Indi China and Tibet

One controversy that rears its head every now and then is whether India should be pro Tibet or pro China. With the Tibetan protests going vociferously global in the prelude to the Beijing Olympics the Indian government has been caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea. On one side is the Dalai Lama who has been given sanctuary in India, whose religious heritage is inextricably linked to our heritage and whose present independence movement strikes a chord with our own. On the other side is China whose military power we can never hope to match and whose economic power is essential to our own growth.

If one tries to locate the root cause of this mess one can go back to the British Empire when arbitrary lines were drawn on the map of Asia and treaties imposed on people without their acceptance. China-Tibet, India-Pakistan-Kashmir and Israel-Palestine all have their genesis in the above. But the more immediate causes were two events took place in the late 1940s. India became independent in 1947 and around the same time Mao’s People’s Army took over China. One of the first acts of the Communist regime in China was overrunning Tibet. Though India sympathized with Tibet it sided with China by recognizing China’s new regime and using its influence on Tibet to compromise with their new situation, thereby giving the Chinese aggression legitimacy. For the next decade, China continued its demolition of the Tibetan culture and India continued to support China with misplaced naivety. “हिन्दी-चीनी भाई भाई” was India’s slogan under the policy of Panchsheel, a slogan that eventually made India a laughing stock. In 1959 the Tibetan rebellion in Lhasa was crushed and under American protection the Dalai Lama fled to India. India was compelled to give him sanctuary in Dharamshala. India discovered that China had built roads deep inside Indian territory. China refused to accept the boundary drawn by the British and accused India of sheltering an enemy of China. This led to the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The confused Indian policy on China can be traced back to its inconsistent reactions to the events described above.

This inconsistency was the result of one man who put his desire for international accolades above the interests of his country. He refused to take strong steps and sought a peace on submissive terms – a peace that could not endure. Nehru’s policy on China was not the only policy that was faulty. His declaring cease-fire in Kashmir when the Indian army was on the verge of occupying the whole of the state was nothing but hankering for praise from the West. That cease-fire gave rise to Pak Occupied Kashmir, which is the cause of problems today.