How India missed an opportunity to resolve dispute with China in the 1980s

An exclusive edited excerpt from former secretary Shyam Saran's How India Sees the World

In 1983 I was back in Beijing on my second assignment. A.P. Venkateswaran was the ambassador. I had become friendly with a Chinese scholar, Zhao Weiwen, a senior researcher and a specialist on India with the newly established think tank China Institute of Contemporary International Relations. During one of our many conversations, she suggested that Ambassador Venkateswaran meet with the head of her institute, Professor Ma, who she claimed had direct access to the senior leadership, in particular to Zhao Ziyang, then the Chinese premier. Through her good offices a series of informal and confidential meetings were held through 1984 between Venkateswaran and Ma, at which Zhao Weiwen and I were the only others present. At these meetings, Ma argued that there was a shift taking place in Chinese foreign policy. From too close a relationship with the US and a virtual alliance against the Soviet Union, China was moving towards a more centrist position. A decision had been taken to improve relations with Moscow. China would also lay greater stress on its third world credentials. In this context, Ma said relations with India were of particular importance because China, too, in effect, was becoming more ‘non-aligned’.

How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century
Author: Shyam Saran
Publisher: Juggernaut
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 599

These conversations led eventually to a query as to whether Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi would respond to an invitation to visit China in her capacity as India’s leader and also as chairman of the NAM [Non-Aligned Movement]. Venkateswaran pointed out that she could hardly contemplate such a visit with the border dispute still unresolved and with the painful memories of what had happened in 1962. In response, Ma referred to Deng’s ‘package proposal’ and said the border issue could be settled on that basis. Venkateswaran rejected the ‘package proposal’ saying it would legitimize the territorial gains achieved by China through force of arms. A deal could only be politically saleable in India if it was status quo-plus. This meant that India would retain the territory it claimed in the eastern sector while China would concede some additional territory in the western sector.

One possibility was that in the western sector, China would return the additional territory it had occupied as a result of the 1962 operations, thus restoring the status quo in this sector. With this additional territory in the west and the LAC in the east, there could be a basis for an agreed boundary. This would have meant China returning to India some 3000 square kilometres of territory in this sector. Ma said he would discuss this with his leadership. After several days he sought a meeting, asking whether the Indian prime minister would be ready to visit Beijing if the Venkateswaran proposition was agreed to. He added that he was posing this hypothetically, to see if things could move forward.

It just so happened that I was going on leave to India soon afterwards. Venkateswaran asked me to take the proposal confidentially to G. Parthasarathi on his personal behalf, and to request him to put it to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. I met Parthasarathi at his residence in Delhi, armed with detailed maps to show what was being contemplated. I conveyed Venkateswaran’s view, which matched my own, that if the proposal was accepted by the Chinese this would be the best deal we could hope to get. However, Parthasarathi was not convinced. He was in any case opposed to the idea of Mrs Gandhi visiting Beijing. He kept referring to Chinese hostility towards Nehru and claimed that Mrs Gandhi still nursed bitter memories on that score. When I gently suggested that he should at least put this proposition before her he refused. I conveyed this to Venkateswaran, who said he would follow up the matter with Mrs Gandhi herself. I learnt later that the proposition had indeed been put to her but she wanted to wait until after the general elections in 1985 before responding. Unfortunately, Mrs Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguards on 31 October 1984.

Reproduced with permission

‘Manufactured history’

Shyam Saran

In reviewing the archival material now available and the more contemporary Chinese narratives, the following conclusions may be made:

• Until 1958, when India formally conveyed to China that its territory in the western sector included the area between the Kunlun and the Karakoram ranges, including Aksai Chin, and that the Chinese had violated Indian territorial integrity by building the Aksai Chin road, the alignment in the eastern sector defined by the McMahon Line was not disputed. The subsequent claims in this sector were raised by China only as a bargaining chip to acquire territory in the west that did not belong to it in the first place. Had China been convinced of its claim in the west there would have been no reason to suggest this trade-off.

• The Chinese empire, even at its maximum extent under the Qing dynasty, did not claim territory south of the Kunlun range. On the other hand, the exercise of administrative jurisdiction over this territory by the Hunza principality west of the Karakoram pass and by the Kashmir state east of the pass is well documented. Even if the Indian claims are considered somewhat tenuous, there was no Chinese presence in these areas at all until the early 1950s.

• The Ladakh–Tibet boundary had been well established and acknowledged by the Qing administration. It was in the 1962 operations that Chinese forces created an alignment further west, which is, broadly, the current LAC. It is important to underline these conclusions because of the revisionist interpretations of the India–China border issue, not only among foreign scholars but in India too. There appears to be an unstated attitude that since India lost the 1962 war, the Chinese territorial assertions stand validated. While Indian claims have been repeatedly and selectively subjected to close scrutiny, Chinese declarations have rarely come under unbiased and critical examination. In fact, they are not very different in nature and intent from China’s current claim on the South China Sea as its ‘historic waters’. Much of this is based on nothing more than accounts of the voyages of the Ming admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century. This has been rightly and universally rejected by the International Court of Justice.
 
And yet, in the case of the India–China border dispute, a similar recourse to manufactured history appears to raise few notes of dissent, even among Indian analysts.