Tawang, one of the last outposts of India on the Arunachal frontier is in news for the past few weeks on account of the escalating tension with the PLA troops. Though the Indian Army has successfully resisted the Chinese attempt to transgress the LAC, there is no denying the fact that we need to strengthen our border infrastructure to secure ourselves against any attempt by the adversary to change the status quo.
It bears recall that in1947, the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had accepted independent India’s legal position and that it was the natural inheritor of all treaties between Britain and Tibet. During the Second World War, road building had begun in the Lohit and Subansiri divisions of NEFA (as Arunachal Pradesh was then known) as part of the attempt to administer the areas right up to the claimed border as per the Simla Convention of 1914.
With regard to Tawang and the entire Kameng Division, the outpost established at Tawang in 1938 by the British Indian Army had been overrun by the Axis troops in 1942. But immediately after the Japanese retreat, the Tibetan army had withdrawn quietly from the territory. So, there was state of flux. In his magisterial work 1962: The War That Wasn’t, military historian Shiv Kunal Verma writes that after the World War, Tibet’s governing council, the Kashag, had officially written to the Indian government in October 1944, that it ‘did not wish to dispute the validity of the McMahon Line’, but requested postponement of the extension of the British administration to Tawang.
Meanwhile, when the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek lost out to the Communists under Mao Zedong, the latter asserted his control over Tibet. From October 1950, Chinese troops advanced into eastern Tibet, crossing the border at five places to capture the headquarters of the Tibetan army in Chamdo in the Kham province. The PLA’s objective was to demoralise the Lhasa government and pressurise it to send negotiators to Beijing to sign terms for a handover of Tibet.
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Establishing administration in Tawang
By early 1951, Indian political officers were reporting increased Chinese activity in various parts of NEFA. Most of the Assam Rifles posts were on the McMahon Line, with extended lines of communication running through areas with little or no administrative control. Walong and Hayuliang were established with a platoon each under the command of an officer, while two check posts were established in the upper reaches of the Siang Valley. However, the governor of Assam, Jairamdas Daulatram, under whose control the Assam Rifles functioned, was most concerned about the Tawang salient where Tibetan dzongpens (local officials) and their acolytes were still exercising control. Major Bob Khathing, the assistant political officer in Pasighat, was summoned to Shillong and directed to take a column of Assam Rifles up to Tawang to establish an administration there. He was given an escort of three platoons from 5 Assam Rifles, under the command of Captain H. B. Limbu. There were six hundred porters as well in their train.
Khathing reached Tawang on 1 February 1951, where a representative of the Tsona Dzong Dzongpen received him, and agreed that from ‘the third day of the Iron-Haired Year, corresponding with 9 February 1951 the administration of Tawang and its monastery would be the responsibility of the Government of India’, and that the Tsona Dzongpen or any other official of the Tibetan government could no longer exercise authority over the villages south of Bum-la that lay on the McMahon Line. The Dzongpen referred the matter to Lhasa. But by this time, the administration of Dalai Lama was in a stage of terminal decline. Claude Arpi, an authority on Tibet avers that the Bob Khathing column into Tawang was Sardar Patel’s last gift to the nation as it was he was he who had instructed the Jairamdas Daulatram to bring Tawang under the tricolour.
Although in a last-ditch effort, the Tibetans ordered all village chiefs to assemble at Tawang. By then, Bob Khathing and the Assam Rifles had made a favourable impression on the Monpas who found that Indians were not keen to extract any taxes from them. The Tibetan officials were escorted to the Indian border post at Khenzemane. Thus India was in de facto possession of the territories it held de jure seven months before the Chinese forced the 17-point agreement with the Dalai Lama on 24 October 1951.
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Angry Nehru
By the time Nehru got wind of the Tawang matter, Khathing was in firm control of the situation, and though a few weeks later (April 1951) both the Governor and the Major had to hear a mouthful from Nehru, it was well-nigh impossible to reverse the fait accompli. But Nehru’s anger did not last too long, for Daulatram completed his five-year term as the Governor of Assam till 1956, and Khathing became the district magistrate of Mokokchung in Nagaland, where the two Naga conventions were held in 1956 and 1957, which denounced violence and agreed for an autonomous state within the Union of India. Khathing went on to become the chief secretary of Nagaland, and later our Ambassador to Burma (as Myanmar was then called).
And it was to this very monastery in Tawang that the Dalai lama took refuge after an arduous journey on 31 March 1959. This story has been captured by Rita Singh in her book An Officer and His Holiness. Fifty years later, in spite of strong protests by China, the Dalai Lama’s visit to Tawang Monastery on 8 November 2009 was a monumental event for the people of the region, and the abbot of the monastery greeted him with much fanfare and adulation.
It is also true that in the 1962 engagement, the PLA had taken control over Tawang and its famous monastery, but it was not damaged, and the troops withdrew quietly after a few weeks. However, all signals from the ground are that we need to strengthen our infrastructure and connectivity with the loveliest and loneliest frontier of the country, for the contest and context are both extremely pertinent to India’s strategic interests and territorial integrity in this sector.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Till recently, he was the Director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)