Author: Reviewed by Dhundup Gyalpo
Publication: www.tibet.net
Date: September 29, 2004
URL: http://www.tibet.net/flash/2004/0904/290904.html
Born In Sin: The Panchsheel Agreement
By Claude Arpi
Mittal Publications, New Delhi,
241 pages, Rs. 495
In each passing century there are
a few defining moments of which it can truly be said: here history was
made or here mankind's passage through the ages took a new direction or
turned towards a new horizon. Such a moment occurred on the 29th day of
April 1954 when an "Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between China and
India" was signed in Beijing. The agreement today is popularly dubbed as
the "Panchsheel Agreement" because of the famous five principles-the elixir
for foreign relations-incorporated in the preamble of the agreement.
The Panchsheel Agreement epitomises
the fiasco of Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai clamour. In this agreement India recognized
Tibet as part of China-in fact, as a mark of goodwill India also gave up
all her extra-territorial rights in Tibet-but failed to settle the Indo-Tibetan
border. And by forfeiting Tibet, India thus forfeited 2,000 years of a
buffer state that kept Chinese imperial aspirations on leash.
During a speech on the occasion
of signing, the Indian Ambassador N. Raghavan declared: We have gone fully
through the questions that existed between our two countries in the Tibet
region. Zhou Enlai responded reiterating that the questions which were
"ripe for settlement, have been resolved". But alas, neither Raghavan nor
the Government of India were able to decipher the portents lurking beneath
the "ripe for settlement".
The high and lofty ideals of Panchsheel
began to crumble just 10 days short of two months after the agreement was
signed as the first of a series of Chinese incursions, numbering in hundreds,
occurred in Bharhoti area of Uttar Pardesh. These incursions culminated
in the Chinese invasion of India with an overwhelming force on two separate
flanks in October 1962.
The Chinese aggression, and the
defeat and humiliation it wreaked on India, caught offguard, remains deeply
embedded in the Indian psyche to this day.
India has been living in the fool's
paradise of its own making, a beaten, crestfallen, humiliated Nehru admitted
in 1962. So betrayed was Nehru by the Chinese aggression that he had this
to say on the day the Chinese invaded: Perhaps there are not many instances
in history where one country has gone out of her way to be friendly and
cooperative with the government and people of another country and to plead
their cause in the council of the world, and then that country returns
evil for good.
Claude Arpi's new book, Born in
Sin: The Panchsheel Agreement, The sacrifice of Tibet, is an incisive post-mortem
of the Agreement and the legacy it bequeathed the future generations of
India. It unravels with great clarity the gushy expectations, self-deluding
hype, and oozing zealousness that has become the hallmark of Nehru's China
policy.
Born in Sin captures in minute detail
a continuum of concessions Nehru conceded in his overzealous rush to befriend
China. A measure of the height of euphoria over the Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai
festivity, obliterating strategic and other implications for India's security,
was illustrated in a strange episode after the agreement was signed. Claude
Arpi writes: India was supplying rice to Chinese troops, engaged in building
a road on Indian territory! And not just an ordinary road, it was the Aksai-Chin
road cutting through the Indian territory in Ladakh. It is indeed a first
in military annals that the government of a country supplies food to enemy
troops! But at that time, who saw China as an enemy?
Claude Arpi's previous book, The
Fate of Tibet: When Big Insects Eat Small Insects, was groundbreaking in
terms of its revelation of the Pannikar factor in effecting a dramatic
transformation in the India's China policy, and by corollary its Tibet
policy.
As in The Fate of Tibet, the facts
presented in Born in Sin, derive authority from its extensive use of a
myriad of official Indian documents and personal memoirs of the then leading
political figures.
The book concludes by exploring
some ambitious but not unrealistic ways to break this impasse of Indo-Tibetan
border dispute.
