Bertil Lintner - China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World

CHINAS INDIA WAR

BERTIL LINTNER

CHINAS INDIA WAR

COLLISION COURSE ON

THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

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Contents

The Subcontinent and China

Southeast Asia and China

My interest in the border conflict in the Himalayas goes back to 1967 when, as a 14-year-old schoolboy in Sweden, I sent a handwritten letter to the Indian embassy in Stockholm asking them for information about the problem. I was very young but already interested in international affairs. I was curious to know about the dispute and why it had led to a short but vicious war in 1962.

I received a box in the mail with a stack of White Papers that contained reproductions of letters, official statements from New Delhi as well as Beijing, and detailed foldout maps of areas claimed by both India and China. I became somewhat familiar with the geography of the region and learned about the basics of the conflict from the Indian point of view: China had launched a massive attack over the Himalayas; India was the victim of Chinese aggression.

The war ended with a devastating defeat for the Indians. But, to the surprise of many, the Chinese did not keep any territory they had captured in the east. After driving the Indian Army out of most of the disputed areas, the Chinese withdrew to the old Line of Actual Control (LAC) along the crest of the Himalayas. Indian administrators and military personnel could move back into those territories, which official Chinese maps even today show as part of the Peoples Republic of China. It was only in Ladakh in the west that the LAC was altered somewhat in Chinas favour.

Several years later, in the mid-1970s, I came across a book called Indias China War. It was written by Neville Maxwell, an Anglo-Australian journalist, who presented a completely different view of the conflict. Maxwell argued that though it may have been China that attacked on 20 October 1962, it was India that had provoked the war. As part of a Forward Policy launched by independent Indias first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indians had established a string of armed outposts along the LAC, and even beyond it.

Maxwell based his arguments on a classified Indian intelligence report that had been leaked to him, known as the Henderson BrooksBhagat Report, and written by two senior Indian Army officers, Lieutenant General T.B. Henderson Brooks and Brigadier Premindra Singh Bhagat. The report supposedly backed up Maxwells claim that the war was Indias fault and China did little more than strike back to reassert its territorial claims along the Sino-Indian border. China was the largely innocent victim of Nehrus hostile policies.

Also, according to Maxwell, India had no case when it came to the actual disputed areas. Those had been included in some, but not all, maps produced unilaterally by the British India Government in the 1930s, and, more consistently in those produced in independent India after 1947. Prior to that, the northern borders of British India as shown on the official maps had essentially been identical to those on the Chinese ones, at the foot of the mountains where the Assam plains begin.

The British, Tibetan, and Chinese delegates had met at Shimla, British Indias summer capital in the highlands above the northern plains, in 1913 and 1914 to sort out the status of Tibet and its borders. But the conference, it has been argued by Maxwell, Alastair Lamb, and other Western scholars, ended inconclusively, as the Chinese refused to accept the British and Tibetan proposals.

I found Maxwells book very persuasive. It was well written, rich in details, and meticulously footnoted. Reading more about the issue, I also discovered that Maxwells book had had a tremendous impact on studies by many Western and Asian scholars as well as policymakers.

Not surprisingly, Chinas leaders have heaped praise on Maxwells book. At an official banquet in Beijing in 1971, Chinas Premier Zhou Enlai and Pakistans Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, both rose from the head table and walked over to where the foreign correspondents were seated. Maxwell was there, and Zhou offered him a toast.

in America, and that

it changed his thinking on China, and he pressed the book on [President] Nixonall thats on the record now, in the transcripts of Nixon-Kissinger-Mao [Zedong] talks [19712]. While Kissinger was in Beijing, Zhou Enlai sent me a personal message to tell me that Kissinger had said to him, reading that book showed me I could do business with you people.

But the more I read about the conflict, the more I came to realize that Maxwells version of the events leading up to the 1962 War did not stand up to any serious scrutiny. First of all, Nehrus Forward Policy, which was designed to secure the entire Sino-Indian frontier from Ladakh in the west to the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA; an administrative unit under the government of Assam and now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh) in the east, was decided upon at a meeting in New Delhi on 2 November 1961, less than a year before the war. Nehru chaired the session, which was also attended by Defence Minister Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, head of the Intelligence Bureau, Bhola Nath Mullik, Foreign Secretary M.J. Desai, and the then newly appointed Army Chief of Staff, General Pran Nath Thapar.

It The new outposts that were set up in the eastern sector above the plains of Assam were manned by relatively small contingents of poorly equipped personnel, mostly from the paramilitary Assam Rifles.

Rather than India provoking China, it could be argued that it was the new communist leaders of China who had behaved aggressively after they seized power in 1949. In 1950, they sent thousands of troops to invade Tibet, a de facto independent nation. For the first time in history, India shared a common border with China without Tibet functioning as a buffer between the two civilizations.