The Narendra Modi-Xi Jinping handshake in Kazan provides the right opportunity to ask the most basic question: what is our long-term perspective on India-China relations?
The question was, in fact, raised and settled back in 1950. In a famed letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, deputy prime minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel set out his concerns over China’s increasing belligerence towards any kind of pretence to independence by Tibet.
Nehru decided to take the issue to cabinet instead of leaving it as a bilateral difference of opinion between himself and his deputy. He had every reason to believe that Sardar Patel would be present at the cabinet meeting. Tragically, the Sardar remained bedridden and died within three weeks of Nehru detailing his counter-argument to all members of the cabinet through his note of November 18, 1950.
Urging that “we should be clear in our minds as to what we are aiming at, not only in the immediate future but from a long-term view”, Nehru’s starting point, obvious as it is, bears reiteration: communist China “is going to be our close neighbour for a long time to come”. It cannot be wished away. No power on earth can either replace it—as, at the time, the American establishment hawks were pressing their government to do—nor could we “save Tibet” from a Chinese takeover, as several Indian establishment hawks were urging him to do. He significantly added that “we might be able to help Tibet retain a large measure of autonomy”. That was eventually written into the Panchsheel agreement of 1954, but violated by the Chinese before the ink ran dry on the signatures of the two sides.
Communism and a feudal theocracy could not really be accommodated in a single package, especially, as Nehru reminded his cabinet colleagues, Tibetan independence was only “40 years” old compared to centuries of kowtowing to Peking (now Beijing). Moreover, the new rulers were atheists, unlike their imperial predecessors, with no need of spiritual guidance from the Dalai Lama. That was the reality with which we had to come to terms. And under these terms, China might “formally grant Tibet autonomy” but that autonomy “can obviously not be anything like the autonomy verging on independence that Tibet had enjoyed” over the previous four decades. Prescient!
Pointing to the “tremendously long frontier” between China and India, Nehru awoke both countries to the need to reaffirm the ground reality by mutual agreement. But China was unprepared to talk to him about the border for close to a decade and that then became the bone of contention leading to the conflict of 1962. While expressing the view that he did not anticipate a “major attack”, Nehru conceded that “there are certainly chances of a gradual infiltration” and even of the Chinese taking “possession of disputed territory” (emphasis added) but underlined that to make “full provision for a feared attack” would be to “cast an intolerable burden” on us. However, we must “take all necessary precautions to prevent” the “infiltration” and unwarranted claims to “disputed territory”.
Nehru, thus, concluded that “if China and India are inveterately hostile to each other”, there will be “repeated wars bringing destruction to both”. But if “India and China (are) at peace… it would make a vast difference”.
Our larger strategic aim should be to ensure that “India and China (are) at peace”. In this context, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has evoked “the power of engaging in continuous dialogue because, sooner or later, solutions will emerge”. Should that not apply to Pakistan?
Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.