more than thirty years. He had a ninety-minute meeting with Deng, who is said to have told him, ‘You are the young. You are the future.’
In a public speech in Beijing, Rajiv Gandhi remarked that ‘it is now time to look beyond the past; it is now time to look forward to the future. It is now time to restore the relationship between our countries to a level commensurate with the contribution which our civilizations made to the world, to a level commensurate with the centuries of friendship between our two countries, to a level commensurate with the contribution which today we must take together to the building of a new world order. Between us, we represent a third of humanity. There is much we can do together.’
The sentiments were Nehruvian, and indeed, the speech was most likely drafted by two scholars who had watched Nehru work firsthand. However, Rajiv Gandhi’s hopefulness was called into question by some Indian commentators. A columnist in the Statesman noted that the territorial disputes between the two countries remained unresolved. These were, he said, ‘the strongest and certainly the most important element in the connection between the two countries’. He chastised ‘the myth-makers, the political pundits, the fashionable fellow-travellers, [and] the fervent promoters of Pan-Asianism’ for ‘working overtime to build up the case for friendship in disregard to the border …’
This scepticism was also expressed in a letter to The Hindu from K. Vedamurthy, who had been a close associate of Nehru’s colleague-turned-critic, Rajaji. He recalled the debacle of 1962, and noted also that China had seamlessly moved from being pro-Soviet to being pro-American when it suited them. ‘We in India,’ wrote Vedamurthy, ‘should not be once again caught in any euphoria of the kind in which we were when Pandit Nehru returned to Delhi from his apparent triumph in the Bandung Conference [of non-aligned nations] of the ’50s. By all means let us repair our relations … but let us also remember that what governs international relations is the enlightened self-interest of the countries concerned and not any ideology … Eternal vigilance, as always, remains the price of liberty.’
Three years after Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing, the Indian economy opened itself out to the world. At first, the growing international trade was chiefly with the West and the Middle East. Slowly, Chinese goods began to enter the Indian market, and vice versa.
In 2003, another Indian prime minister visited Beijing. This was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who, as a young, right-wing, pro-American member of Parliament in the late 1950s, had regularly attacked Jawaharlal Nehru for being too trusting of the Chinese. Now, Vajpayee signed a document accepting that Tibet was an integral part of China.
Two years later, the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, came to India. He chose first to come to Bangalore, the centre of the software industry, going later to the political capital, New Delhi. Seconding (or perhaps explaining) the sequence, the Chinese ambassador in New Delhi said in a press conference that ‘the “B” of business is more important than the “B” of boundary’.
The most recent figures estimate the annual trade between China and India at $60 billion, up from roughly zero in the 1990s. India exports iron ore and cotton to China, and imports heavy machinery and electronics in return. Indian software and pharmaceutical firms seek a share of the Chinese market; Chinese companies think that they are best placed to build the highways, bridges and ports that India so urgently requires.
Still, despite the steady increase in trade, and the rhetoric that sometimes accompanies it, the ‘B’ of boundary disputes has not entirely gone away. Every now and then, Chinese newspapers claim the eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh to be their territory. In 2009, when the Dalai Lama sought to visit the ancient Buddhist monastery in Tawang—which lies deep inside Arunachal—Beijing demanded that the Government of India stop him. New Delhi declined to interfere—the Dalai Lama, they said, was a spiritual leader who was going on a spiritual pilgrimage. Pressing their case, the Chinese have since refused to issue visas to residents of Arunachal Pradesh, as to do so would be to recognize it as being part of India.
On the Indian side, suspicions linger about Chinese intentions. Among the Hindu right-wing and some sections of the military, there is talk of Chinese attempts to throw a ‘string of pearls’ to encircle India, by building and then controlling ports in Gwadar in Pakistan, Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chittagong in Bangladesh, and Kyaukphyu in Myanmar. China’s consistent support to Pakistan (long a haven for terrorists who have regularly attacked India) is also a sore point in the relationship.
China and India are not the deadly enemies they were between 1959 and 1962; nor are they the close and intimate friends that, back in the 1940s and early 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru had hoped they would be. The border dispute remains unresolved; and so it will be for some time. After denouncing the McMahon Line for so long, the Chinese cannot suddenly turn around and accept it; while any significant concessions from the Indian side will have to be discussed in Parliament, to be subjected to, and very likely rejected by, an always contentious Opposition. Meanwhile, the presence of a large and vocal Tibetan community in India still irks the Chinese; as does the steady popularity the Dalai Lama enjoys within India and across the world.
XI
There is a noticeable asymmetry in the ways in which the war of 1962 is viewed in the two countries that fought it. The Indian sense of humiliation, so visible in some circles even five decades later, is not matched by a comparable triumphalism in China. This may be because the Chinese fought far bloodier wars against Japan, and among themselves. At any rate, while histories of modern India devote pages and pages to the conflict (my own India after Gandhi has two chapters on the subject), histories of modern China (such as those written by Jonathan Fenby, Jonathan Spence, and others) devote at most a few paragraphs to it. Likewise, the conflict with India merits barely a passing reference in biographies of Mao or Zhou, whereas the conflict with China occupies a dominant place in biographies of Nehru.
This asymmetry is also in part a product of the fact that while Nehru wrote a great deal about how he saw China, his counterparts in Beijing did not leave behind books or essays that speak about India. Meeting Mao Zedong in the 1930s, Edgar Snow told him about Gandhi and his non-violent movement for freedom, without evoking much interest. Mao’s collected works hardly refer to India at all. From Zhou Enlai’s statements on the border dispute we get a sense of the great stress he laid on the antiquity of the Chinese civilization. But of his impressions and opinions of the other great Asian civilization we get no hint.
In the popular imagination, Nehru’s place in history is assessed principally across three axes—his role in the independence movement; his economic policy; and his foreign policy in general but with particular reference to China. With regard to the first he is generally judged a hero. With regard to the second the judgement has varied across time—once celebrated for forging an autonomous path of economic development, Nehru has more recently been demonized for shackling the forces of individual enterprise and innovation. (However, with the global financial crisis and the growth of crony capitalism within India, Nehru’s economic record may yet be regarded in less dark terms.) With regard to the third, the verdicts are less ambiguous. Most Indians now believe that Nehru betrayed the country’s interests in his dealings with China.
This essay has sought to qualify and nuance that judgement. For, Nehru was not as much in control of these events as commonly supposed. The border conflict had deep structural roots, and was made more intractable by contingent factors such as the Tibet question and the different, and in a sense rival, political regimes in the two countries. At the same time, the massive emotional investment of Indians in the defeat of 1962 is also not commensurate with the event itself. A mere 3,000 soldiers died on the battlefield, far fewer than Indian casualties in the two World Wars, and a trivial number compared with the loss of life that acc
ompanied the Partition of India. It was really a skirmish rather than a war. Nor did it really change the facts on the ground, since the Chinese withdrew to where they were before the battle began.
The border dispute, the question of Tibet, and the difference between the two countries’ political systems—these remain, to influence and determine India–China relations in 2012, as they did in 1952 or 1962. Such is the argument of the historian, based (he thinks) on a dispassionate analysis of both evidence and context. But while the historian may document, and contextualize, the conventional wisdom will most likely remain impervious to his work. Citizens and ideologues shall continue to personalize a political conflict, seeing it principally through the lens of what Jawaharlal Nehru did or did not do, or is believed to have done and not done, with regard to China. Neglecting the deeper structural forces that underlay the conflict, neglecting also the lack of foresight or preparedness of other arms of government—the bureaucracy and army among them—Indian public opinion has made the military defeat of 1962 Nehru’s failure alone. Thus the image, so popular then and now, of an old and broken man taking his defeat to the cremation ground, an image that may be emotionally satisfying but which altogether lacks historical plausibility.
I shall end this essay with a verdict on Nehru’s China policies that combines the empathetic, the pitying, and the contemptuous. It was offered by H.V. Kamath, a former civil servant turned freedom fighter, who served several terms in Parliament and was jailed both by the British and during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. In a book entitled Last Days of Jawaharlal Nehru, published in 1977, Kamath took his readers back to a Parliament session in September 1963, when he saw ‘an old man, looking frail and fatigued, with a marked stoop in his gait, coming down the gangway opposite with slow, faltering steps, and clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended’. The man was Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India at this time for the past sixteen years.