ABSTRACT
A country’s foreign strategy is based on two elements: the quality of its political leadership and its bureaucracy; and the character of its domestic and international situation that creates pressures to react as well as provide opportunities to act. Following India’s defeat in 1962, China pushed India from outside, and nationalist Indian parliamentary and public opinion pushed India’s political leaders and bureaucracy from within. The twin pressures produced a rapid change in Indian diplomatic thinking and its strategic conduct. My narrative maintains that Sino-Indian interactions during the 1950s
were based on two distinct and incompatible solitudes. Beijing’s leadership and bureaucratic orientation was to moderate or neutralize India’s position as an obstacle to China’s rise to power and prestige, and second, to use the Subcontinent including Tibet as a platform for the consolidation and expansion of China’s regional position in its southern zone. It adopted several tactics. 1. Force was used to consolidate its position, and developed its lines of military and political communications in the Himalayan area; this occurred in the 1950s. 2. Maoist ideology and Chinese maps were used to assert territorial claims in the Himalayan area; this occurred in the 1950s. 3. Political diplomacy was used to emphasize the theme of peaceful coexistence with China’s neighbours as state policy; this occurred in the 1950s. 4. Threat to form a two-front problem for India was used to frighten India into making concessions to China; this occurred in 1959. 5. Finally, war was used in 1962 to end Indian ‘provocations’ and to teach India a lesson. The five-faceted Chinese orientation took shape when Nehru’s international prestige was high among the major world powers and Third World countries in the 1950s. India’s leadership and bureaucratic orientation in the 1950s played on
several themes. Moderation was urged in a world of Cold Wars that involved the major powers. The Dulles-Acheson view that you are either with us or against us, and that nationalism and nonalignment were evil was rejected as simplistic and immature. Despite its economic and military weakness, India
sought space for itself in the world arena by stressing the importance of correct values – diplomacy, an international commitment to reduce Third World poverty, and an end to great powers domination in international political and economic affairs. The approach to the communist powers was to highlight the role of nationalism rather than communism, and with China the approach was to wean it away from a dependency on Moscow. The Nehru line regarding China was that it was presently peaceful (a misleading view because he told his intelligence chief B. N. Mullik that China was a likely threat to India), that it needed a period of peace for its internal development (an incorrect assessment because China simultaneously sought internal economic and political change and international strength and expansion), and that a non-militaristic approach to the Tibetan and SinoIndian border questions could be productive (an incorrect assessment given the Maoist faith in the power of the gun and its cultural superiority over both Indians and Tibetans). These views expressed the dominant aspects of India’s political and bureaucratic leadership orientation up to 1962. 1962 was a psychological and a political turning point in Indian and
Sino-Indian affairs. It liberated the Indian decision-making machinery – civilian and military, from Nehru’s obsessive faith in peace diplomacy and a no war policy with China. It revealed India’s administrative disunity and a lack of proper policy coordination among the relevant government ministries who were supposed to deal with different facets of China-India relations. It revealed that the Indian army lacked the resources to check Chinese expansion. This defect was the result of Nehru’s anti-military orientation, the stingy attitude of the Ministry of Finance that viewed Indian public policy with a mindset of ‘guns versus butter’, not guns and butter. India’s political ministers had failed to provide policy direction and the resources to the army commanders to be ready to fight if diplomacy failed. Many books call the 1962 war ‘China’s betrayal’ but they also acknowledge that the Indian government’s failure was a ‘made in India’ political and a military problem. Between 1950 and 1962 the Government of India lost its manoeuvrability in engaging China in a meaningful way; both sides were talking according to the diplomatic and the legal records but neither side was listening or finding a way to develop a mutually satisfactory solution. China was seeking a border solution on its own terms through diplomacy and it was preparing for military action in the border while it was buying time with India through its diplomacy. India was reacting to Chinese moves but it had no leverage to induce it to moderate its position or to change it. Nor did Indian practitioners possess the means to deflect Chinese moves that led to war. It was also apparent that India’s diplomatic machinery (the Ministry of
External Affairs where Nehru was the Foreign Minister as well as the Prime Minister) worked under Nehru’s shadow and it suffered the problem of a personality-centred foreign policy. It followed Nehru’s directions on China except that K. M. Pannikar, India’s ambassador to China (1949-52) had his personal China policy that defined Tibet as a part of China where
the latter possessed ‘sovereignty’ although the diplomatic record of British India-Manchu China-Tibet relations was in terms of Chinese suzerainty. Nor did Pannikar see it fit to lever India’s position on Tibet in 1950-54 to the boundary question. During the 1950s the Foreign Ministry was often at odds with the Intelligence Bureau about India’s territorial limits.
