» India on Tibet: Genuflecting before the Middle Kingdom? India on Tibet: Genuflecting before the Middle Kingdom?
Sumit Ganguly is a Professor of Political Science and Director of Research of the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington. Copyright: OpinionAsia, 2006 - 2008.
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Sumit Ganguly | 09 Apr 2008
India’s foreign policy makers routinely pride themselves on the pursuit of an independent foreign policy. Even after nonalignment has ceased to have any viable meaning they argue that nonalignment still remains relevant as ever because it means the pursuit of an autonomous foreign policy. India’s deafening silence on the PRC’s brutal crackdown on the hapless Tibetans makes a complete mockery of this much-vaunted independent foreign policy. Sadly, this utterly misguided set of policies has a long and tragic lineage harking back to India’s dealings with the PRC from the 1950s.
As early as 1950, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) marched into Tibet, India sought to placate the PRC. At that time, arguably, it had few viable options. Prime Minister Nehru knew that the country’s military prowess was limited, he correctly believed that India had to focus on economic development and avoid wasteful defence expenditures. Accordingly, against the advice of more tough-minded colleagues, including Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the Minister of Home Affairs, he chose to pursue a policy of appeasement --- in the pristine sense of the word. Such a policy, as the noted diplomatic historian Paul Kennedy, has argued, involves the recognition and accommodation the legitimate interests of a more powerful state.
Accordingly, Nehru expressed only minor disapprobation of China’s entry into Tibet. Furthermore, as early as 1954, at the PRC’s insistence he ceded India’s extra-territorial rights in Tibet without demur. Simultaneously, he accepted Premier Chou-Enlai’s anodyne explanation about Chinese maps that showed significant parts of India’s Himalayan areas as Chinese territory. Chou had blithely stated that these were Kuo-Min-Tang maps and that his regime had not had examined them in any detail.
Despite this utterly disingenuous answer, Nehru did little or nothing to pursue the matter. Worse still, he kept parliament uninformed about this form of cartographic misrepresentation on the part of the PRC. Instead he continued with his attempts at appeasement. Among other matters, he sought to boost China’s case at the Bandung Summit of 1955, the precursor to the Non-Aligned Summits. Sadly, his efforts amounted to worse than nought. Chou-Enlai had little use for Nehru’s attempts to chaperone him at the summit and later stated as much. Worse still, he endured much calumny from the PRC following the Dalai Lama’s flight into India in 1959.
Despite these rebuffs from the PRC, Nehru continued his ill-fated attempts to court the Middle Kingdom. It was only after the two incidents at Longju and the Kongka Pass, where the PLA ambushed and killed Indian troops did Nehru finally grudgingly recognise the security threat from the PRC. However, his Defence Minister, Krishna Menon, still did little or nothing to boost India’s defence capabilities. In his judgment, seeking any meaningful military assistance from the Western world was anathema, for it would corrupt the sacrosanct doctrine of nonalignment. Instead, after the breakdown of the talks with Chou in 1960, India adopted a militarily indefensible and politically maladroit strategy of compellance in the form of the “forward policy”.
This entailed sending in lightly-armed troops in “penny packets” to establish India’s claims to disputed areas along much of the Himalayan border. In the words of a senior Indian general who was asked to implement this tragic and flawed policy, it had neither “teeth nor tail”. In simple language this meant that the soldiers lacked adequate firepower and had little or no logistical support. When the PLA attacked with much vigour, careful planning and grim determination in October 1962, India’s military strategy lay in a state of complete shambles.
In the aftermath of this military debacle, India briefly flirted with obtaining significant military assistance from the West. Of course , this attempt floundered because of spirited Pakistani objections and India’s lack of diplomatic skill. Sadly, even after Nehru’s demise in 1964, his ghost continued to animate the spirit on nonalignment. His successors continued to live in abject fear of the PRC. Even after the PRC’s decision to test nuclear weapons, they lacked the gumption to pursue a full-fledged nuclear deterrent. Indeed they embarked on a pathetic quest to obtain a nuclear guarantee from the great powers --- an endeavour that proved to be a fool’s errand.
Immediately after the Sino-Soviet Ussuri River clashes, feeling beleaguered, Chairman Mao made an attempt to improve relations with India. However, the 1971 India-Pakistan war ensued and the PRC again assumed an intransigent posture. Indeed it was not until the short-lived Janata regime of 1977-1979 that any attempt at a thaw was considered. Of course, the PRC leadership made it a point to publicly insult the Minister of External Affairs, Atal Behari Vajpayee, by invading Vietnam during his visit. Just to drive the message home, they also announced that they were in the business of teaching Vietnam a “lesson” just as they had done with another power in 1962.
Yet in the 1980s, India resumed border negotiations with the PRC and Rajiv Gandhi chose to visit it in 1988. During his visit his hosts made sure that Gandhi reiterated the Chinese stand on Tibet as an “autonomous region of China”. Not surprisingly, Gandhi obliged. Of course, he could not extract a similar concession from the PRC on the disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir. During the 1990s, no doubt to the delight of the PRC, India continued with a desultory set of border talks which accomplished next to nothing.
Simultaneously, well into the early 1990s, the PRC remained a significant supplier of missile technology and possibly a nuclear weapons design to Pakistan, thereby undermining India’s national security. India did protest these weapons transfers but then chose to continue with border talks, a series of confidence-building measures, cultural exchanges and trade negotiations. The border talks, of course, proved to be utterly infructuous. Thus far, one of the more striking achievements of these talks has been the exchange of maps of the middle sector of the Himalayan border, an area which is not in dispute.
This brief survey of Sino-Indian relations amply underscores the bankruptcy of India’s attempts to curry favour and genuflect before the Middle Kingdom. Sadly, as India’s unwillingness to demonstrate any intestinal fortitude in the wake of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet amply attests, this policy of abject appeasement still has considerable longevity even as it yields no useful results.