| For over forty years after independence, India was ruled directly or
indirectly by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. As a result, national interest
was often sacrificed for personal dynastic interests. On at least
three occasions, Nehru sacrificed India's interests for the sake of
international glory for himself. First is his well-known blunder of
referring Kashmir to the United Nations when Indian troops were on the
verge of driving the Pakistanis out of Kashmir. The next was his
betrayal of Tibet to please China and gain glory for himself in Korea.
The third was his failure to settle the border with China because of
his preoccupation with his fantasy of Pancha Sheel. Nehru's colossal
blunder in Kashmir is well known, so I will briefly discuss his fiasco
in dealing with Tibet and China.
But first I want to highlight an important but often overlooked point.
It was not Pakistan that created the Kashmir problem. Nehru created
the problem with his two blunders: referring Kashmir to the United
Nations and agreeing to the present cease fire line or the LOC. At the
very least Nehru should have asked for the Indus River as the Line of
Control. Similarly, what I want to next is explain that it was not
China but again Nehru that created the border problem with China with
his multiple blunders. With his blunder upon blunder Nehru sacrificed
thousands of lives- both soldiers and civilians. His grandson Rajiv
Gandhi contributed his own share of blunders by sending Indian troops
into Sri Lanka unprepared. Let me next examine the Chinese scene.
Nehru and the China-Tibet blunder
In the year 1950, two momentous events shook Asia and the world. One
was the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and the other, Chinese intervention
in the Korean War. The first was near, on India's borders, the other,
far away in the Korean Peninsula where India had little at stake. By
all canons of logic, India should have devoted utmost attention to the
immediate situation in Tibet, and let interested parties like China
and the U.S. sort it out in Korea. But Jawaharlal Nehru, India's Prime
Minister, did exactly the opposite. He treated the Tibetan crisis in a
haphazard fashion, while getting heavily involved in Korea. India
today is paying for this folly by being the only country of its size
in the world without an official boundary with its giant neighbor.
Tibet soon disappeared from the map. As in Kashmir, Nehru sacrificed
national interest at home in pursuit of international glory abroad.
India at the time maintained missions in Lhasa and Gyangtse. Due to
the close relations that existed between India and Tibet going back
centuries and also because of the unsettled conditions in China,
Tibet's transactions with the outside world were conducted mainly
through India. Well into 1950, the Indian Government regarded Tibet as
a free country.
The Chinese announced their invasion of Tibet on 25 October 1950.
According to them, it was to 'free Tibet from imperialist forces',
and
consolidate its border with India. Nehru announced that he and the
Indian Government were "extremely perplexed and disappointed with the
Chinese Government's action..." Nehru also complained that he had been
"led to believe by the Chinese Foreign Office that the Chinese would
settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner by direct negotiation
with the representatives of Tibet..."
This was not true, for in September 1949, more than a year before the
Chinese invasion, Nehru himself had written: "Chinese communists are
likely to invade Tibet." The point to note is that Nehru, by sending
mixed signals, showing more interest in Korea than in Tibet, had
encouraged the Chinese invasion; the Chinese had made no secret of
their desire to invade Tibet. In spite of this, Nehru's main interest
was to sponsor China as a member of the UN Security Council instead of
safeguarding Indian interests in Tibet.
Because of this, when the Chinese were moving troops into Tibet, there
was little concern in Indian official circles. Panikkar, the Indian
Ambassador in Beijing, went so far as to pretend that there was 'lack
of confirmation' of the presence of Chinese troops in Tibet and that
to protest the Chinese invasion of Tibet would be an "interference to
India's efforts on behalf of China in the UN". So Panikkar was more
interested in protecting Chinese interests in the UN than India's own
interests on the Tibetan border! Nehru agreed with his Ambassador. He
wrote, "our primary consideration is maintenance of world peace...
Recent developments in Korea have not strengthened China's position,
which will be further weakened by any aggressive action [by India] in
Tibet." So Nehru was ready to sacrifice India's national security
interests in Tibet so as not to weaken China's case in the UN!
It is nothing short of tragedy that the two greatest influences on
Nehru at this |
