‘The world’s against China’: India’s ICFA comrades keep the faith
- Ageing veterans of the India-China Friendship Association struggle to fathom the logic of those who burn flags, ban apps and demand boycotts
- They say the same anti-communist forces are at work today as when they started promoting people-to-people ties more than 50 years ago
“I will not make enemies of them,” declares Bhaskaran, 79, the general secretary of the Karnataka chapter of the ICFA.
“Boycotting is a foolery in a globalised world,” adds Achari, 76, president of the association’s National Committee. “We should not fall prey to China phobia.”
WHOLE WORLD AGAINST CHINA
“It’s the whole world against China,” Bhaskaran says, blaming anti-communist forces for the attacks on Beijing over the pandemic. The same forces have been spreading false propaganda in India since 1962, he adds.
“World peace can happen only if there is friendship between India and China. We oppose war of any kind,” he says.
The hostilities on each side of the border have prevented Bhaskaran and Achari from issuing a public statement in a bid to calm the anger. Well-wishers have advised them against taking any step that might be interpreted as being pro-China.
But they are thinking seriously about how to use the ICFA, which was instrumental in persuading Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to recognise China in 1950 and make India the second non-communist country – after what was then Burma – to establish diplomatic ties.
The ICFA foundations were laid in the then princely state of Mysore by parliamentarian Mulka Govinda Reddy in November 1949, soon after the People’s Republic of China came into being. Its sole purpose was to establish friendly relations with the Chinese people to achieve world peace together. Its charter then, as now, declares its aim to “effectively combat the imperialist manoeuvres aiming at making Asians fight Asians by sowing seeds of discord and ill will among them”.
Recognising the role of the ICFA, the Ministry of External Affairs backed it in 1955 by appointing the former first ambassador K M Panikkar as the chairman of the national executive and foreign minister Syed Mahmood as the vice-president.
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ICFA’s rejection of political and religious affiliations attracted leading communist and non-communist members, giving it the appearance of a popular peace movement. During its peak years, it had more than 158 primary and district branches, from Bombay and Calcutta to Delhi and Kerala, and included politicians, academicians, journalists and businessmen. A 1956 advertisement in The Times of India announced annual membership for 1 rupee. Last year, the ICFA raised its membership fee from 10 rupees to 100 rupees (US$1.25) to cover the expense of its publications.
Historian Arunabh Ghosh of Harvard University is among those to have studied the ICFA’s activities between 1950 and 1960, an era when ties flourished. He highlights the numerous activities of ICFA and its counterpart, the China-India Friendship Association (CIFA), which was founded in 1952 and remained the principal agency through which cultural and other forms of exchange with India were channelled.
These included photo exhibitions like New China at a Glance, on the People’s Liberation Army, and the first visual glimpses of Chinese culture through films like The White-Haired Girl (Bai Mao Nu), based on the folktale of Xi’er and her lover Dachun, representing the oppression of millions of peasants before liberation. It was shown in 1952 and, three years later, Prithviraj Kapoor led a delegation of 11 filmmakers to China, showing Indian movies like Awara, Do Bigha Zameen and Barsaat to Chinese audiences in the hope they would fall in love with the musical romance of Raj Kapoor and Nargis.
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Writing in the 1961 issue of the China Quarterly on Sino-Indian cultural relations, Herbert Passin, a scholar on China and Japan, noted that the ICFA involved the participation of tens of thousands of people nationwide. “Strongly supported, it can be expected at all times to exert a pro-Chinese influence on Indian thought and politics.”
All this changed dramatically in 1962, the year Bhaskaran, then a young student activist inspired by the Marxist movement, joined the ICFA. War broke out as Chinese forces seized the Galwan valley and Pangong Tso – which are again the site of confrontation today – along with the Chip Chap valley, areas in Aksai Chin and the North East Frontier Areas.
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He refuses to use the term “war” and calls the 1962 conflict an “unpleasant situation” at the border which he blames on the historical fallout of imperialist British power.
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The ICFA continued to maintain contact with the Chinese people even after it was officially forced to shut when India ended bilateral ties and clashes continued through 1967. It took a leading role in persuading Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to restore relations in 1976. Achari and Bhaskaran undertook their first tour of China before Rajiv Gandhi’s ice-breaking trip in 1988, a first by an Indian leader in 34 years.
The ICFA has since lost clout with the government, and interest in forging ties with China has waned in many states. As of today, its units function in 11 states with 3,000 members. The Karnataka chapter, however, remains an untiring flag bearer of friendship, working closely with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries to pursue provincial-level ties with Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan, Yunan, Shaanxi and Tianjin, helping businesses and intermittently conducting joint medical exchanges, a tradition started in 1938 under Dwarkanath Kotnis during the Japanese war.
Shen feels that at a difficult juncture it is even more important for the ICFA and CIFA to function on their own and partner wherever possible. He says the anti-China sentiment and calls for a boycottare “natural, but self-hurting and unsustainable”.
“The friendship predates the current challenge and will survive and endure. With or without the border issue, the people-to-people relations have helped in promoting shared interests in friendship and goodwill.”
The ICFA veterans are confident that India and China will sail through the storm. Bhaskaran says leaders and governments change but friendly relations between people do not. Achari recalls the words of Lin Lin, the vice-chairman of the Political Consultation Committee, during a 1984 visit to Kerala. Lin compared China’s relations with India like the flow of the vast Brahmaputra river, saying their differences were temporary, like bubbles.
Ghosh of Harvard thinks a stronger ICFA could help in educating Indians about China and counter stereotypes, ignorance and envy. “Unfortunately”, he says, in the current climate the aggressive actions of the Chinese state, coupled with an inept response from the Indian government, “make these tasks doubly harder”. ■
