The Sino-Indian War of 1962

New perspectives

Amit R. Das Gupta, Lorenz M. Lüthi

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315388922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Sino-Indian border war of 1962 forms a major landmark in South Asian, Asian and Cold War history. Among others, it resulted in an unresolved conflict permanently hindering rapprochement between China and India, the establishment of the Sino-Pakistani axis, the deepening of the Sino-Soviet split and had a lasting impact on Indian domestic affairs.

This volume draws on new documentary evidence to re-evaluate perceptions, motivations and decision-making processes of both antagonists, but also of third powers immediately affected by the conflict. It also investigates the effect on India's internal politics, its Constitution, the Communist Party of India and the fate of Indians of Chinese origin. Finally, it analyses how the conflict is viewed in India today and its ramifications for India–China relationship.

A major intervention in the Asian historical landscape, this book will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of modern history, especially of modern South Asia and China, international relations, defence and strategic studies, international politics and government. It will also be useful for think-tanks and government agencies.

Part 1

Bilateral perspectives

1 India’s relations with China, 1945–74

Lorenz M. Lüthi

After World War II, India and China played in a class of themselves among Afro-Asian countries. No other country in the decolonized world could match them in terms of territory; given their respective populations, they even were the two largest in the world. From an Indian viewpoint, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the source of some hope but also much mistrust, fear and frustration. While the two countries shared the historical experience of colonialism and the struggle against it, they choose to establish different socio-economic and political systems in the late 1940s. India’s relationship with Communist China was fraught by two major problems. Almost from the very beginning, Tibet and the problematic border situation in the Himalayas were on the minds of Indian government leaders. And, then, Pakistan imposed itself as a second irritant in the bilateral relationship. In a quarter century, India’s relationship with the PRC went through three distinct phases: the unfolding of the relationship until 1957, the road to war in the Himalayas and beyond in the period from 1958 to 1965 and the final decade of India’s attempts to manage China’s relative rise in international relations.

India’s relations with China, 1945–57

As soon as Jawaharlal Nehru was released from prison in mid-1945 after three years of incarceration for anti-colonial activities, he pondered India’s role in international relations. The prime minister-in-waiting had no doubt that India was a great power, destined to lead the colonized world to independence.¹ At the same time, he was convinced that India and China would assume their rightful great power positions as permanent United Nations (UN) Security Council members alongside the United States and the Soviet Union.²

It was against this background that Nehru demanded UN membership for the newly established PRC in 1949. He considered New China’s exclusion from the United Nations not only counterproductive but also a violation of the organization’s spirit.³ At the same time, the prime minister called the continued membership of the Republic of China (ROC) of Taiwan – including the permanent seat in the Security Council – ‘farcical’.⁴ Despite the border conflict that started a decade later, India never disputed Communist China’s entitlement to UN membership and the permanent seat. When the United States proposed in 1950 for India to replace the ROC in the council, and the Soviet Union suggested in 1955 a 6th permanent seat for India, Nehru declined to consider either, asserting that India would discuss this issue only after the PRC had replaced the ROC in the United Nations.⁵ During Nehru’s visit to Moscow in mid-1955, the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev proposed to convene a six-power conference – bringing together what the Indian prime minister considered the four legitimate permanent Security Council members plus the PRC and India – which was supposed to discuss pertinent issues in international affairs.⁶ Nehru, however, ‘replied that in his view the time was not yet ripe’ for such a meeting.⁷

The two proposals and Nehru’s twofold rejection are remarkable in several aspects. First, they testify to the great international reputation which India enjoyed in the first half of the 1950s.⁸ Indeed, Delhi had twice organized an Arab-Asian relations conference in the late 1940s, and was an important convenor, though not host, of the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung in 1955.⁹ Concurrently, Nehru had defined and established the idea of non-alignment that helped to position India between the superpower blocs as mediator while it rejected acquiring nuclear weapons on moral grounds.¹⁰ Nehru’s rejection of both proposals also reveals two implicit assumptions on his part: first, that the PRC would replace the ROC in the United Nations in the future, and second, that India’s continued reputation in international affairs would lead to a renewal of these offers.

India’s principled position with regard to PRC representation in the United Nations did not, however, include an endorsement of Communist China’s domestic or foreign policies. With the foundation of the PRC, Nehru was convinced that ‘all kinds of new problems arise’.¹¹ The prime minister worried about the possibility of expansionist tendencies in the foreign policy of New China.¹² Just as India was establishing its own democracy, the ‘totalitarian creed’ of the Communist neighbour troubled him deeply.¹³ Yet, even before the foundation of the PRC, he had stressed that India had to respect the Chinese choice of government, ‘whether we like it not’.¹⁴ Enthusiastic reports from the Indian embassy in Beijing in the early 1950s about China’s ‘general feeling … of great friendship with India’ caused him hope that his fears about a rising Communist China, may be, had been mislaid.¹⁵

Still, in the wake of the war with Pakistan over Kashmir in 1947–48, Nehru started to emphasize the ‘new importance’ of the territory south of the McMahon Line (at the eastern sector of the border), which would become the Northeast Frontier Agency (NEFA; today’s Arunachal Pradesh province) in 1951.¹⁶ In late 1950, with the start of the Chinese Communist military occupation of Tibet in the wake of the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, Beijing’s actions in Tibet became ‘incomprehensible’ to Nehru, and he himself even ‘more frontier-conscious’.¹⁷ It was in this context that he reconsidered Indian trading and military privileges in Tibet that dated back to the British colonial period.¹⁸ The maintenance of such rights, he would write in 1954, was against the essence of India’s anti-imperialism.¹⁹ While unhappy about the Chinese occupation of Tibet in October 1950, the prime minister, however, was not really bothered by the appearance of battle-hardened Chinese troops north of the Himalayan crest line.²⁰ Attacking India from this ‘icy wilderness’ would be ‘foolish’, Nehru wrote as late as mid-1952.²¹

Yet, at the same time, Nehru grew alarmed over the possibility of Tibet becoming a source of Sino-Indian conflict. Girja Shankar Bajpai, the first secretary general of India’s foreign ministry, had become deeply concerned about the emergence of Sino-Indian conflict over Tibet in November 1950 but wondered a year later whether or not it was advantageous to raise the issue with the PRC as long as the Korean War was still going on.²² Against the background of China’s concurrent intervention in the Indochina conflict, the Indian government in early May 1952 publicly warned the PRC that any ‘aggression in Burma, Siam [Thailand] or Malaya [Malaysia] would be treated as war-like’, and promised military support for the three South Asian nations.²³ Still, as Bajpai told US Ambassador Chester Bowles later that month, ‘India would continue to talk softly on subject [of] Communist China because [of the] common long boundary and fear of Chinese aggression [in] south East Asia’.²⁴ In October, Nehru grew additionally concerned ‘about the way [the] Chinese had been negotiating’ with the United States during ‘the last months’ of talks on the termination of the Korean War.²⁵

After China’s Prime Minister Zhou Enlai suddenly had offered to negotiate on India’s relations with Tibet on 14 June 1952, Nehru read into the absence of any reference to the McMahon Line an implicit Chinese attempt to renegotiate what he considered a settled issue.²⁶ According to the US Ambassador Chester Bowles who regularly met Nehru, the Indian prime minister started to fear that his country had ‘only two alternatives’ – ‘to build up a military force which would enable her to speak on terms of equality with China, or to seek a modus vivendi for co-existence with China’. For political and economic reasons, Nehru doubted that the first was feasible. Since he also was convinced that China’s contemporaneous foreign policy, in particular in Korea and Indochina, was tied to Soviet expansionist policies, he aimed for India ‘to loosen’ these bonds with the goal of Sino-Indian ‘co-existence’.²⁷

On 1 August 1953, four days after the end of the three-year-long Korean War, Nehru observed the general ‘lessening of tension’ in the global Cold War.²⁸ A month later, he proposed to China negotiations on Tibet; his communication to Beijing implied that no border disputes existed.²⁹ Yet, while he soon came to admit to himself that the McMahon Line had come to India ‘during British rule’, he was not willing to raise border issues because he seemingly did not want to awaken sleeping dogs.³⁰ The Sino-Indian Agreement on Tibet, which was signed in Beijing on 29 April 1954 after almost four months of negotiations, was an odd mixture of technical agreements and lofty principles. In the six articles codifying trade and pilgrimages, India renounced the old British privileges in Tibet. The preamble, however, contained what became known as Panch Sheel, the five principles of peaceful co-existence between India and China.³¹ Apart from the mutual promise to respect each other’s sovereignty, the agreement did not delineate the borderlines itself but defined six entry points into Tibet for Indian pilgrims at the McMahon Line. Nehru probably...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Bilateral perspectives
• Part 2 International perspectives
• Part 3 Domestic perspectives
• Index