India Berates Nehru
SABAVALA, SHAROKH
India Berates Nehru Communist China's border aggression has exploded Sino-lndian friendship and aroused public opinion against Prime Minister's foreign policy By Sharokh Sabavala BOMBAY "THE...
...For the first time, he is being told openly that his foreign policy is a failure, that he has failed to stand up to China, that he has provided unnecessary comfort to Communism, both at home and abroad...
...China has a feeling that if India...
...Most important of all, the Chinese onslaught has devastated the carefully built structure of Communism in India...
...All this, however, has not satisfied public opinion here...
...In Lhasa, meanwhile, Chinese military leaders, addressing public meetings, were calling for a new federation of Mongolian peoples under Peking's hegemony...
...This is the opinion of Asoka Mehta...
...Fortunately for that friendship...
...The maps, meanwhile, have been reproduced in Russia and East Europe for the "education" of Communist school children...
...In the first week of September 1959, in a formal note to India...
...It is planned strategy to impose Communist ideology upon unwilling people...
...On this and other points, an adamant Prime Minister continues to be assailed...
...Everyone is busy congratulating the British electorate for putting the Tories back—a trend unprecedented in the annals of Indian history—and there is barely-concealed impatience with the fact that the Indian general elections still are two years away...
...For at least five years now, Chinese maps have been showing as much as 40.000 square miles of Indian territory in the Himalayas as belonging to the Peoples' Republic...
...Peking's export drive collapsed after a few months of spectacular effort...
...That the Chinese do not seem to care what India thinks or feels is equally obvious from Peking's contemptuous refusal to answer Nehru's notes, from the studied insults recently offered the Indian Ambassador in China, and up to very recently from the deliberate harassSHAROKH SABAVALA, NEW LEADER correspondent in India, also writes for the Christian Science Monitor...
...which a trusting Indian Government then was holding with a dozen members of the local militia...
...The Chinese accepted this as a settled boundary...
...defying the directive of its Central Executive, has endorsed a Socialist party resolution condemning China...
...The threat from China, therefore, is no momentary aberration...
...In the same year, a dispute arose over grazing lands in the Bara Hoti plateau bordering the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, but there the Chinese withdrew when Indian parties appeared on the scene to regain possession...
...China was told that the McMahon line was a dividing barrier, sanctified by treaty and usage, and that not even minor revisions of the Sino-Indian frontier could be countenanced until aggression was vacated...
...And the problem of Kashmir still remains...
...ment of Indian trade representatives and merchants in Tibet...
...In Bombay, the local wing of the Party...
...A former Chief of Staff has been appointed Governor of Assam...
...Then came Tibet...
...This was enough for India...
...Thus, Communism is back where it was in 1942, when it emerged from underground with British permission to help the war effort and to provide information about Congress leaders who were calling for a "Quit India" movement...
...Newspapers and leading personalities across the country continue to call for his dismissal from the Defense Ministry, casting doubts on his loyalty to party and country...
...The ruling party's socialist pattern, thanks to recent events in the field of foreign affairs, is discredited and reviled...
...The result is the birth of criticism and opposition...
...Peking accused New Delhi of sponsoring the Tibetan uprising: the hill resort of Kalimpong was alleged to be its "command center...
...Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru now admits he hid this information from Parliament for 18 months in the hope that diplomatic-persuasion would work before divulgence of deliberate provocation and aggression created an uproar in India...
...Two years ago a series of pinpricks began in this theoretically usurped region...
...We can have no truck with these people anymore," he told a meeting of his own party executive, which now is waiting for the first legislative measure to ban the Communist party in India...
...In Calcutta, a Communist redoubt, the Reds have not been heard from for the last month...
...the Independent Kingdom of Nepal and the eastern Ladakh region of Kashmir...
...since the Chinese stand was a corollary to the attitude taken up in 1951 when China overran Tibet...
...That year, too, Peking launched its "Great Leap Forward" in exports, deliberately trying to capture traditional Indian markets in South Asia by undercutting and massive "dumping" of cheap goods on credit...
...The explosion also shattered the Panch Shila (Five Principles of Coexistence), the Bandung myth that China had no expansionist aims in Asia, and the sedulously Nehru-cultivated legend that the Indian Communist party, by and large, was a democratic institution...
...For the first time since he entered politics more than 30 years ago, India's leader wilted before his countrymen's wrath...
...The federation was to include parts of the oil-rich Indian state of Assam, the Indian protectorates of Bhutan and Sikkim...
...In October the two countries sat down together to settle their own border problems and to straighten out financial matters, a legacy of the subcontinent's partition...
...The McMahon Line got its name from Sir Henry McMahon, who was British plenipotentiary at the Simla Conference which produced the tripartite British-Chinese-Tibetan Convention of July 1914...
...For five years, polite inquiries about this cartographic invasion have brought forth the invariable reply that these are old Kuomintang maps which the Communist Republic just has not got around to altering...
...It recognized Tibet's autonomy, forbid China to send civil or military officers into Tibet and established the McMahon Line...
...The Indian Communist party, called fifth columnist by ruling Congress party President Indira Gandhi and traitorous by everyone else, was unequivocally informed by the Prime Minister that henceforth any anti-national activity would be sternly dealt with...
...All that has happened since—even after the Sino-Indian Treaty of 1954—clearly establishes the intentions of the Chinese...
...In New Delhi, the bazaar grapevine is busy spreading amusing stories of violent quarrels at Party headquarters...
...To cap it all, India is accused of imperialist intentions...
...Step by step Nehru and his Cabinet were forced to show open friendship for the Dalai Lama, give him and 13,000 Tibetans asylum, and watch helplessly while he made a royal progress from the Assam border to his new home in the Himalayan foothills north of New Delhi...
...Sino-Indian friendship literally exploded in Nehru's face...
...The former Chief Minister of Kerala admits it is now going to be doubly difficult to win the state elections due in February...
...Also being hurried is the World Bank's plan to distribute canal waters in East India over which a dispute has raged for 10 long years...
...This has not, however, saved the Communist-Socialist working alliance in Western India...
...Defense Minister V. K. Krishna Menon, on Nehru's orders, still will not defend Tibet at the UN...
...Chinese leaders began talking of Indian imperialism...
...Chinese Premier Chou En-lai laid claim to the 40,000 square miles of Indian territory shown to be Chinese in the supposedly old and incorrect Kuomintang maps...
...member of Parliament and a leader of the Praja Socialist party of India...
...This should have caused no surprise to the Government of India...
...Indian Communists were "instructed" to call him a liar...
...Nehru is also being pushed in the direction of a rapprochement with Pakistan...
...It is among the most reasonable answers to the question of why China has now moved to blow sky-high its hitherto prized and much-vaunted 2.000-year-old friendship with this country...
...Protests of Indian businessmen and merchants were shrugged off by the Indian Government, once again in the sacred cause of friendship...
...He called for a revision of the whole border and repudiated the international McMahon Line...
...The Convention, ratified by Britain and Tibet, was initialled but never signed by China...
...India Berates Nehru Communist China's border aggression has exploded Sino-lndian friendship and aroused public opinion against Prime Minister's foreign policy By Sharokh Sabavala BOMBAY "THE REASON that Communist China is committing aggression against India is that it wants to secure 'positions' on India's natural frontiers in order to make it (India) completely vulnerable...
...After occupying this most inhospitable corner of the world's roof and ignoring the first of many Indian protest notes, they then proceeded to build a road across the territory...
...Longju and 5,000 square miles of Indian territory still are occupied...
...Before long, the friendship began to disintegrate...
...The whole frontier region was handed over to the Indian Army in 24 hours...
...His speech on this subject in New York, according to New Delhi's Hindustan Times, was "disgusting, degrading, humiliating and rank appeasement...
...The northern border, hitherto thought of as safe, now gets everyone's attention, and everything that the Army does or does not do there is a subject of rumor and speculation...
...To underline the formal demand, local Chinese commanders attacked and overwhelmed the border outpost of Longju in the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region of Assam...
...This runs for nearly 700 miles from the east of Bhutan and the north and east of Assam to a point where China, Tibet and Burma meet...
...The Chinese suddenly swooped on the Aksaichin region of Ladakh in Kashmir...
...That the friendship has been blown sky-high cannot be doubted by anyone who lives in India for more than a week...
...In the 10 weeks since it was founded, the new Swatantra (Freedom) party has made more progress than it normally would in five years...
...When Nehru denied this on the floor of the House in Parliament...
...Asia's only remaining bastion of democracy, could be humbled and humiliated, it would be easy for her to subjugate the rest of the continent...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 41
