Fifty years ago, the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, affectionately referred to by his fellow countrymen as “Panditji,” lamented that roads leading to our borders with China in Uttar Pradesh were in an abysmal state. I was recently planning to visit Joshimath near the India-Tibet border, but was unable to do so as landslides had blocked the road. Such landslides regularly disrupt communications with the Army Brigade in this area, on our borders with Tibet. Many of our border areas with China even now regularly suffer a similar fate. China has, however, linked Tibet to its mainland with a remarkable railway line. More importantly, the Chinese army can move with remarkable speed along paved highways to Tibet’s borders with Nepal and India, even as Indian forces are supplied through tenuous, accident-prone and narrow mountainous routes. If Panditji proclaimed sixty years ago that our borders with China were “impregnable”, our present rulers utter similar platitudes. No lessons appear to have been learnt from Panditji’s “Himalayan Blunder” in 1962.
Arun Shourie’s book, Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again?, is a timely warning about how diplomatic bungling, misleading the public and the absence of proper military preparedness can lead India into a national disaster, bringing shame and humiliation to our country and people. In the first chapters, Shourie dwells at length on how Panditji himself, and his academician-turned-Ambassador to China, K M Pannikar, disregarded reality and deluded themselves about China’s intentions in Tibet, with Panditji overruling the advice of colleagues ranging from Sardar Patel to President Rajendra Prasad. This was coupled with manifestly wrong assessments about Chinese military capabilities and political intentions. While Panditji averred that the Chinese had nothing but the friendliest intentions towards us and that they had high regard for India, Chinese leaders showed nothing but contempt for India and for Panditji personally, in their discussions with world statesmen.
Shourie establishes that whether it is in regard to our approach to the Tibet issue, or in gauging Chinese intentions on the vexed border issue, or its efforts to isolate us in South Asia by surrounding us with bases in the Indian Ocean and by providing nuclear weapons knowhow and missiles to Pakistan, there is, even today, a tendency to pretend that all is well in our relations with China. We still retain the illusion that our northern neighbour wishes to deal with us as an equal. Panditji diluted our stand on Tibet by moving from talking of China’s “suzerainty” in Tibet to soon acknowledging its “sovereignty”. Vajpayee went a step further in 2003 by declaring that “the Tibet Autonomous Region is a part of the territory of China”, disregarding the fact that in the Chinese eyes, the “Tibet Autonomous Region” includes the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh and large tracts of Ladakh!
The penultimate chapter entitled “Lessons” clinically sums up the do’s and don’ts for statesmen and countries in dealing with powerful neighbours. “Never take silence as consent,” Shourie cautions. But, is this not what the Manmohan Singh government has done by its naive and perhaps misleading assertions that China was supportive of our ambitions to be a permanent member of the Security Council, or on its reported acquiescence to moves to end global nuclear sanctions against India in the NSG? Shourie asserts that if we faced a national humiliation in the 1962 conflict with China, it was on account of wishful thinking, “wishful construction” that led to the misrepresentation of Chinese intentions, suppressing information from the people, and “outright cravenness” — an attribute we witnessed even recently, when the Olympic Flame moved through Delhi.
Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again? is a must-read not only for those who profess to be scholars of China, but also for those who believe that nations which learn nothing from the lessons of history will, sooner or later, pay a very heavy price. Shourie will hopefully ensure that his book is also read by some of his friends and colleagues, who even now believe that their “comrades” in Beijing are motivated primarily by the friendliest of intentions towards India!
The author is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan
ARE WE DECEIVING OURSELVES AGAIN?
LESSONS THE CHINESE TAUGHT PANDIT NEHRU BUT WHICH WE STILL REFUSE TO LEARN
Arun Shourie
ASA/Rupa
Rs 395; 214 pages
