The shadow of the People’s Liberation Army already over Lhasa, the Indian Army officer Major Zorawar Chand Bakshi stood before the army that was being assembled to guard the roof of the world, the Tibetan Plateau. Forced by their landlords to conscript, the soldiers received no pay. The new Tibetan soldiers, Bakshi recorded in the autumn of 1949, had “no hesitation in looting the civilians in the villages through which he happens to pass. Rape is common and obviously allowed by the officers.” Tides of patients ravaged by venereal disease swept through the Indian-run hospitals at Lhasa, Gyantse and Yatung.
From the reports sent by Bakshi—sent by India to Tibet on a secret mission to assess its military capabilities in the face of a potential Chinese invasion—it is retrospectively clear he was witnessing a society embracing its own annihilation.
Tibetan soldiers had contempt for their commanders, known as Magchies and Depons, who were handed charge of units on demonstrating their ability to salute with a ceremonial sword.“The standard of turn out and discipline is shocking. The soldier does not seem to wash himself and his clothes.”
Last week, India and China agreed to begin border negotiations on the basis of a 10 point agreed framework, focussed on a term called “early harvest”: settling disputes first in areas like Sikkim, where there is little disputation. The ugly shadow of the 1962 war, hangs over more perilous borders, like in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh. The truth, however, is that the region’s geography was fundamentally reshaped with the withdrawal of British power in 1947, and sealed when People’s Liberation Army troops arrived in Tibet in 1951, changing the reality of power forever.
Few in India now speak of what happened in 1951. Yet that conversation, and the lessons about power it should have taught, are key to guiding the painful compromises that lie ahead.
Tibet falls apart
Even India was supplying weapons and sending officers to train the Tibetan forces—thousands of automatic weapons and rifles were made available by the government of India in the last months of 1949—the task was hopeless. Field Marshal KM Cariappa—former spy chief BN Mullik has written—flatly told former Prime Minister Jawaharlal he coudn’t spare more than a battalion for Tibet, given the situation on the borders with Pakistan, and the Left-wing insurgency in Telengana.
Arthur Hopkinson, who arrived as the Indian Political Officer in Lhasa, saw the writing on the wall. “Fresh troops arriving in the spring of 1947 as Escorts Reliefs had been told that they would be the last in a succession of over 40 years. The Indian Foreign office refused to send up an officer for the training that was essential if continuity was to be preserved.”
To Major Bakshi, it seemed clear Tibet’s theocratic society had ceased to function. “There is no written law. The officials can award any punishment they like to the accused. The most common punishment is to clip off the ears of the accused.”
Lawerence Wadell, a British civil servant who visited Lhasa in 1905, had seen much the same: Their eyes gouged out, alleged criminals roamed the streets begging for alms. The victims included men who had helped the Indian spy and philosopher Sarat Chandra Das infiltrate the Potala in 1881. Their servants, Wadell recorded, were “barbarously mutilated, their hands and feet cut off and the eyes gouged out.”
There was no interest in British colonial India to build the rudiments of a modern civil society in Tibet. And even though independent India asserted its rights as the successor state, it simply did not have the means to assert its will. Torn by Partition violence, war, and a half-dozen insurgencies within, hopes to influence Tibet were untethered from reality for New Delhi.
In some parts of the border, officers acted on their own to assert India’s territorial claims. Led by the young Naga officer Major Bob Kathing, the Governor of Assam Jairamdas Daulatram, ordered troops to take over the monastery of Tawang in 1951. The monastery lay on the Indian side of the McMahon Line, but had not been held by India. Local monks protested furiously, but to no avail.
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Needling the dragon?
From 1954, India tried hard to lay the foundations for a post-colonial relationship with what was now Chinese-controlled Tibet. A trade agreement was signed in 1954, giving up special concessions India enjoyed as a result of an Anglo-Tibetan secret convention of 1914, laying down new regulations for traders and pilgrims. There was also an annexe, historian Karunakar Gupta writes, committing to discontinue Indian Army military escorts for traders and officials, stationed in Lhasa for the best part of a century. India also agreed to hand over telegraph offices and guest houses to the Chinese authorities.
Nehru, though, had also become increasingly concerned about China’s real intentions. In the summer of 1954, Karunakar records, he issued a secret memorandum ordering the construction of forward posts along the length of the border, to assert Indian sovereignty.
From 1959, as tensions mounted within Tibet, the PLA’s intelligence services became increasingly convinced that Nehru was conniving with America to stir up an insurgency. In November, 1958, the scholar Claude Arpi writes, the PLA reported that the CIA had sent 226 horses loaded with weapons and ammunition from India to southern Tibet, crossing from Tawang. The next year, supplies were alleged to be routed through Nepal, for Kham insurgents on the other side of the border.
The CIA, it’s now well known from the work of Keith Conboy and James Morrison, was also running flights from Bangladesh to drop supplies for insurgents—flights India had no aircraft to interdict, but also did not protest or publicise. Khampa insurgents were also trained in the United States itself.
The jostling for territorial advantage along the border led, in 1959, an Indian patrol led by Deputy Central Intelligence Officer Karam Singh being ambushed as it entered the mouth of the Kugrang Tsangpo river, close to where the Line of Actual Control now runs. Ten police personnel were killed, and seven taken prisoner.
For decades, there have been sensible ideas on how to move forward. In the build-up to the 1960 Nehru-Zhou Enlai summit, historian Srinath Raghavan has recorded, both India and China considered serious concessions. Early in April, vice-president Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan told British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald that India’s border claims in the Northeast were immutable—but New Delhi was willing to trade off recognition of Arunachal Pradesh for Chinese territory “in practical occupation of the territory which they now occupied.”
And, for his part, China’s first Premier, Zhou Enlai, suggested a similar swap. In Ladakh, China was poised on the line running from Karakoram to the Kongka La Pass, the site of the 1959 skirmish. This territory was vital to China for its road access to Xinjiang, he replied. In return, China would consider giving up its claims to Arunachal Pradesh, giving India depth in its Northeast.
There have been several iterations of this idea since. As Ameya Pratap Singh has pointed out, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had proposed a version of the territory-swap to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who insisted on a detailed, historical sector-by-sector study. Prime MInister Morarji Desai’s weak government was in no position to push through a political settlement, in any case, and the idea dissolved amid the Sumdorong Chu clashes in 1986. The deal was offered once again by Deng to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988.
For progress, Indian political leaders will have to prepare their public for the prospect of concessions India never really held—just as Chinese leaders must admit Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh were never theirs. The stakes in the relationship between the two countries are just too high to be hijacked by colonial-era ideas of nationhood, and the many tragedies which flowed from them.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)