ABSTRACT
After World War II, India and China played in a class of themselves among Afro-Asian countries. No other country in the decolonized world could match them in terms of territory; given their respective populations, they even were the two largest in the world. From an Indian viewpoint, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was the source of some hope but also much mistrust, fear and frustration. While the two countries shared the historical experience of colonialism and the struggle against it, they choose to establish different socio-economic and political systems in the late 1940s. India’s relationship with Communist China was fraught by two major problems. Almost from the very beginning, Tibet and the problematic border situation in the Himalayas were on the minds of Indian government leaders. And, then, Pakistan imposed itself as a second irritant in the bilateral relationship. In a quarter century, India’s relationship with the PRC went through three distinct phases: the unfolding of the relationship until 1957, the road to war in the Himalayas and beyond in the period from 1958 to 1965 and the final decade of India’s attempts to manage China’s relative rise in international relations.
