This is India’s China war, Round Two
The absurd myth of an ‘unprovoked Chinese aggression’ in 1962 has fermented in India a persistent longing for revenge
The lesser of these was the outright falsehood spun in the shock of immediate and utter Indian defeat in 1962’s Round One border war with China, when, after the hesitant launch of an Indian offensive to drive the Chinese out of India-claimed territory on the Chinese side of the McMahon Line, the pre-emptive Chinese counter-attack had in little more than a month crushed the Indian Army. It enabled the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to vacate all the territory it had occupied with nothing more than the minatory – and humiliating – warning to India, “don’t challenge us again”.
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The underlying and greater delusion is that India’s geographical limits are set by millennial historical forces. The process of boundary formation established and required by the international community (negotiation to achieve agreement on border alignment and cooperation to demarcate the agreed alignment on the ground) thus becomes otiose for the Indian republic. India, having “discovered” the alignment of its borders through historical research, need only display them on its official maps and those would become defined international boundaries “not open to discussion with anybody”, as Nehru put it in a notorious order in 1954.
Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript
He applied his own ruling literally and categorically, rejecting Beijing’s repeated calls for negotiation; and every one of his scores of successors in the Indian leadership has clung, or felt nailed to, that obdurate and provocative stance, in effect claiming the sole right unilaterally to define China’s as well as India’s borders. Every generation of literate Indians is inculcated with that false sense of national oppression by the cartographic image showing broad areas of Indian territory “occupied” by China, with reminders that Beijing’s maps reveal an intention to seize even more.
The Sino-Indian interface along the undefined and contested frontier is consequently and constantly a source of international friction, waiting only for incidental sparks to set off martial conflagration.
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Border war was narrowly averted in 1987 when a belligerent Indian Army commander, General Krishnaswamy Sundarj, having been foiled in his plan to render Pakistan a “broken-back state”, turned his attention to the China border. He massively reinforced positions there and in deliberate provocation pushed numerous posts across the established McMahon line of actual control. China reacted with matching troop concentrations and air force inductions, and warned India to desist from its aggressions, which, in the late summer of 1987, it did, probably under US pressure.
The heat went out of the confrontation but the Indian Army was left in a grossly unbalanced situation, with great troop concentrations beyond normal supply reach. That predicament induced a new Indian government, under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, to negotiate in 1993 India’s one and only border agreement with the PRC: jointly to observe the line of actual control (LAC) and to reduce force levels to a practical minimum. Later, developments fell far short of what the treaty required.
The current confrontation in the Sikkim sector might appear to have similar origins in military rather than political assertions, with India’s army chief, General Bipin Rawat, beating his chest with boasts that India can fight and win on “two and a half” fronts simultaneously.
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The sudden convergence of Indian and Chinese troop concentrations around the current military confrontation in Doklam illustrates again the truth of Curzon’s observation in his Oxford lecture that borders can be “the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issue of war or peace”. There is a spicy historical irony here because this confrontation is precisely sited in the single, tiny Sino-Indian border sector that was long ago treaty-defined and demarcated.
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In 1890, rational self-interest brought the mighty British Raj to sit down in conference, as if on equal terms, with the ruler of the Lilliputian Himalayan state of Sikkim, agree on the alignment of the state’s border and jointly mark that out on the ground. Time, weather and probably local human mischief will have obliterated the border markers but the careful verbal description in the Treaty prevails to prove that the local Indian commander, with or without higher orders, has blatantly moved forces into what is now Chinese territory. Beijing, sorely chafed already by India’s recent repeated provocations, appears to have decided that this is too much, and has itself adopted the absolutist Nehruvian position of “no discussion without withdrawal”.
The Indian attempt to depict this confrontation as tripartite should be disregarded. Bhutan is not an independent actor, is rather an Indian glove-puppet. A brigade group of the Indian Army, permanently stationed in Bhutan and now reinforced, is an ever-present reminder to Bhutan’s ruling group of what happened to Sikkim when its ruler aspired to independence – speedy annexation.
Thus this still petty armed confrontation has a real and potentially enormous explosive potential – Round Two of Sino-Indian war. The way out, and ahead, lies where it always has been, in the opening of comprehensive, unconditional Sino-Indian boundary negotiation. What bars the way is the requirement of Indian policy reversal, which in the current bellicose mood and twisted popular sense of injury in India would require heroic bravery of leadership.
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Neville Maxwell, who covered the 1962 China-India border war as the South Asia correspondent for The Times, is the author of India’s China War. In March 2014, Maxwell leaked the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, an Indian government report from 1963 examining India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian War that is yet to be declassified.