In a refutation and critique of Jawaharlal Nehru’s stand on the eastern and western border with China which is the official policy of the Indian government, a former head of the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs for 30 years has seriously questioned the belief India has a good case on the border issue.
Avtar Singh Bhasin said both on the west and east, Nehru unilaterally imposed his own claim about what the border should be, without obtaining the necessary concurrence from China and, more importantly, often in complete defiance of the facts which were well-known to him.
In an interview to The Wire based on his recent book Nehru, Tibet and China, Bhasin discussed India’s stand and Nehru’s multiple mistakes on the western border and, then, separately, India’s stand and mistakes on the eastern border.
Bhasin said of Nehru, “The prime minister had taken a simplistic view of the frontiers… Nehru’s insistence that India’s borders were what they were, maps or no maps, was unsustainable and proved disastrous for him and the nation which felt humiliated and demoralised”.
“The position taken by India In the past was not a rational one and China was not altogether perfidious as it was made out to be,” Bhasin continued.
Bhasin said if we are ever going to solve the border dispute with China, the Indian people need to be educated and informed that the stand taken under Nehru, and maintained by successive governments thereafter, was wrong – it was not based on facts and it was unilaterally asserted in defiance of the known historical position. At the same time, people will also have to be educated and told that China was not wrong but, in fact, often in the right.
According to Bhasin, what destroyed India’s position on the western border is that China built a 120-km-long road in Aksai Chin which India did not detect for seven years while it was being built. Zhou Enlai, in fact, taunted the Indian ambassador about this. Worse, in 1957, when India found out and protested, it was only an informal protest. Even that informal note lost much of its significance because, first, it said the Chinese men who had built the road had not obtained Indian visas and, second, the same note requested Chinese help locating Indian persons who had gone missing on patrol duty.
There’s a corollary that further weakens India’s position. When the Chinese responded to this note and said they had found the missing Indians and were going to deport them, India’s response was further damaging. It said “the question whether this particular area is in Indian or Chinese territory is a matter in dispute which is to be dealt with separately”. That confirmed India had doubts about its claim on Aksai Chin.
Now, on the eastern border there are four critical facts that need to be remembered. They are to do with the 1914 McMahon Line. First, the British never occupied all the territory between the northeastern border of that time and the McMahon Line. Second, Tibet remained in occupation of Tawang even though, according to the Simla Convention, it was part of India. Third, Tibet wanted the McMahon Line adjusted to return what they called “indisputable Tibetan territories that had been included into India”. Fourth, the British government indicated it was willing to do this. All this, according to Bhasin, proves the British did not think the McMahon Line was sacrosanct and settled for all time.
