ABSTRACT
In 1962, India and China went to war over Aksai Chin, a mostly unpopulated high altitude desert along the western sector of the Himalayan border between India and China and the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), now known as the state of Arunachal Pradesh in India and South Tibet in China, along the eastern sector of the Himalayan border. The conflict resulted in an overwhelming military victory for China which declared a unilateral cease-fire and claimed control of Aksai Chin but withdrew from NEFA. The origins of the India-China war are difficult to fathom from conventional IR perspectives. Both NEFA and Aksai Chin were resource poor, sparsely populated and located well away from major population centres. While Aksai Chin provided access to Tibet and might, therefore, have had ‘strategic’ value for the Chinese, no such argument is adequate in explaining India’s claim. While NEFA has been integrated into the Indian Union as the state of Arunachal Pradesh, it did not hold this significance in 1962 and there are clear indications that China was willing to renounce its claim to the region on the basis of a new border agreement. The most comprehensive attempts to analyse the motivations of India and China in 1962 are Neville Maxwell’s ‘revisionist’ India’s China War and Stephen Hoffmann’s ‘post-revisionist’ India and the China Crisis. Refuting the dominant international understanding at the time of the war as an unprovoked aggression by China against India, Maxwell (1972) argued that China was committed to a conciliatory approach to the problem of converting ambiguously defined borders into the boundaries of modern nation-states. By contrast, Nehru, according to Maxwell, had from the outset followed a policy of non-negotiation with regard to the India-China border and was implicitly committed to the use of force to impose India’s territorial claims. In a more recent article, Maxwell argues that India effectively forced war on China through expansionist and irrational behaviour which, he speculates, was ‘perhaps traceable to the psychological wound inflicted on Nehru and his generation by the sundering of India to create Pakistan, which imparted mystical or religious significance to territorial issues’ (Maxwell 2006: 3877). Hoffmann’s study is guided by the International Crisis Behaviour (ICB) theoretical model which focuses on the link between perceptions and war and relies on ‘objective behavioural data about conflictual interaction in the international
system’. Hoffmann (1990: 265) argues that ‘Indian decision-making in many ways followed what might be called ‘normal’ practices, found in governments elsewhere . . . India’s 1962 tragedy came about not just from practices that are peculiar to India but also from behaviours that may be quite usual in international affairs’. These ‘behaviours’ are the consequence of the threat perceptions and worldviews of key decision-makers and their semi-permanent images of international and domestic realities. As the threat perception changes, so do worldviews and images. He argues that due to a number of incidents during the 1950s, both India and China hardened their stances toward their border claims and soon the ‘conflict spiral possessed a momentum of its own and culminated in the Indian-Chinese border war’ (Hoffmann 2006: 183). Hoffmann (2006: 25-8) goes beyond the ICB model in pointing to the importance of Indian nationalism in the border conflict. The Indian leadership, he suggests, was wedded to the idea that India was demarcated by historical borders which existed long before the British established their state structure. Hence, both Hoffmann and Maxwell touch on the role of identity and nationalism in understanding India’s motivations in the India-China conflict, without fully developing this argument. Instead they employ conventional problem-solving approaches to analysing crises as objective facts that are the product of pre-existing sets of dispositions and world-views. In keeping with an approach that asks how rather than why particular foreign policy decisions are made, this chapter analyses the border ‘crisis’ as a social construction which was produced by policy-makers who drew on representations that were the product of particular understandings of India’s past and desired present and future. We have seen that Nehru’s construction of India’s postcolonial identity was anchored in a desire to construct an ethical modernity in which an internationalist nationalism, rather than a territorial nationalism, was key. In analysing the India-China war therefore, we are analysing not simply a foreign policy crisis but a significant moment in the production of identity. I begin by exploring British India’s imperial geopolitics and the ways in which Nehru attempted to deal with this legacy. Nehru, I argue, generally accepted a narrative which emerged during the colonial encounter and presented Indian civilization as being perpetually vulnerable to invasion and conquest. This narrative contributed to the perception of India’s backwardness among the Indian elite. Despite accepting this narrative, however, Nehru was also a critic of realist and imperial geopolitics and he was determined to engage China in ways that departed from the geopolitical reasoning of British India. In particular, there was an attempt to establish India-China relations along the lines of friendship. This relationship, therefore, constituted an important element of India’s postcolonial identity as a part of Nehru’s attempt to construct an international politics of friendship. Through an examination of the correspondence on border issues between India and China, the chapter analyses how a dispute over borders emerged and overwhelmed the discourse of friendship by being constructed as a crisis linked to identity. I suggest that the introduction of discourses of humiliation, honour
and self-respect were key to this process. How India dealt with the aftermath of the war is explored by analysing speeches and government statements. Many of these sustained a discourse of betrayal which was an attempt to minimize the damage to India’s self-identity, for it contained possibilities for resistance and renewal. Finally I evaluate the identity costs of India’s war with China and the damage done to Nehru’s vision of India’s postcolonial identity.
