Notice the national mood. How relaxed the country seems as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visits it. There is an air of understanding and conciliation. Compare this to the time when Prime Minister Chou En-lai came to India in April 1960 — a little more than two years before the India-China war. The atmosphere at that juncture was tense and the Congress, which was the ruling party at that time as well, was up in arms. Chou En-lai had taken the trip in a bid to avoid a confrontation with New Delhi. He was keen to legalise his country’s occupation of the Aksai-Chin region, where it had forcibly built a road to link Sinkiang. New Delhi’s repeated protests to China that it had nibbled at Indian territory had made little difference.Against this background, Chou En-Lai’s visit assumed a crucial importance. As the home ministry’s information officer, I was present when Chou En-lai met the then home minister, Govind Ballabh Pant, at his residence. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had arranged the meeting to assure the suspicious Congress that he was not seeking a compromise on the boundary dispute behind the party’s back. He had also wanted Beijing to realise how intractable were his Cabinet colleagues on the boundary question. Pant’s memory was phenomenal. He had read every bit of material on the dispute. Starting from the Ladakh side and ending with the Thag La Ridge, Pant tried to establish the watershed theory — the point from which water flowed to either side should be taken as the dividing line. Where the line was straight, he argued, it would follow the crest of the high dividing range (Beijing had agreed by implication to the watershed theory while signing border treaties with Myanmar and Nepal).Chou En-lai explained how important the Aksai-Chin road was to China. He pointed out that it was the only access his country had to Sinkiang. Pant offered to guarantee safe and free (civil) traffic through the area. But he made it clear that India would not part with the territory. Chou En-lai kept quiet at that time but questioned subsequently the very validity of the McMahon Line. When Pant began on the presumption that the McMahon Line was a settled fact, Chou En-lai had observed that the line was open to “interpretation”. (The then defence minister, Krishna Menon, who was not present at the meeting, conveyed to Nehru the impression that Pant was rude to Chou En-lai).The Chinese prime minister gave enough hints to suggest that he was ready for a package deal and would accept the Actual Line of Control. This meant that Aksai-Chin would remain with Beijing because its forces were already there and India could take its forces right up to the McMahon Line in case it was in occupation of what was then called NEFA. Successive governments at New Delhi have been trying to get the deal — with more or less the same contours — renewed. The guiding principles for settling the boundary dispute, which have been anvilled by officials and endorsed by the respective governments, may well be on the lines indicated in the fifties. My worry is that India may, in the process, compromise on giving China some area in Tawang as well.I do not want to go into the rights and the wrongs of the settled principles on the demarcation of the border. But I do want to know why these principles were rejected in 1960, and why the two countries went to war in 1962. It is little naive to think that our trouble with China was essentially due to the dispute over some territories. It had deeper reasons. Two of the largest countries in Asia confronted each other over a vast border. They differed in many ways. And the test was whether anyone of them would have a more dominating position than the other on the border, and in Asia itself. In his letter to the chief ministers of the day, Nehru had written just before the India-China war: “We do not want communism to come here and yet the essential conflict is more political and geographical than that of communism, although communism is an important factor in the background. Communism too is fundamentally developing two facets, one represented by the Soviet Union and the other by China. It is possible to live peacefully with the Soviet Union. But it does not appear to be possible to do that with China. Hence the essential conflict.”Some can reassess Nehru’s approach to China. I think he tried his best to be accommodative and even offered the Aksai-Chin in a roundabout manner (a long lease). Many may say he drove Beijing to attack India. How? Building a few pillars to delineate the border, which we had known traditionally as ours, was not a step that should have led to the Chinese retaliating with a full-fledged war. Take the other reason that is bandied about. How provocative could Nehru have been when he asked his forces to throw the Chinese out of Indian territory? Beijing’s response was the use of force to “teach India a lesson”. Even otherwise, Nehru, who personally introduced Chou En-lai at the first non-aligned conference at Bandung, could not have expected the Chinese prime minister to do what he did. True, Chou En-lai was angry that Nehru had given asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959. But New Delhi could not have shut its doors to a person who was considered “holy” by most people in India. China’s objective, it appears, was to heighten tension in the world and to make non-alignment and peaceful existence more or less difficult to maintain.Given this background, we need to welcome Premier Wen Jiabao linking a settlement on the boundary issue with the overall trajectory of bilateral ties between India and China today. His visit to India’s Silicon Valley at Bangalore, before touching down in New Delhi, indicates how keen he is to strengthen economic ties with India. He wants to chart a new course of cooperation. Prosperity creates a vested interest in peace. Therefore, he should be doing something positive on the boundary question. Time is a great healer. But the scars of the 1962 wounds still remain. This is not so much to do with India’s defeat but the shattering of its trust in China. Premier Wen should find ways to rebuild that trust.
