AS Bhasin’s new book offers archival insights into Tibet, China & Nehru

Sandeep Dikshit

At a time when the Chinese “perfidy” is again on display on the borders, AS Bhasin’s book touches squarely on these frontiers and is a timely reminder that educating the public opinion about the correct position is the only way to resolve the issue.

Based on archival material which Bhasin delved into during 30 years with MEA’s Historical Division, followed by nearly 30 more years of academic research, his earlier five-volume compilation of India-China archival material forms the grounding of this book. The backend material could not have been more solid.

Some of the developments revolving around Nehru have been analysed threadbare earlier. But here, Bhasin brings out in a more complete glare Nehru’s inconsistencies and his continued failure to read the Chinese mind, even when it was not as inscrutable as is assumed.

To begin with, it was not Red China that had designs on Tibet. Nor was the 1914 Simla Agreement that we assume permanently fixed the boundaries — McMahon Line — between India and Tibet/China ever agreed upon by Beijing. Bhasin provides acute insights into what really went on and the picture is not pretty from India’s point of view.

Nehru was mesmerised by the heights of the Himalayas and did not feel the need for defensive measures as he assumed them impregnable from military assaults. But did his advisers offer sound advice? The record is mixed.

Bhasin writes of TN Kaul, one of the negotiators of the China-India agreement on Tibet, having an affair with a Chinese woman all through the four months of talks. And on completion of the talks, he was audacious enough to seek two months’ leave, ex-India, for a honeymoon when already married.

The frequent hobnobbing by India’s senior diplomats with their US and British counterparts also did not go unnoticed by the Chinese. At one point, Bhasin reveals how MEA Director General Girija Shankar Bajpai informed the US ambassador of a secret note he had sent to Nehru on Tibet! The cross-over Indian diplomats from the British civil service seem to have inherited the jaundiced Anglo-American eye towards communists, for at one point a top Indian diplomat tells his US counterpart that New Delhi will not allow Moscow’s influence to expand! The dependence on the Anglo-American alliance was too costly.

If not Nehru, his diplomats ought to have picked up signals about the Chinese position on Tibet during the Asian Relations Conference in 1947. We are told it was an unqualified demonstration of Asian solidarity. But archival material points to the Chinese, then ruled by Kuomintang, strongly resenting the invitation to a Tibet delegation and taking serious objection to a map showing Tibet outside China.

The Tibetans were not entirely guileless. A delegation under trade cover led by senior noble Shakabpa Richardson hobnobbed more with US embassy officials to prepare landing fields in Tibet for a revolt. Then there was Kalimpong, where it was widely believed that the CIA was helping Tibetans to funnel arms supplies.

Among so many tomes on Tibet, where does this book fall? It skirts the oversimplification by Neville Maxwell (India to be blamed) at one end and Bertil Lintner (China wanted to teach India a lesson) at the other. It is closer to Ananth Krishnan’s ‘India’s China Challenge’, which also argues that on the basis of very little revelation about the actual facts from Nehru’s time, in the Indian public’s mind, China’s very presence in Tibet is illegitimate. As Bhasin provocatively points out, PLA’s armed foray into Tibet closely resembled the Indian Army’s takeover of Hyderabad state.

While playing up Nehru’s role in promoting third world solidarity, Bhasin does miss out on a much more active role by China that leads to the impression of Beijing having no friend in the world. If China did not acknowledge Nehru’s claim to have helped China to the UN seat, it is also because India was not the only country that was making that demand. To the Chinese, these platitudes may have seemed hypocritical when juxtaposed against the continuous gun running to Tibet, the pro-western outlook of its diplomats and the hobnobbing of the Tibetans with the Americans — at one point, accepting their advice not to go to Beijing to negotiate despite Nehru’s express orders.

The book more than ever underlines the need for a meaningful exercise to be conducted to open the archives to convince Indians that the position taken by India has not been rational and that China was not altogether perfidious, as is made out to be.