India/China

Balkan-MiG

Balkan-MiG

Active member
I dont have a tiny inkling about the tensions between China and India, and i was wondering if anybody could provide a totally neutral source?

If you cant find one, would you be able to give me a short 200-250 word description?

Id really appreciate it.
 
Hi,

Forty years have elapsed since the 1962 war, but its shadow still influences Sino-India relations.

China and India, having a long history of friendly interaction and a fine tradition of learning from each other, both suffered from imperialist and colonialist aggression, oppression and exploitation.

After achieving their independence and liberation, respectively, in the late 1940s, they should have treated each other on an equal footing, supported each other, and learnt from each other in the reconstruction of their own countries, to enable the peoples of both countries to lead a happy life. But it was deplorable that due to the misperceptions and mistaken policies of a few leaders, the development of Sino-India relations took a winding path.

As for the genesis of the 1962 war, since many eminent scholars across the world, such as Neville Maxwell, Karunakar Gupta, and Steven Hoffmann, have made in-depth studies, it is not pertinent for me to dwell on it here. But it should be noted that the Nehru government not only took over the legacy of British imperialist strategic perceptions of security and interfered many times with the Tibet affairs of China, it also demonstrated more arrogance and irrationality on boundary issues than the Raj.

The British imperialists did draw an illegal McMahon Line, but they dared not occupy in reality the territories of China to the south of that line. But the Nehru government did just that.

Evidence indicates that in the early years after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru himself privately instructed B N Mullick, head of the Intelligence Bureau, to count China as an enemy. It was under his approval that armed Indian border guards drove away the Tibetan administrators and occupied Sela by force in 1948, and Tawang and other Chinese territories to the south of the McMahon Line in 1952. But Nehru's government did not stop here; it sought to decide for itself where India's borders with China should lie and then impose the alignments it had chosen on China.

In 1960, the Nehru government not only refused publicly to negotiate with Premier Zhou Enlai who made a special trip to New Delhi to seek a friendly settlement of boundary issue, but rejected any standstill agreement.

In the following year, it ordered the 'Forward Policy', under which the Indian Army relentlessly attacked the People's Liberation Army's posts along the entire border and killed many Chinese soldiers in an attempt to extrude them out of all the Chinese territory it claimed.

This aggressive and provocative policy not only interrupted the status quo, but also breached the peace and tranquillity along the entire border. In October 1962, Nehru ordered the army to take the offensive and made a statement about it on the 12th of the same month. His statement shocked the whole world. The New York Herald Tribune published an editorial entitled 'Nehru Declares A War Against China' the following day.

All honest and sober-minded people could see that the 1962 war was imposed on China by the Nehru government. China had no other way out but to launch a counter-attack and take preventive action. The purposes were:

1. To defend peace and tranquillity along the entire border;
2. To bring the Nehru government back to the negotiating table.

China had no intention to solve the boundary issue by force, which was proved by the fact that as soon as the PLA won the war, it returned to its original posts.

But how did the Nehru government explain the event to the Indian public? It had no courage to admit its mistakes and tell the truth, but adopted dishonest and irrational means to blame it on China, saying China conducted an "unprovoked aggression" against India, and China "betrayed India".

This frame-up produced two kinds of negative and malignant consequences: first, China was turned into a devil in the mind of the Indian public; second, it led to a long-term confrontation between the two countries and caused a huge waste of manpower and material resources on both sides. These negative and malignant consequences really made those who were keen to maintain Sino-Indian friendship distressed.

Though such was the case, we have no reason to be crestfallen. As the saying goes, misfortune might be a blessing in disguise. If the successors can learn the real lessons from the mistakes of their predecessors and turn them into lasting action, it will allow the people of both nations to own an invaluable precious wealth.

Thanks to the late Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's historic visit to China in 1988, Sino-India relations have gradually regained normalcy. During Indian prime minister P V Narasimha Rao's visit to China in 1993, both sides signed the Agreement on Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control in the China-India Border Areas.

In 1996, a further agreement on "confidence-building measures in the military field along the LAC" was signed during President Jiang Zemin's visit to India. All these demonstrated that the two governments had become far-sighted and mature. This is the very reason why Sino-India relations developed smoothly and quickly on the whole during the last more than 10 years, though it took an unexpected turn in 1998.

But we should not sit back. It should be noted that, in terms of populations, sizes, economic scales, and the roles played in the contemporary world by China and India, the co-operation between them is far from what it should be.

What has obstructed Sino-India relations from developing in depth and giving full play to the potential of both?

There are both objective and subjective factors. Judging from the present conditions, it seems that the subjective factors are prevailing, and the resistance is mainly from the Indian side.

Why am I saying so? Because on the Indian side there still are a considerable number of officials, soldiers and think tanks who have not walked out of the shadow of the 1962 war. Many of them adhere, consciously or unconsciously, to the strategic perception of security prevailing in old times, and count China as a threat or a potential adversary. Given such a psychology, how can they expect to further develop Sino-India relations?

But I don't complain about them, because the majority of them were also misled in the past. I believe that, with increasing mutual exchanges, the day will come when they will realise that China is a true friend and brother of India. Now the challenge facing us is, how effectively will far-sighted statesmen and those of insight make public the truth of the 1962 war?

Let that day come earlier. On the day when Sino-India misunderstanding is thoroughly dispersed, an era for in-depth Sino-India co-operation will come.

By : Wang Hongwei is professor of South Asia regional studies at the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and adviser to the Chinese Association for South Asian Studies. He is the author of several books, including The Himalayas Sentiment: A Study of Sino-Indian Relations (1998 ) and The Present Situation and Future of The South Asia Regional Cooperation (1993), and more than 100 papers, commentaries, treatises and prose relating to South Asia and Sino-Indian relations.
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totally neutral source? :type:

Peace
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[SIZE=-1]Neville Maxwell [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][SIZE=+2]A[/SIZE]fter the 1962 war, the Indian Army commissioned Lieutenant General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P S Bhagat to study the debacle. As is wont in India, their report was never made public and lies buried in the government archives. But some experts have managed to piece together the contents of the report. One such person is Neville Maxwell, who has studied the 1962 war in depth. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]In the article that follows, Indians will be shocked to discover that, when China crushed India in 1962, the fault lay at India, or more specifically, at Jawaharlal Nehru and his clique's doorsteps. It was a hopelessly ill-prepared Indian Army that provoked China on orders emanating from Delhi, and paid the price for its misadventure in men, money and national humiliation. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1][SIZE=+2]W[/SIZE]hen the Army's report into its debacle in the border war was completed in 1963, the Indian government had good reason to keep it Top Secret and give only the vaguest, and largely misleading, indications of its contents. At that time the government's effort, ultimately successful, to convince the political public that the Chinese, with a sudden 'unprovoked aggression,' had caught India unawares in a sort of Himalayan Pearl Harbor was in its early stages, and the Report's cool and detailed analysis, if made public, would have shown that to be self-exculpatory mendacity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]But a series of studies, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1990s, revealed to any serious enquirer the full story of how the Indian Army was ordered to challenge the Chinese military to a conflict it could only lose. So, by now, only bureaucratic inertia, combined with the natural fading of any public interest, can explain the continued non-publication -- the Report includes no surprises and its publication would be of little significance but for the fact that so many in India still cling to the soothing fantasy of a 1962 Chinese 'aggression.' [/SIZE]

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It seems likely now that the Report will never be released. Furthermore, if one day a stable, confident and relaxed government in New Delhi should, miraculously, appear and decide to clear out the cupboard and publish it, the text would be largely incomprehensible, the context, well known to the authors and therefore not spelled out, being now forgotten. The Report would need an Introduction and gloss -- a first draft of which this paper attempts to provide, drawing upon the writer's research in India in the 1960s and material published later. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Two Preambles are required, one briefly recalling the cause and course of the border war; the second to describe the fault-line, which the border dispute turned into a schism, within the Army's officer corps, which was a key factor in the disaster -- and of which the Henderson Brooks Report can be seen as an expression. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Origins of the border conflict [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1][SIZE=+2]I[/SIZE]ndia, at the time of Independence, can be said to have faced no external threats. True, it was born into a relationship of permanent belligerency with its weaker Siamese twin, Pakistan, left by the British inseparably conjoined to India by the chronically enflamed member of Kashmir, vital to both new national organisms; but that may be seen as essentially an internal dispute, an untreatable complication left by the crude, cruel surgery of Partition. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]In 1947, China, wracked by civil war, was in what appeared to be death throes and no conceivable threat to anyone. That changed with astonishing speed, however, and, by 1950, when the new-born People's Republic re-established in Tibet the central authority which had lapsed in 1911, the Indian government will have made its initial assessment of the possibility and potential of a threat from China, and found those to be minimal, if not non-existent. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]First, there were geographic and topographical factors, the great mountain chains which lay between the two neighbours and appeared to make large-scale troop movements impractical (few could then see in the German V2 rocket the embryo of the ICBM). More important, the leadership of the Indian government -- which is to say, Jawaharlal Nehru -- had for years proclaimed that the unshakable friendship between India and China would be the key to both their futures, and therefore Asia's, even the world's. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]The new leaders in Beijing were more chary, viewing India through their Marxist prism as a potentially hostile bourgeois state. But, in the Indian political perspective, war with China was deemed unthinkable and, through the 1950s, New Delhi's defence planning and expenditure expressed that confidence. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]By the early 1950s, however, the Indian government, which is to say Nehru and his acolyte officials, had shaped and adopted a policy whose implementation would make armed conflict with China not only "thinkable" but inevitable. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]From the first days of India's Independence, it was appreciated that the Sino-Indian borders had been left undefined by the departing British and that territorial disputes with China were part of India's inheritance. China's other neighbours faced similar problems and, over the succeeding decades of the century, almost all of those were to settle their borders satisfactorily through the normal process of diplomatic negotiation with Beijing. [/SIZE]
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The Nehru government decided upon the opposite approach. India would, through its own research, determine the appropriate alignments of the Sino-Indian borders, extend its administration to make those good on the ground and then refuse to negotiate the result. Barring the inconceivable -- that Beijing would allow India to impose China's borders unilaterally and annex territory at will -- Nehru's policy thus willed conflict without foreseeing it. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Through the 1950s, that policy generated friction along the borders and so bred and steadily increased distrust, growing into hostility, between the neighbours. By 1958, Beijing was urgently calling for a standstill agreement to prevent patrol clashes and negotiations to agree on boundary alignments. India refused any standstill agreement, since it would be an impediment to intended advances and insisted that there was nothing to negotiate, the Sino-Indian borders being already settled on the alignments claimed by India, through blind historical process. Then it began accusing China of committing 'aggression' by refusing to surrender to Indian claims. [/SIZE]

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From 1961, the Indian attempt to establish an armed presence in all the territory it claimed and then extrude the Chinese was being exerted by the Army and Beijing was warning that if India did not desist from its expansionist thrust, the Chinese forces would have to hit back. On October 12, 1962, Nehru proclaimed India's intention to drive the Chinese out of areas India claimed. That bravado had by then been forced upon him by public expectations which his charges of 'Chinese aggression' had aroused, but Beijing took it as in effect a declaration of war. The unfortunate Indian troops on the frontline, under orders to sweep superior Chinese forces out of their impregnable, dominating positions, instantly appreciated the implications: 'If Nehru had declared his intention to attack, then the Chinese were not going to wait to be attacked.' [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]On October 20, the Chinese launched a pre-emptive offensive all along the borders, overwhelming the feeble -- but, in this first instance, determined -- resistance of the Indian troops and advancing some distance in the eastern sector. On October 24, Beijing offered a ceasefire and Chinese withdrawal on the condition that India agree to open negotiations: Nehru refused the offer even before the text was officially received.

Both sides built up over the next three weeks, and the Indians launched a local counterattack on November 15, arousing in India fresh expectations of total victory. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]The Chinese then renewed their offensive. Now many units of the once crack Indian 4th Division dissolved into rout without giving battle and, by November 20, there was no organised Indian resistance anywhere in the disputed territories. On that day, Beijing announced a unilateral ceasefire and intention to withdraw its forces: Nehru, this time, tacitly accepted.

[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]Part II: How the East was lost!
Part III: India's shameful debacle [/SIZE]
 
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