Every war can be traced back to its roots deep in the annals of history; wars do not come up out of the blue, rather they are the result of a sequence of slow, grinding steps that inevitably lead to the conclusion as battle. The Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 is no exception: its roots can be traced back to the Chinese annexation of Tibet wherein the first seeds of war were sown
After Indian independence in 1947, India had maintained missions in Lhasa and Gyangtse. Due to the close relations that existed between India and Tibet - going back centuries beyond the British trade treaties - and also because of the unsettled conditions of a China enwrapped in a bitter civil war, Tibet’s transactions with the outside world were conducted mainly through India. Well into 1950, Tibet was regarded as a free country. Indeed, China also had a mission in Lhasa, underlining the fact that Tibet was nominally independent.
On July 8, 1949, following the defeat of Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Government in the Chinese civil war, the Tibetan Government asked the Chinese mission to "vacate", calling upon its rights as an independent country to request the expulsion of diplomats. Tibetan records show that they had planned this expulsion of the Chinese agents for more than a year.
China invited Tibetans early in the 1950s to "accede peacefully" and backed up this emphatic plea by stationing an army near the city of Chamdo in East Tibet. An anxious Tibetan delegation hurriedly agreed to go to Peking to talk to the PRC themselves in an effort to defuse the sudden tension. On October 7, 1950, the day the Tibetan delegation was scheduled to arrive, 80,000 soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China attacked Tibet and announced its 'peaceful liberation'.
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Above: Map of pre-occupation Tibet |
The Dalai Lama was forced to sign, under duress, the " 17-Point Agreement of May 23, 1951", surrendering to the Chinese attack. Imposed on the Tibetan government, the "Agreement", the PRC claims, shows that Tibetans not only agreed to, but actually invited Chinese Communist troops to "liberate" Tibet.
This action, and the systematic devastation of the Tibetan people and culture, naturally, took both Tibet and India completely by surprise. Nehru complained that he had been "led to believe by the Chinese Foreign Office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner by direct negotiation with the representatives of Tibet." The legality, or lack thereof, and account of the PRC's invasion of an independent Tibet, though entwined in history with the '62 war, will be omitted in this project.
The huge public outcry in India protesting the Chinese invasion mainly dealt with the political and cultural facets of this issue. Prior to Indian independence, the British had earmarked Tibet as a neutral buffer zone in view of British India's defense environment vis-à-vis the similar imperialistic leanings of China and Russia. Barring a few people with acute perception, most Indian politicians, along with the common man, failed to anticipate the strategic ramifications of the Chinese aggression and the loss of this buffer.
Pandit Jaharwalal Nehru, the Prime Minister of the newly independent India, following his foreign policy of trying to establish its mutual, nonaligned relations on the international scene, held the view that India could ill afford a confrontation over Tibet at a nascent point in India's history, and especially so during the ongoing Korean War. On November 18, 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to the Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, saying, "We cannot save Tibet, as we should have liked to do, and our very attempt to save it might well bring greater trouble to it. It would be unfair to Tibet for us to bring this trouble upon her without having the capacity to help her effectively. It may be possible, however, that we might be able to help Tibet to retain a large measure of her autonomy."
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Above: A Buddhist Monastery in Ladakh district, Jammu and Kashmir State |
Instead of taking an interest in the whole Tibet issue, which could be argued in retrospect to be of the most critical import to India, Nehru had instead shown a greater interest in the Korean War. Indeed, India' under Nehru's leadership, went to great lengths to insure and assure that friendship with China was the keystone of India's foreign policy, and that India along with China could mutually hold the non-aligned balance of power in Asia. While high-minded, this impractical view was to result in disastrous, unforeseen consequences for India.
Nehru's two closest advisors at the time were the socialist-leaning Krishna Menon and India's then Ambassador to China during the Communist Revolution, K. M. Panikkar. They were largely responsible for Nehru's decision to recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Panikkar had strong Communist leanings - so much so that he successfully wished his daughter's marriage to a leading Communist labor leader. Panikkar, when called upon by Nehru, went so far as to fib that there was a "lack of confirmation" of the presence of Chinese troops in Tibet and argued that to protest the Chinese invasion of Tibet would be an "interference to India’s efforts on behalf of China in the UN." It seems that Panikkar was more interested in protecting Chinese interests in the UN than India’s own interests on the Tibetan border. Amazingly Nehru concurred with his Ambassador. He wrote, "our primary consideration is maintenance of world peace... Recent developments in Korea have not strengthened China’s position, which will be further weakened by any aggressive action [by India] in Tibet." So Nehru was ready to sacrifice India’s national security interests in Tibet so as not to weaken China’s case in the UN! He also was unclear about how his "primary consideration" of maintaining world peace would be served by the Chinese invasion of an independant-recognized Tibet. Patel scathingly remarked that the Panikkar "has been at great pains to find an explanation or justification for Chinese policy and actions."
Sardar Patel, however, wanted a strong line to be adopted against the Chinese aggression. He wrote to Nehru that "even though we regard ourselves as friends of China, the Chinese do not regard us as friends." India moreover had international support to this matter, with world opinion strongly against Chinese aggression in Tibet. The world, in fact, was looking to India to take the lead. The highly influential English publication The Economist echoed the Western viewpoint when it wrote: "Having maintained complete independence of China since 1912, Tibet has a strong claim to be regarded as an independent state. But it is for India to take a lead in this matter. If India decides to support independence of Tibet as a buffer state between itself and China, Britain and U.S.A. will do well to extend formal diplomatic recognition to it." It was a testament to Patel's vision that his prophecies of increasingly aggressive China, evident from his letters to Nehru at the time, were to be unfortunately proven correct in a decade's time. Sadly, instead of hardening its attitude towards China, India supplied 10,000 maunds of rice to Tibet under China, a year after its occupation, following reports of famine there. China made the demand to this effect and India obliged.
It would be instructive to briefly examine the Chinese claims on Tibet at this point, as the dispute over the "McMahon Line" that demarcated the border between India and China owes its origins to these claims.
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Above: Aksai Chin today |
The ostensible reason given by China when the PLA entered Tibet was to "liberate three million Tibetans from imperialist aggression, to complete the unification of the whole of China, and to safeguard the frontier regions of the country." Cutting through the propaganda reveals the underlying motive for their invasion - the safeguarding of Chinese territory by proactive engagement; the 'engagee' in this case being the Kingdom of Tibet. It is generally surmised that the reason behind China's invasion was to gain control of the highly strategic crossroads of Tibet that lead to the heart of Western, Central, South and South East Asia, and can be used as a springboard for engaging the same.
In 1842, the autonomous Tibetans and the Dogra rulers of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir signed a non-aggression pact on respecting the "old, established frontiers." The boundary was not specified. To clarify this, in 1847 the British delineated a boundary from the Spiti river up to the Pangong lake. The area further north up to the Karakoram Pass was left out. The first boundary alignment here was recorded in 1865 when W. H. Johnson of the Survey of India trekked across the Aksai Chin and drew a map including this in Jammu and Kashmir. Johnson was soon appointed Kashmir's commissioner in Ladakh. The Foreign Office came to be of the view that the border should be pushed further to the Kuen Lun range to absorb Aksai Chin and to put a British controlled buffer in between to forestall the presumed Russian advance, as the British did with Afghanistan, though nothing came of this.
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In 1892 the Chinese put a boundary marker at the Karakoram Pass and told the British officer and adventurer, Capt. Young, that Chinese territory began there and that the boundary ran along the Karakoram range. The reasons given for this was that Askai Chin is an "integral" and "sacred" part of Tibet, which the Chinese claim. In 1998, Chinese ambassador to India, Zhou Gang, quoted verbatim the Chinese government statement given to the British on this matter when he stated that "there exists no issue of China's evacuation from Aksai Chin because Aksai Chin has been China's territory since ancient times and ever since under the effective administration jurisdiction of China." Sadly, the claim has no credible historical, or legal, backing; while Tibet has always had varying degrees of freedom historically, and at various times it was autonomous, at other times it was integrated into a larger China, or allied with Indian kingdoms. Indeed, Tibet was also a tributary to the Mughal Empire in the subcontinent. Regardless, it was noted by both the British and the Chinese, even then, that the boundary marker could not be regarded as having any legal value in international law because the boundary was not demarcated jointly. |
In 1904, a British military expedition was sent to China under the leadership of Colonel Young to prevent China from falling under the influence of "foreign" powers. An Anglo-Tibetan treaty was signed with China that granted Britain trading rights and marked the origin of direct British influence in and of Tibet. An Anglo-Chinese treaty of 1906 followed up the previous treaty. Treaties not withstanding, the Chinese tried to capture Tibet many times until 1913, but failed to make headway against the British. In 1913, Tibet declared independence, and a conference was held in 1914 in Simla regarding Tibetan independence.
The Simla Conference was agreed to be a tripartite one, in which the Tibetans were an equal partner in the talks with the Chinese and British. Legalities of the Tibetan independence notwithstanding, this casts much doubt on the nature of Chinese position that states Tibet was merely a Chinese province. Tibet demanded recognition of their de facto sovereignty - a proposal intolerable to the Chinese, as China did not wish to give up their claim to Tibet, though they did not actually control it. It was decided that Tibet was to be divided into an Inner- and an Outer-Tibet. Eventually it was agreed that Outer-Tibet would accept Chinese "suzerainty" if its autonomous status were recognized, but in the end China refused to sign the treaty because of disagreements over the China-"inner Tibet" border - not the Tibet-India border - based on vague and ephemeral "historical boundaries."
When this happened, China lost the opportunity to be recognized as suzerain over Tibet in international law. Tibet was at the time functionally independent, as its government's participation in the border talks shows, and by no treaty had it agreed to accept Chinese suzerainty. In the end, the only legally binding outcome of the 1914 conference was that Britain and Tibet, represented by Sir Henry McMahon and Lonchen Shatra respectively, reached an agreement of a border settlement binding between themselves, bringing McMahon Line into being. To this meeting, the Chinese delegate was not invited, as the McMahon line was the agreement on the official demarcation of the border between Tibet and India; this highlights the fact that all the parties -China included- recognized that Tibet had full authority to negotiate its boundary with India. It is of crucial importance to note that the McMahon line legally had nothing to do with China.
To this date, the Chinese claim to the Indian areas is based upon the non-recognition of the McMahon Line, regardless of the recognition of Tibetan autonomy and Tibet's acceptance of the McMahon Line, which is is based on their illegal claim to Tibet. Seizing the opportunity to expand in the late 50s, they played upon quirky logic that would've been legally binding had Tibet been legally been part of China:
The first, (again, assuming Tibet is legally Chinese) is that the Tibetans, as a province of China, could not legally be signatories to the Simla Convention. Though the understood agreement that a Tibetan delegate was present, and the fact that Chou Enlai himself assured Nehru of Tibetan autonomy when the Chinese Prime Minister visited India in 1954. Also, the Chinese were never actual signatories to the Simla Convention, which was agreed to between the Tibetans and the British. Because a unilateral (solely British, since the Tibetan signature is not legally binding) agreement on a border demarcation is not valid, the whole McMahon line demarcation, which India inherited, comes into question.
Had these historical facts been put proactively forward by the Indian government in during the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, rather than dismissed out of apprehension of the geo-political situation, the world would have been appraised of the situation and the Indian locus stand would have been strengthened. Instead Mr. Nehru preferred a policy of appeasement and surrender to China and accepted this mammoth change in status quo. Regardless of vehement public outcry and hurt, the Indian government went so far as opposing the discussion of Tibet's appeal to the UN General Assembly of 23rd Nov 1950. Thus, the prescient in policy established was to cultivate Chinese friendship by buying it off. As events were to prove later, this was a most disastrous road to take. Nehru had failed to take into account that China had always tried to expand its territories at the expense of its neighbors, and a time would come when "Indian territory would have to be defended against the Chinese dragon."
Thus, the territories that came in dispute between India and China due to Chinese claims to Tibet are listed as follows:
1. The Eastern sector: 90,000 Sq. Km under Indian control then called the North-East Frontier Agency, or NEFA.
2. The Middle sector: 20,000 Sq. Km on either side of the Himalayan watershed and passes.
3. The Western sector: 30,000 Sq. Km of high plateau country known as the Aksai Chin in the district of Ladakh of Jammu and Kashmir state bordering Tibet and Xinjiang province of China.
