In the face of Chinese territorial claims, India’s so-called “forward policy” was an exercise in prudence at one level, and of imprudence at another, as it was not accompanied by adequate military preparations, of the kind that could withstand a Chinese reaction. If the judgement was that the Chinese would not respond militarily, it only demonstrated that instead of having our ears on the ground, we had our heads in the air!
The 1962 border conflict scarred us politically, militarily and psychologically. It made India look militarily feeble; it provided China reason to support insurgencies in our north-east; it damaged our standing in the third world as well as our leadership pretensions; it made China a potent player in South Asian affairs; it gave Pakistan an additional political and military crutch for confronting India; it gave space to our neighours to play the China card against us, not only Nepal, but Sri Lanka ,and later, Bangladesh.
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The lasting effect of the 1962 debacle was the shattering of our self-confidence vis-a-vis China, our fear of China’s capacity to exploit our vulnerabilities, our over-cautious attitude towards it, and the loss of nerve even to forcefully protest against China’s provocative attitude and policies. We even hesitate to use the word “aggression” to describe the events of 1962. This would be understandable if 1962 was buried forever and the reasons why the conflict occurred have vanished. But the border issue remains unsettled and China continues to reiterate publicly its territorial claims on Arunachal Pradesh, but we are afraid even of semantic defiance! This psychological weakness via-a-vis China is a great handicap in fashioning a purposeful approach to that country.
The Chinese effectively exploit our democratic system and our free press to cultivate lobbies and use them to encourage the government to maintain its diffident posture. In our pluralistic society there is enough debate and self-questioning on government policy, as well as competition between political parties to project success or obfuscate failures, with public opinion in mind. A foreign country can always discreetly inject itself into this internal debate and try to steer it to its advantage. This is an unequal situation as outsiders can hardly penetrate the closed Chinese political system and its tightly controlled media. While China can use a section of our media and commentators to preach to our government the virtues of thinking out-of-the-box vis-a-vis China and making concessions to unblock the current impasse on the border issue, we cannot use the Chinese system to proffer similar advice to the Chinese government from within.
For a variety of reasons, Chinese actions on the border make big news in India as they awaken the ghosts of 1962. There are counter lobbies at work too, which feed reports of Chinese incursions across the border to the press so that the public remains wary of China’s intentions. The government is put on the defensive and tries to minimise these incidents, offering the convenient, and technically not wrong, explanation that they are limited to “disputed” areas and that the overall peace and tranquillity on the border has not been disturbed. No government in India wants to be put in a position of being accused of failure in its China policy. There is a kind of schizophrenia towards China at work-a strong fear of China and its posture on the border and in the region is accompanied by a mollifying discourse and unconscionable delays in developing the border infrastructure to requisite levels.
China’s disinclination to settle the border issue and our non-existing capacity to force it to do so in its own interest, left us no choice but to try to stabilise the situation on the border through the Agreements on Maintaining Peace and Tranquility and on Confidence Building Measures in the 90s. These have contained the border problem, but has also frozen it to India’s disadvantage. The status quo always favours the side not anxious for change. India wants peace on the border but also wants a border settlement. It suits China also to have peace as it defuses the border issue politically and militarily and gives it a free hand to settle Tibet internally. This also helps it to make the claim of its peaceful rise more credible.
In 1959, when the Dalai Lama flew to India , we rightly granted him asylum, but erred in laying a condition that he would not engage in any political activity on Indian soil. We gave up thus the Tibetan card voluntarily.
China, on the one hand, wishes the world to believe that it has pacified Tibet, with Tibet riding the crest of prosperity under Chinese rule. It demonstrates confidence about its position by inviting outsiders, including Indian visitors, to tour the region and personally assess the positive transformations that have occurred there. This is paying dividends as sympathetic visitors, as well as skeptical ones, have produced favourable commentaries. And yet China takes ground decisions which reflect a sense of insecurity about its hold over the territory. The railway line it has built, at great expense, makes less economic sense and more military/security sense as it augments China’s capacity to move troops and munitions to the border and meet any future local challenge to its rule in Tibet.
The impressive road infrastructure that China has built along Tibet’s border with India, along with expansion of airfields in Tibet in recent years, is surely intended not for border trade but for border domination, behind which Tibet will be held secure. The Chinese, credited with a lot of common sense, would have long concluded that India has not made military preparations to back up any political intention of wanting to settle the border dispute by force or provoke an uprising in Tibet. If India has increased its military capacity along the border compared to the past, it is essentially defensive in character and calculated to avoid a repetition of 1962. China’s military posture, it would seem, serves a trio of purposes; to secure Tibet as the sense of being occupied will not leave the Tibetans no matter what the semblance or reality of economic progress; to put military pressure on India and impose economic costs on the nation; and extract a favourable border settlement eventually by entrenching in the Indian mind a sense of inferiority and insecurity.
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