Stapling visas on passports and detaining Indian travellers in international transit zones are among the forms of harassment faced by citizens from Arunachal Pradesh, a region China claims as part of “South Tibet”. These actions cannot be dismissed as errors of judgment by an over-enthusiastic immigration officer; they are part of a well-thought-out stratagem to question Arunachal Pradesh’s status as a full-fledged state of India. The latter seems far more likely, for nothing in the Chinese orchestra is ever out of sync.
Just last week, Prema Wangjom Thongdok, an Indian financial consultant based in the UK, was illegally detained at Shanghai airport. Responding to India’s vehement protests, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning parroted the official line that “the border inspection authorities had gone through the whole process according to the laws and regulations, and fully protected the lawful rights and interests of the person concerned”.
She also referred to Arunachal Pradesh as “Zangnan” and asserted that “China never acknowledged the so-called Arunachal Pradesh illegally set up by India”.
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Asserting India’s rights
Let us set the record straight. The area that now constitutes Arunachal Pradesh was part of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), and clearly spelt out as such in the boundary line established between India and China under the McMahon Agreement, initialled by the plenipotentiaries of India, Tibet and China after their meetings in Simla and New Delhi in 1914. The conference is known as the Simla Convention — its opening sessions were held in the summer capital of British India, even though the talks continued into winter and concluded in New Delhi.
It is true that, because of the preoccupation with the First World War and the inaccessible terrain, visits by Indian revenue and civil officials to these outermost frontiers were few and far between. As a result, the abbots and monks, who owed their allegiance to the Dalai Lama, continued to administer the monasteries, especially the Tawang monastery, the entrepôt to NEFA (as Arunachal was then called).
However, in the aftermath of Independence — and especially after Pakistan’s attempts to push into Indian territory — Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, then India’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, moved to firmly assert India’s rights over the areas laid out in the First Schedule of the Constitution. A week before his death on 15 December 1950, he drew Prime Minister Nehru’s attention to the threats from expansionism of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
“Throughout history, we have seldom been worried about our north-east frontier. The Himalayas had been regarded as an impenetrable barrier against any threat from the north. We had a friendly Tibet which gave us no trouble….(However) recent and bitter history also tells us that Communism is no shield against imperialism and that the Chinese Communists are as good or as bad imperialists as any other,” he wrote.
In this letter, he wanted Nehru to take immediate and prompt action on:
(a) the political and administrative steps needed to strengthen our northern and north-eastern frontiers, which would include the whole border — i.e., Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling and the tribal territory of Assam;
(b) measures of internal security in the border areas as well as in the States flanking those areas, such as UP, Bihar, Bengal and Assam;
(c) improvement of communications — road, rail, air and wireless — in these areas and with the frontier outposts;
(d) policing and intelligence of frontier posts;
(e) the future of our mission at Lhasa and the trade posts at Gyantse and Yatung, and the forces in operation in Tibet to guard the trade routes; and, last but not least, the policy regarding the McMahon Line.
A copy of this letter was marked to Jairamdas Daulatram, then-Governor of Assam, invested with special responsibilities for NEFA, who decided to take immediate action. He summoned Major Ralengnao ‘Bob’ Khathing of the Assam Rifles — who had earlier made a name for himself in the rehabilitation work post the 1950 Assam earthquake. Daulatram asked him to secure the NEFA frontier by taking physical possession of Tawang as per the McMahon Line.
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Does the dragon ever listen?
Khathing set out with 200 troops from the Kumaon regiment, along with 800 porters and mules, to establish India’s authority on the Tawang Monastery. It was on 9 February 1951 when Khathing reached Tawang and announced that henceforth the lamas would have to offer their allegiance to India.
There was little resistance, since the local population had been suffering under high taxes, especially after their livelihoods were hit by the long period of warfare. Had Patel lived longer, India may not have conceded the Consulate at Lhasa or the military garrisons at Gyantse and Yatung, for after his death our foreign policy took an ideological, rather than a ‘nation-first’, approach. Not only did we accept the Chinese view of suzerainty over Tibet, but we also supported China’s membership of the UN — a move that later proved to be an albatross around our neck. From a cartographic perspective, the word Cheen (Hindi for China) made its first appearance on the first Hindi map of India, published in 1952.
Ten years later, on 23 October 1962, Chinese soldiers entered NEFA, bordering China and Bhutan, and engaged in intense artillery fire, seizing the monastery town of Tawang. By mid-November, they had reached Bomdila, another monastery town barely 250 km from Assam, home to India’s tea gardens, oilfields and jute plantations. Yet barely a month after the invasion began, on 21 November, China declared a unilateral ceasefire and swiftly withdrew to 20 km north of the hazy de facto border between the two countries — the very McMahon Line it had always contested. This now constitutes what is called the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
That said, the point raised by Prema remains extremely relevant: “a bilateral or geopolitical matter was misdirected at a private Indian citizen.” This should never occur in international transit because it is a clear violation of the Chicago and Montreal Conventions relating to civil aviation.
But does the dragon ever listen?
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)