Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0169/01695.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 28KB | 423 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01695}
$Pretitle{221}
$Title{India
Chapter 9B.   Relations with China and Small Neighbors}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Surjit Mansingh}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{india
china
indian
india's
border
nepal
chinese
tibet
relations
sri}
$Date{1985}
$Log{Commonwealth Meeting*0169501.scf
}
Country:     India
Book:        India, A Country Study
Author:      Surjit Mansingh
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1985

Chapter 9B.   Relations with China and Small Neighbors

     Throughout 1984 India and China continued their slow and cautious moves
toward improving a relationship that had fallen into a morass of hostility in
the early 1960s. India placed high priority on settlement of the boundary
questions as the touchstone of normalization. Discussions in 1983 and 1984
produced some guidelines for negotiation on the border but no agreement on
specific aspects of it. Although India and China engaged in cultural,
scientific, and commercial exchanges as both sought to diversify their
international dealings in the 1980s, their chosen paths of internal
development remained strikingly different.

     The two largest states of Asia had had few contacts with each other from
the time their cultures developed in ancient times right up until the 1950s.
Although Nehru predicted his vision of "resurgent Asia" on friendship between
India and China, he was uncertain about how to obtain this in the absence of
reciprocal compliments from the Chinese communist leaders who came to power in
1949. Moreover, there was an incipient conflict of interest in Tibet, a
geographical and political buffer zone where India had inherited special
privileges from the government of British India. China wanted to reassert
control over the farthest and most autonomous reach of the Qing Dynasty
(1644-1911) and to "liberate" the Tibetan people from Lamaism and feudalism.
It did so by force of arms in 1950.

     Nehru was confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, if India clung to
inherited privilege and condemned China's actions in the UN, India would
antagonize China, open itself to charges of "imperialist" collaboration, and
lock Tibet into cold war politics. On the other hand, if India abandoned all
rights in Tibet, it would leave the way open for Chinese expansion to the
great mountain barrier of the Himalayas and make India an accomplice in the
subjugation of the Tibetan people. Nehru knew that India could not defend its
outposts in Tibet and did not want to provoke further military action by
China. He adopted a course of action that was a compromise between the two
sides of the dilemma and the conflicting recommendations he was getting from
Ambassador K.M. Panikkar in China and Indian officials in Tibet, Xinjiang, and
New Delhi. He was persuaded that China, like India, would prefer peace in
order to be free to pursue development. Accordingly, he informed China that
India sought neither political nor territorial ambitions, nor did it seek
special privileges in Tibet, but that traditional trading rights must
continue. With Indian support, Tibetan delegates signed an agreement in May
1951 recognizing Chinese sovereignty and control but guaranteeing that the
existing political and social system in Tibet should continue. Direct
negotiations between India and China commenced in an atmosphere improved by
India's mediatory efforts in ending the Korean War.

[See Commonwealth Meeting: Commonwealth Meeting, November 1983, New Delhi
Courtesy Embassy of India, Washington]

     In April 1954 India and China signed an eight-year agreement on Tibet
that set forth the basis of their relationship in the form of the five
principles of peaceful coexistence, or panchasheel. These principles were
respect for each other's integrity and sovereignty, mutual nonaggression,
noninterference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit,
and peaceful coexistence. Although critics called panchasheel naive, it was
justified as being the best way of juxtaposing contrasting systems and beliefs
without conflict, and it became the basis of a network of international and
even domestic relationships in Asia. Nehru went further in praising it "as
making it difficult progressively for the other country to break trust." In
the absence of either the wherewithal or a policy for defense of the Himalayan
region, Nehru calculated that India's best guarantee of security was to press
friendship and reassurance on China, nurturing it in the habits of peaceful
coexistence. He hoped to stave off Chinese expansionism by words rather than
military cordons and attempted to erect a psychological buffer zone in place
of the lost buffer of Tibet. Thus the theme song of Indian diplomacy in the
1950s was Sino-Indian friendship - "Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai" (India and China
are brothers). The second part of the 1954 agreement dealt with the specifics
of trade and pilgrim travel. A serious omission was any reference to
respective jurisdictions in the Himalayas or definitions of borders, even with
respect to the six designated mountain passes used for trade. Up to 1959,
Chinese leaders amicably assured India that there was no territorial
controversy on the border and that the marked discrepancies between Indian and
Chinese maps were merely debris of the past.

     In practice, however, small border incidents occurred within months of
the 1954 treaty as both countries extended their administrations to hitherto
neglected frontier districts. The Indian government kept news of skirmishes
secret and their protests to China polite, but it was unable to continue doing
so when an Indian reconnaissance party discovered a completed Chinese road
running through the Aksai Chin part of the Ladakh district of Kashmir.
Thereafter, border clashes became more frequent and more serious; Parliament
showed a lively concern, and Indian protests became more strongly worded. In
January 1959 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai wrote to Nehru, rejecting the latter's
contention that the border was based on treaty and custom and pointing out
that no government in China had accepted as legal the 1914 Simla Convention
of the McMahon Line defining the eastern section of the Indo-Tibetan border.
Zhou Enlai's position was part of a broader ideological and territorial
confrontation with India caused, in part, by a revolt in Tibet against China's
control and policies of transformation and, perhaps, by resentment of India's
international prestige at the time.

     China's repressive counteractions in Tibet drove the Dalai Lama-spiritual
and temporal head of the Tibetan people-to seek sanctuary in India in March
1959; asylum was granted, and many thousands of Tibetan refugees settled in
India. Although the Dalai Lama was not permitted to engage in overt political
activity, he was greatly honored. China accused India of expansionism and
imperialism in Tibet and throughout the Himalayan region. China claimed
104,000 square kilometers of territory, over which India's maps showed clear
sovereignty, and demanded "rectification" of the entire border. Long articles
appeared in Chinese journals, attacking Nehru and analyzing in scathing terms
India's bourgeois economy, democratic polity, and friendship with the United
States. China commenced border negotiations with India's immediate
neighbors-Burma, Nepal, and Pakistan-in which it underlined India's
"obstinacy."

     Emotions in India ran high. A meeting between Nehru and Zhou Enlai led to
talks between officials in 1960 on the entire range of border issues. These
talks produced a mountain of documents, prepared mainly by the Indian side,
but little else. The Chinese team appeared to place less reliance on
historical research into treaty and custom than on the strong position their
forces enjoyed on the ground. Zhou Enlai proposed that China relinquish its
claim to most of India's Northeast in exchange for India's abandonment of its
claim to Aksai Chin. Although this proposal was not made public at that time,
it was