INDIA’S HIMALAYAN POLICY

INDIA’S HIMALAYAN POLICY Part -I

by Sonam Wangdi
former Chief Secretary, Government of Sikkim


During the first week of April, fifty-two years ago, His Holiness The Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, then the 24-year old Tenzin Gyatso, [DL] was in NEFA, an abbreviation of North East Frontier Agency in 1954, which became an administrative unit called North East Frontier Tract in 1912, within Assam. The territory, with 83,743, square kilometer, was renamed Arunachal Pradesh []AP] as a Union Territory in 1972 and a State in 1987. The DL had escaped from Lhasa at 10 PM on a Tuesday, 17 March, and entered into India shortly after sunset through an unknown Chutangmu Pass in NEFA on another Tuesday, 31 March, 1959.

The Statesman, Calcutta, 5 April, 1959, quoting the New China News Agency, reported that the 21-year-old Panchen Lama, pro-communist rival of the DL, arrived in Lhasa to head the Tibetan Government.

Imperial India’s Tibet policy

The plight of Tibet and the flight of the DL have been attributed to either deliberate or inadvertent lack of foresight in Independent India’s Himalayan policy, which had replaced Imperial India’s time-tested strategy before 1947. The main policy of Imperial India was to maintain Tibet as a buffer State between China and the Indian empire and to keep off the Russians from Tibet and also to gain access to the vast Chinese market. The British, being an alien power, wanted to ensure that there was absolute peace on the frontier by surrounding its Indian [Burma, now Myanmar, was a part of India till 1935] possessions by a series of buffer States on the western, northern and north-eastern borders. Thus Iran and Afghanistan in the west were under its sphere of influence; Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan provided the inner and outer bulwark between China and India; Siam or Thailand was the bumper between the British and French empires in the east. Britain had no problem defending India against any naval attack since she was the strongest naval power in the world and the Indian ocean was considered a British lake where no power dared to enter and disturb the Indian Empire. Imperial India, however, was not sure of the loyalty of its Indian subjects who could rise in revolt again as in 1857; and an imperial power cannot hold on to its possession if the imperial army has to fight on the border and also to help the Police simultaneously in quelling internal rebellions .

The British empire wanted a virtually independent Tibet, not because of its love for the Tibetans; but because it did not want China on its threshold. A quarrelsome and powerful neighbour is a perpetual headache. Before the Younghusband mission, despite repeated attempts from the British-Indian Government to open up Tibet, she kept aloof on the ground that the British “were harbouring ulterior designs on their country and their religion”.[Sir Charles Bell, 1924, Tibet Past and Present, Oxford, (CB) P 62] But the British policy in India was to annex only those territories which were fertile and rich in mineral resources and leave the rest under the largely autonomous Princely States which were in their largest number in the semi-desert areas of Rajputana, now Rajasthan.
Both Tibet and Mongolia had their inner and outer territories. During the Manchu empire, both Tibet and Mongolia with their inner and outer areas were part of China. After the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, Tibet and Mongolia were said to have signed a treaty in January, 1913 at the Mongolian capital, Urga . The text of the alleged Mongol-Tibet Treaty, 1913 is reproduced in CB [P 304-5]. If the Tibetans had played their cards right, with the assistance from the wily British, the Outer Tibet, with Lhasa, would have been certainly a sovereign country in the same way as the Outer Mongolia, called Mongolia, is today. Mongolia is closer than Tibet is to the Chinese capital. With the help of the Soviet Union [1922-91], the Mongolian People’s Republic was proclaimed in 1924. Inner Mongolia is a part of China.

British support of Tibet against Chinese aggression

In 1919, a British foreign office document noted: “Firstly, Nepal externally is a very valuable counterpoise to Afghan and Muslim movements to the west and north of Afghanistan; secondly, having released Tibet from China, Tibet cannot stand alone and we have to support Tibet against Chinese aggression”.[SUNDAY, 29 May-4 June, 1994, An Ananda Bazar Publications, Calcutta, Emphasis added, Page 27]
“In 1910, the Tibetan Government would have welcomed a British Protectorate”, the Tibetan Ministers remarked: “The Indian States were in an ideal position, for each was safe from external aggression and free from interference as regards its internal administration . They sighed as they added, ‘That is how we should like Tibet to be’” [CB, P p246-7]. Bell continues: “But it was recognized on our side from the first that this would have devolved far too heavy a burden upon us, the responsibility of protecting the distant and difficult expanses of Tibet”.[CB, 247]

Sir Charles A Bell [1870-1945], a member of the Indian Civil Service (1891-1919), was the British Political Representative in Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim. A son of an ICS officer, Sir Charles was born in India and educated in the Oxford University. Bell acted as Political Officer on three occasions while the permanent incumbent, John Claude White, was on the Younghusband mission or on leave; and when White retired in October 1908, he succeeded him. Bell is considered an authority on British policy towards Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim. Alex Mckay writes: “Bell’s humane and sympathetic approach succeeded in establishing a unique alliance of interests between Tibet and the British Raj. Ultimately, Bell’s ideas predominated throughout most of the 1904-47 period.” [Tibet and the British Raj, The Frontier Cadre, 1904-1947, Dharamsala, 2009, P 254]

The British were particularly concerned with the Chinese who had repeatedly talked of regaining “lost territories”.

China’s “lost territories”

Frank Moraes writes: “Even in the days of British rule in India more than one Chinese spokesman urged the blending of the “five colors”, these being China, Tibet, Nepal Sikkim and Bhutan” [The Revolt in Tibet, Page 192(FM)]. He adds: “The Chinese irredentist urge is not confined only to Bhutan, Sikkim Nepal and Ladakh. Over forty years ago the late Sun Yat-Sen cited a long list of so-called lost territories which China would reclaim. ‘We lost,’ he declared , ‘Korea, Formosa and Peng Fu to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War, Annam to France and Burma to Britain. In addition, the Ryukyu Islands, Siam, Borneo, Sarawak, Java, Ceylon, Nepal and Bhutan were once tributary States to China’. Chiang Kai-shek subsequently repeated these claims, and Mao Tse-tung has reiterated them. Mao in fact traces the beginnings of his political consciousness to his realization of China`s territorial losses” [FM, P 183]

No Chinese authority in Tibet, 1912-50

“Throughout the period 1912-1950, the Government of Tibet exercised exclusive authority in domestic affairs within its territory; that it successfully defended its territory against attack under colour of a claim to suzerainty; and that vis-à-vis the Republic of China, no act was committed or declaration made that compromised its internal independence. It is, therefore, considered that there was an effective government in Tibet, which owed no subservience whatsoever in internal affairs”.[Tibet and the Chinese People’s Republic: A Report to the International Commission of Jurists by its Legal Inquiry Committee on Tibet, Geneva, 1960, Page 148].

Mao Tse-tung [also Mao Zedong, 1893-1976] proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on 1 October, 1949 in Peking. On 07 October 1950, China invaded Kham in Eastern Tibet with 40,000 soldiers. Exactly one month after the invasion, Sardar Vallabhai Patel (1875-1950), Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India wrote a prophetic letter to Prime Minister Nehru on 07 November, 1950 stating, “Very soon they (the Chinese) will disown all the stipulations which Tibet has entered into with us in the past.” The Sardar proposed that India should send a token Indian force to help the Tibetans in resisting the Chinese invaders. His proposal was, however, rejected.

In the fifties of the last century, India had to withdraw all the rights it had acquired since 1904 as forewarned by Sardar Patel. The situation on the peaceful pre-independence Sino-Indian border – as peaceful as the US-Canadian border - changed overnight and became volatile for the first time in the history of the two biggest Asian countries.

India declines military assistance to Tibet

“The possibility of militarily defending Tibet was formally discussed at that time, by the US and British governments. The conclusion was that it was not easy to help the Tibetans as the terrain was not favourable and in any case it was up to the Indian Government to decide since the arms or equipment would have to transit through India”.[Claude Arpi, BORN IN SIN THE PANCHSHEEL AGREEMENT The Sacrifice of Tibet, Mittal, New Delhi, 2004, (CA) Pp 19-20] But the Government of India made it clear that “it cannot, however, render active military assistance in form of dispatch troops to Lhasa”.[CA, ibid]. If India had taken the required initiative, it was likely that the Western powers would have helped Tibet in consonance with their policy of containment of communism anywhere and everywhere, as incorporated in the Truman Doctrine in the name of the US President, Harry S Truman on 12 March, 1947.
The Treaty between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China on Trade and Intercourse between ‘the Tibet region of China’ and India was signed on 29 April, 1954 at 4 PM at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing by the Indian Ambassador N Raghavan and Chang Han-fu, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister. Normally, a treaty is signed between two countries without mentioning any particular area within the country. But the Chinese diplomacy succeeded in mentioning Tibet as “the Tibet region of China”. Never before was Tibet referred to as ‘the Tibet region of China’. Thus, Tibet was sacrificed at the altar of Sino-Indian friendship. The treaty was ratified on 4 June 1954 [CA, P 211].

Subsequent events demonstrated that the treaty was the source of perennial border problem. The Chinese government complained on 29 June 1954 – only after 25 days of the ratification of the treaty – that Indian troops with rifles crossed into the Tibet region of China and intruded into Wu-je area.

It appears that India negotiated the 1954 Treaty out of compulsion. The Prime Minister J L Nehru, said: “We must give up these facilities such as telegraph lines; if we do not give them up voluntarily, then we shall be forced to give them up…. The fact is that if we did not like to give up those things, we would have been forced to give them up. We must accept this fact”.[PM’s speech in Lok Sabha, 18 May, 1954, quoted in P C Chakravarti, 1961, India-China Relations, Firma K L Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta, P60. The italics and the ellipsis are in the original text.]

Warren W Smith: “The PLA officers and men talked of going on to India once Tibet was in their hands”. [TIBETAN NATION, A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations, HarperCollins, New Delhi, 1996, Foot note No 32, P 273(WS)]. ‘PLA’ is People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese Army, the largest in the world. Moreover, according to George Patterson, a missionary in Kham at the time, the Khampas were told that “Tibet was to be liberated within a year, followed by Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan in three years and India within five years.” Patterson, Tibet in Revolt, P 63. Foot Note No 39 P 274] .


Sino-Indian war 1962

Interestingly, “When China invaded Bharat, a section of the Communist Party of India proclaimed that Chinese forces were here for ‘liberating’ Bharat (from capitalist domination). Their leaders like Basavaponnaiah went to the extent of saying that Bharat was the aggressor and had occupied Chinese territory. Their unions were made tools to sabotage or obstruct our defence efforts. Their water-transporting union in the North-Eastern region served a strike notice. Transport of food and other materials to the jawans at the Front was hampered”.[RSS A VISION IN ACTION, Compiled and Edited by HV Seshadri, Bangalore, 1988, P 31]

In May, 1963, President JF Kennedy considered the option to use nuclear weapons against China if India were attacked a second time, according to newly declassified audio recordings by the JF Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. In the 42-year-old tapes, released on 25 August, 2005, President Kennedy and his advisers could be heard discussing how to prevent India from becoming another domino to fall to communism. Kennedy’s defence secretary, Robert S. McNamara, is heard saying: “Before any substantial commitment to defend India against China is given, we should recognize that in order to carry out that commitment against any substantial Chinese attack, we would have to use nuclear weapons. Any large Chinese communist on any part of that area would require the use of nuclear weapons by the US, and this is to be preferred over the introduction of large numbers of US soldiers”.

In 1962, India suffered a humiliating defeat in the Sino-Indian war. In western countries, the Prime Minister would have been sacked for his failure to defend the country; but Nehru carried on with feeble voice against him in Parliament and the dismissal of the Defence Minister, Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon [1896-1974] .