Indian Defence Review

The “Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India” was signed on 29th April 1954 in Beijing by the Indian Ambassador N. Raghavan and Chang Han-fu, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister of China. It is remembered as the Panchsheel Agreement.

During a speech on the occasion of the signing, Zhou Enlai reiterated that the questions which were “ripe for settlement have been resolved”.

The subtleties of Zhou disturbed very few in Delhi, though before the Conference some diplomats such as Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, had strongly advised that India should force Beijing to recognize the traditional boundary between India and Tibet as the only way to resolve all the outstanding questions between India, China and Tibet.

The same day, through an exchange of letters, India gave up her ‘extra territorial’ rights in Tibet such the military escorts in Gyantse and Yatung; post offices, telegraph and telephone services and 12 rest houses.

During the following years, the same refrain would often be repeated: “The Government of India found the old advantages of little use and in any case the Chinese exercised full control in Tibet.”

But there is another side to the coin. For many years the so-called ‘colonial’ agreement on Tibet (i.e. the Simla Convention) had provided protection to the Land of Snows against an expansionist Eastern neighbour. It had allowed this nation to survive with complete internal autonomy. In 1954, the same nation was not even informed about the Agreement. Indeed, the Panchsheel Agreement was no less ‘colonial’ in nature than the treaties forced by the British on smaller nations without their knowing it.

The Indian government believed that the risk of world conflict was only due to ‘irritants left by imperialism’ and the Panchsheel Agreement was an effort to find “a peaceful method of solving irritants directly between two great neighbours.”

The Indian leaders believed in ‘wider perspectives’ while China pragmatically looked after its own interests.

Beijing got what it wanted: the omission of Demchok pass in the Treaty, (leaving the door of Aksai Chin open), the removal of the last Indian jawans from Tibet, the surrender of Indian telegraphic lines and guest houses, but first and foremost the Indian stamp of approval on their occupation of Tibet.

The title of the Agreement itself was a major victory for the Chinese side. From an independent State, Tibet had become ‘Tibet’s Region of China’ in the new Agreement. The Chinese historian Tieh-Tseng Li summed up the situation:

“Indeed, the status of Tibet was clearly defined in the ‘Peking Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’;¹ but the external aspect of the issue remained to be settled. India [gave] a tacit consent to the situation created by this agreement. …India accepted the principle that Tibet constitutes an integral part of China.”²

What were the concessions offered by Chang ‘to his Indian friends’?

The Agreement

The ‘Panchsheel Agreement’ marked the apogee of the Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai policy: Gopal, Nehru’s official biographer, called the ‘Zenith of World Influence’.

The preamble was merely a post-mortem sermon for Tibet as an independent State. During the following months, this innocuous agreement dealing with trade and travel regulations with Tibet became the new mantra of Indian diplomacy. Some politicians believed that the amazing Five Principles would solve all the problems in the relations between developing and non-aligned nations of the world.

The Chinese would later discover the use that they could make of the five Principles which were:

1. Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty
2. Mutual non-aggression
3. Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs
4. Equality and mutual benefit; and
5. Peaceful co-existence.

It sounded like a modern Asoka Edict.³ How many in India realized the ironical paradox of these precepts which triggered the virtual disappearance of a nation which itself had traditionally practiced these five principles? Tibet, the non-violent nation par excellence had not only preached peaceful co-existence, mutual respect, equanimity, non-interference, but had spread these precepts as far as China, Manchuria, Mongolia and Siberia.

Besides the centuries’ old traditional ties, in the previous fifty years, Tibet had enjoyed official treaty relations with India.

As damaging as the Agreement itself is the exchange of letters between the Indian Ambassador in Beijing and the Chinese Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The Government of India through this exchange handed over all advantages accrued from the Simla Convention. India would not ask for nor get anything in return, not even the confirmation of the McMahon line.

The Aftermath

On 2 May 1954, in a Note to the Secretary General of the Ministry of External Affairs, the Indian Prime Minister summarized his thinking:

“The Agreement between India and China on Tibet should be communicated formally to the Commonwealth countries. With that Agreement there should be a note mentioning our old connection with Tibet and the necessity that arose to make fresh adjustments in view of the recent changes in Tibet. Petty difficulties were cropping up in regard to trade, pilgrimage and other matters… This Agreement not only settles these various points in regard to Tibet which have been troubling us during the last two years or so, but also we hope will have a stabilising effect over this region, as well as, we think, to some extent, in Asian affairs.”⁴

The ‘fresh adjustments’ for the Tibetans meant a complete loss of their independence. On May 15, 1954, Nehru presented the Agreement to the Indian Parliament.

After reading the preamble to the Agreement, Nehru commented on its implications for Tibet. India had accepted that this peaceful nation was brutally invaded and deprived of its autonomy.

The fact that China claimed suzerainty over Tibet was not a proof that Tibet was a region of China, just as the fact that China claimed large chunks of Indian territory (through her newly printed maps) was not a proof that these territories rightfully belonged to Beijing. Nehru stated:

“It is true that occasionally when China was weak, this sovereignty was not exercised in any large measure. When China was strong, it was exercised. Always there was a large measure of autonomy of Tibet, so that there was no great change in the theoretical approach to the Tibetan problem from the Chinese side. It has been throughout the last 200 or 300 years the same. The only country that had more intimate relations with Tibet was India, that is to say, British India in those days. Even then, when it was British policy to have some measure of influence over Tibet, even then they never denied the fact of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, although in practice it was hardly exercised and they laid stress on Tibetan autonomy.”⁵

Once more, he reiterated that the most important feature of the Agreement was not the fate of the Tibetans, but the ‘wider implications’. Unfortunately, for India, the loss of her natural buffer zone with China was indeed to have even ‘wider’ implications. It would take several years for Delhi to discover this.

It did not occur to Nehru to ask the most interested party, the Tibetans, who most likely would have preferred to live with a couple of hundred Indian jawans rather than with tens of thousands of soldiers of the ‘Liberation Army’.

In the same speech Nehru spoke about Agreement Panchsheel: “Live and let live, no one should invade the other, no one should fight the other… this is the basic principle which we have put in our treaty.”

The historian S. Gopal described the Agreement in more realistic terms:

“But this was clutching at straws after the main opportunity had been deliberately discarded. The only real gain India could show was a listing of six border passes in the middle sector, thereby defining, even indirectly, this stretch of the boundary. On the other hand the Chinese had secured all they wanted and given away little.”⁶

During the debate which followed, most of the members from the Congress and the Communist Party were enthusiastic in their endorsement of the agreement.

Acharya Kripalani strongly attacked the Government policy: “It affects us all and we have to say something about it. We feel that China, after it had gone Communist, committed an act of aggression against Tibet.”

At one time a Communist member cut him to say: “Did you commit aggression in Hyderabad?” But Kripalani continued:

“The plea is that China had the ancient right of suzerainty. That right was out of date, old and antiquated. It was theoretical; it was never exercised, it has lapsed by the flux of time. Tibet is culturally more akin to India than it is to China, at least Communist China which has repudiated its old culture.”

Kripalani went on to mention that the new maps printed in China showed Nepal, Sikkim, etc. as part of China and he concluded: “In International politics when a buffer state is abolished by a powerful nation that nation is considered to have aggressive designs on its neighbours.”

Nehru summed up the debate by saying “in my opinion, we have done no better thing than this since we became independent. I have no doubt about this… I think it is right for our country, for Asia and for the world.”

At the end of June 1954, in the midst of the Geneva Conference on Indichina, Zhou Enlai paid his first visit to India. During his three-day stay, he had five long meetings with Nehru to review the world situation and his expectations in Geneva. The friendship was at its zenith, but Tibet was not mentioned.

The First Intrusions

It took less than two months for India to discover that all problems had not been settled. The first Chinese incursion in the Barahoti area of Uttar Pradesh occurred in June 1954. This was the first of a series of hundreds of incursions which culminated in the attack of October 1962.

The irony is that it is China which complained about the incursion of some Indian troops… on India’s territory!

The Counselor in the Chinese embassy in Delhi wrote to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs on 17 July 1954: “According to a report received from the Tibet Region of China, over thirty Indian troops armed with rifles crossed the Niti pass on 29 June 1954, and intruded into Wu-Je⁷ of the Ali Area of the Tibet Region of China. The above happening is not in conformity with the principles of non-aggression and friendly co-existence between China and India.”⁸

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On August 27, the Ministry of External Affairs replied that Barahoti was well inside Indian territory. This exchange is the first of more than one thousand Memoranda, Notes and Letters exchanged by the Governments of India and China over the next ten years, published in the White Papers on China.

John Lall wrote: “Ten days short of three months after the Tibet Agreement was signed the Chinese sent the first signal that friendly co-existence was over… Significantly, Niti was one of the six passes specified in the Indo-Chinese Agreement by which traders and pilgrims were permitted to travel.”⁹

Seeing that Indian diplomats were ready to bend backward to accommodate any Chinese demands, Mao Zedong and his colleagues would find more and more outstanding issues to raise. But in May—June 1954, they were still awaiting the outcome of the Geneva Conference.