Graveyard of Indian idealism Tibet. The Lost Frontier by Claude Arpi
Although the absorption of Tibet into China since 1950 has been copiously discussed from different angles, there is a dearth of understanding about the regional politics surrounding the “roof of the world”. Since time immemorial, Tibet’s fate has been intertwined with that of its two giant neighbors, China and India. French scholar Claude Arpi’s new book teases out the complex workings of this triangle and throws light on how Indian idealism came a cropper against Chinese realpolitik.
Arpi begins with a historical distillation about the nature of the triangle: “Tibet and China always had a relation based on force and power, while Tibet and India had more of a cultural relationship based on shared spiritual values.” (p 25) In the Medieval age, Indian and Tibetan Buddhist seers and translators crisscrossed their respective borders in a constant exchange of knowledge and wisdom. Arpi classifies Tibet as “a child of Indian civilization”.
However, the decline and disappearance of Buddhism in India pushed Tibet to find new protectors to preserve the Dharma and this set the stage for priest-patron relationships with Mongol and Chinese emperors. This politico-spiritual system lasted for centuries until Manchu troops invaded Tibet in 1908.
The stubborn obstruction of the Dalai Lama’s modernizing reforms by big orthodox monasteries led to his prophecy in 1932 that “Tibetans shall be slaves of the conquerors”. The opportunity for Tibet to assert its independence and build a strong army was also missed due to infighting between the Khampas and Lhaseans, which softened the state for communist raiders.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang considered Tibet a part of China and bequeathed this legacy to the succeeding communists. Chairman Mao Zedong was well aware of the strategic importance of Tibet as a gateway through which the Indian sub-continent could be threatened. His “liberation” of Tibet from 1950 onward was a “demonstration to the world of who the real leader of Asia was” and a humiliation of India as a “paper tiger”. (p 18)
For some time, newly independent India followed the British line of recognizing Tibet as a de facto sovereign state. Even up to the early part of 1949, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru held that Tibet was a separate entity with a separate government. New Delhi supplied light arms and ammunition to the Tibetan government without informing the Chinese and stated its “readiness to help Lhasa with its security concerns”. (p 134)
But by late 1949, Nehru did a volteface and accepted the fait accompli that Tibet would be invaded by communist China. The Indian army chief, General Cariappa, said his forces would be unable to engage the Chinese in a full-fledged high-altitude war as he was hard pressed on the Pakistan front. Britain and the United States regretted India’s tendency to “throw up its hands and say nothing could be done [to save Tibet] and retire to its own frontiers”. (p 143) Due to the compulsions of geopolitics, the rest of the world placed the onus on India to act before it was too late.
The Indian representative in Lhasa was redesignated a consul-general under the Indian Embassy in Beijing. Indian diplomats bent backward to accommodate Chinese demands and conceded rights in Tibet that were inherited from the Simla Convention of 1914. Panikkar recommended that India should dismantle its “colonial rights” in Tibet and offer them to China as a necessary gesture of goodwill. India even began supplying rice to the PLA forces in Tibet from 1952 to help Beijing consolidate its conquest. True autonomy for Tibet, which would have assured security for India’s borders, was jettisoned.
When a farsighted Indian Foreign Service officer wrote ominously about Chinese military designs on the northeast frontier of India, Nehru dismissed it as “not quite an objective or balanced view as it was colored very much by certain conceptions”. (p 263) At the 1953-54 Beijing conference, Indian diplomats obsessed with “broader perspectives” and “larger issues”, such as creation of a neutral “third pole” in world affairs, while the Chinese side came with the hardnosed goal of formalizing its occupation and ownership of Tibet.
Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, took a tougher stand and voted in favor of the 1965 UN resolution for selfdetermination in Tibet. In 1967, the Indian army repulsed Chinese troops trying to intrude into Sikkim, in the eastern Himalayas. The incident “made Beijing think twice” and ushered in frosty Sino- Indian relations for decades. In 1986, the PLA was thwarted from nibbling at Indian territory in Arunachal Pradesh in the Sumdorong Chu incident. This again gave the Beijing leadership pause for thought since it “had earlier always considered India to be a weak nation”. (p 307) Yet, as of 2008, India’s defense infrastructure along the Chinese border remains below par.
The moral from history for India is that atmospherics are superficial facades behind which China is an unpredictable and wily bargainer. With the destiny of Tibet already sealed as a graveyard of Indian idealism, New Delhi is now left to strive for its own territorial integrity against a surging Beijing. A bilateral settlement that could not be reached in 1954 has much less chance of materializing today when China’s power is on the ascendant.
Tibet. The Lost Frontier by Claude Arpi. Lancer Publishers, Olympia Fields (October 2008). ISBN: 0-9815378-4-7. Price: US$27, 338 pages.
Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in New York.
REVIEWED BY SREERAM CHAULIA
