A manual of Indian blunders in India-China relations

My book The End of an Era India Exits Tibet - Part IV has been reviewed by Vijay Kranti in The Organizer.  

The review is entitled: A manual of Indian blunders in India-China relations

This monumental four-volume analytical document deserves to be adopted as a compulsory text book in the training programmes for every MEA entrant and Member Parliament on “How not to conduct External Affairs of India.” This review deals with the fourth volume, The End of an Era—India Exits Tibet: India-Tibet Relations 1947-1962

Here is the link...

A big handicap in the business of book publishing on current affairs in India, especially on major issues related to India’s international relations, is the shortage of books by genuine and passionate researchers. A large section of books available in the market is by former bureaucrats and political leaders who invest most of the space and efforts in justifying and highlighting their personal role and looking good. There are quite a few other serious books which are mere reproduction of PhD or other research works of individual scholars for whom it was a formal exercise in completing a project or an assignment. Very few among such works are the result of a passionate hunger for digging out facts, developments and trends related to events which made history and affected India’s fate in a big way.
Claude Arpi’s set of four books under the series “India Tibet Relations (1947-1962)” belongs to the last category. It is a monumental work as an honest and detailed ‘post mortem’ of developments during 1947-1962 era within the India-China-Tibet triangle. It was that period of history which first marked the Chinese attack on the Eastern part of Tibet, followed by its formal occupation and then India’s final withdrawal and snapping of centuries old relations with Tibet to leave the ground open for China to fortify and perpetuate its colonial rule over Tibet. Interestingly, all this colonial drama happened under the watch of a ‘free’ world which had just emerged out of the Second World War and had started taking pride in witnessing the beginning of the end of colonialism from the face of earth. The focus of our discussion is the fourth and concluding volume of this series which is titled “The End of an Era: India Exits Tibet”.
This book is monumental in more than one ways. As Maj. General BK Sharma the Director of United Service Institution of India (USI), puts it in his foreword....
This historic research project will not only dispel many myths but also unravel the truth about the events that were to shape India-Tibet-China relations during those crucial years.” It is under USI’s ‘Field Marshal KM Cariappa Chair of Excellence’ that Claude Arpi conducted this research. These books offers a deep insight and an honest and dispassionate analysis of the way Indian government ‘mishandled’, the invasion of Tibet by China in October 1950; subsequent complete assimilation of Tibet into PRC; and then issues created by China on Indian borders as a consequence of this sudden overnight metamorphism of many millennias old ‘India-Tibet border’ into an ‘India-China border’. It explores and exposes the unending chain of blunders committed by the then Prime Minister of India Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru and his army of diplomats and policy makers in the MEA. It also analyses how these blunders pushed India into miserable and hopeless situation where India finds itself today vis-à-vis China seven decades later.
It explores and exposes the unending chain of blunders committed by the then Prime Minister of India Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru and his army of diplomats and policy makers in the MEA. It also analyses how these blunders pushed India into miserable and hopeless situation where India finds itself today vis-à-vis China seven decades later
The forth volume (1958-1962) deals with developments leading to India-China war in 1962. It presents the stark contrast between the approaches of Mao’s China and Nehru’s India in dealing with their respective national interests and ambitions. While China was feverishly busy in establishing a motorable network of roads in Tibet, the ‘Hindi Cheeni Bhai Bhai’ fever of PM Nehru had taken the dimensions of such a cerebral fever that the PM office and the MEA mandarins in New Delhi practically assigned all such warning reports to files without even reading them – leave aside taking any action or counter measures to correct the situation.
Claude Arpi presents many glaring examples of how Nehru mishandled his relations with China. One example is of Aksai Chin of India’s Ladakh which China quietly occupied by just walking in. In early 1958 Nehru’s Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt submitted to him report on China’s 1200 km long road connecting Gartok in Western Tibet with Yeh (Yeheng) in Sinkiang (now ‘Xinjiang’) through India’s Aksai Chin area five months after its ‘official’ opening by China. With this report he advised the PM to send a reconnoitering party ‘in the coming spring’ to verify if the road had ‘really been built’ on Indian territory. In response, an indifferent Nehru rejected even the idea of an air reconnaissance saying: “I do not think it is desirable… In fact I do not see what good this can do us….”. And finally Nehru suggested to his Foreign Secretary: “our maps should be sent to the Chinese….. But I think it would be better to do this rather informally.” It simply shows that Nehru did not have any desire, or guts, to confront China even in a blatant case of usurping Indian territory. The book reveals how New Delhi happily went on exporting tons of rice through Nathu La to feed the Chinese road workers who were busy connecting their army posts on border with Lhasa through a motorable road.
This set of book fortifies popular perception that a sizeable section among Indian bureaucrats, especially those serving MEA, are brilliant in parts but most of them use their brilliance more for ensuring and fortifying their personal comforts and interests rather than for serving the national interests. Prior to signing of the so called “Panchsheel Agreement” with China in 1954, Indian Ambassador KM Panikaar to Peking (know ‘Beijing’) had advised Nehru not to speak of a border which is settled with China because “if it were not settled China would have brought the issue to the negotiating table”. He failed to understand the meaning behind Chinese PM Zhou Enlai’s words, “we are prepared to settle all such problems as are ripe for settlement,” which actually meant that China would prepare for or wait for situations to become favourable enough to raise claims on any Indian areas.
Author Claude Arpi has put in hard work in studying official documents to expose such anomalies in the performance of India’s diplomatic force. He refers to PM Zhou’s letter of January 23, 1959 to Indian PM Nehru in which he had clearly explained why China did not discuss border issues in the 1954 agreement. The letter said, “…The border question was not raised in 1954 when negotiations were being held between the Chinese and Indian sides for the ‘Agreement on Trade and Intercourse between the Tibet Region of China and India’ (popularised by Pt. Nehru as the ‘Panchsheel Agreement). This was because conditions were not yet ripe for its settlement.”
The book is a monumental work as it is loaded with logical analysis of Indian government’s blatant failure in reading the Chinese mind and its inability to take timely steps to protect Indian interests. One only wonders why India’s foreign policy leaders and their army of MEA bureaucrats could not learn basic lessons even from written documents like Zhou’s above letter which gives a transparent peep into the real Chinese mind and their intentions about borders with India. Had India’s China policy makers ever read Zhou’s letter seriously they would have saved India from the deep pitfall they have landed Indian on the border issues vis-à-vis China. On the one hand such incidents explain why China has never allowed the border issue to be settled with India and how inefficient, incompetent and indifferent Indian policy makers have remained oblivious to it for over six decades after Zhou revealed his government’s policy on border disputes with India. This failure reflects even from a well-known fact while China has been feverishly busy in fortifying their defence infrastructure on the Tibetan side of our borders, India has been postponing providing even a single reasonable road link to our Army personnel along nearly 4000 km long border.
This set of books is result of a long painstaking research by the author. He has given hundreds of real examples of how India’s leaders and bureaucrats mishandled their responsibilities in the most delicate and demanding moments of national history. That is why Claud’s racy and lucid writing style makes reading of this monumental work an exercise in self-inflicted torture for any reader who has some love or sympathy for India.
All this makes this set of books an invaluable document for all those scholars, media persons and students of international affairs who wants to understand the true characteristics and history of India-China relations. It is a must read for India’s policy makers who need to understand the significance of a free Tibet for ensuring India’s territorial integrity and national security from China’s future plans and machinations. Thanks to the author’s in depth research and sharp analysis, this four-volume analytical document deserves to be adopted as a compulsory text book for every MEA entrant and each Member of Indian Parliament on “How not to conduct external affairs of India.”

Unravelling the mysteries of India’s last days in Tibet

My last volume has been reviewed by Ananth Krishnan in The Hindu: "The End of an Era | Unravelling the mysteries of India’s last days in Tibet"

Here is the link...

Reasons for the closure of the Indian Consulate in Lhasa in December 1962 remain unclear.
For a development as significant as the end of India’s presence in Tibet, the events surrounding the closure of India’s Consulate General in Lhasa in December 1962 still remain a small footnote in the history of that period, forgotten in the immediate aftermath of the war earlier that year.

Attempting to lift the veil on what would turn out to be a landmark event in the history of India’s relations with Tibet and China, a new book reveals it was India that took the fateful decision to close the Consulate in Lhasa — a momentous decision that, the book concludes, remains a mystery and still never fully explained, and one that India would come to regret as it made numerous unsuccessful attempts to reopen its presence in Lhasa and return to Tibet following the normalisation of relations with China in 1988.

The End of an Era: India Exits Tibet is the fourth volume of a sweeping work of research by the south India-based scholar Claude Arpi, who has drawn on official documents to write the most detailed history yet of India-Tibet relations from 1947 to 1962.
In the book, Mr. Arpi notes that information about the Lhasa Consulate and this period in history remains scarce. “Unfortunately,” he laments, “the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) still zealously keeps classified all documents related to 1961-62.”
He does, however, piece together the chain of events leading up to the fateful decision, which was, finally, conveyed “in a laconic note” from the MEA to a surprised Chinese Embassy in India, saying it had “decided to discontinue the Indian Consulates in Lhasa and Shanghai from December 15, 1962.”
Mr. Arpi writes that even the Indian Embassy in Beijing appeared to be kept in the dark. The then charge d’affaires P.K. Banerjee, would write in his memoirs that Delhi took the call on Shanghai “because there was hardly any work to carry out.”
That certainly wasn’t the case in Tibet, at a time when, not only was being in Lhasa crucial in the aftermath of the war, but there was also the unsettled matter of 3,900 Indian PoWs in Tibet.
In the memoirs, Mr. Banerjee suggests one reason could have been Delhi being “anxious” to close Chinese consulates in Mumbai and Kolkata because “they were indulging in activities other than consular work”, but that doesn’t explain why Delhi would voluntarily close Lhasa.
What we do know is that in the lead up to the war, Indian officials in Lhasa began to come under increasing harassment from Chinese authorities. On October 9, 11 days before China launched its offensive, the consulate’s telegraphic lines were cut, as were its telephone lines and courier communication. All outsiders were barred from entering the Dekyilinka area where the mission was located, while supplies of essential commodities like milk and eggs were also stopped.
On November 4, 1962, the MEA in a note complained this treatment was “against all established norms” and its staff were subject “to the most willful harassment by local Chinese authorities.”
Yet after the November 20, 1962 ceasefire, this would stop, Mr. Arpi notes, leaving unclear why the closure still went ahead. “These are among the many questions without answers,” he writes.
Mr. Arpi traces the closure to India’s gradual withdrawal from Tibet, where it was also maintaining trade agencies in Yatung, Gyantse and Gartok under the 1954 agreement on trade and intercourse — now famous as the “Panchsheel” agreement — and its decision to not renew the agreement when it expired in April 1962.
Beijing had offered a renewal, but India’s contention was that with every tenet of panchsheel violated by then — the MEA highlighted China’s actions in Aksai Chin starting in 1957-58 — it could not renew. The trade agencies, where Indians were coming under increasing restrictions, were all shut, and by the end of the year, the consulate would follow.
India would later try unsuccessfully on numerous occasions to return to Lhasa. In 2006, Mr. Arpi notes, when both sides agreed to open new consulates, India suggested Lhasa but had to settle for Guangzhou, while China returned to Kolkata. As trade boomed, India had also returned to Shanghai and China reopened Mumbai, but Lhasa still remained off-limits.
In 2015, an agreement was reached for India to open a consulate in Chengdu and for China to open one in Chennai, although that remains stalled. That year, India had again sought Lhasa but was turned down again, unable to return to the city it left under a cloud of mystery.

Claude Arpi's Latest On India-Tibet Is An Important Work Coming At An Important Time

An Indian official on his way Gartok, Western Tibet
(courtesy Ipshita Rawat)

Another book review: this time by Prof Mayank Singh from Benares Hindu University. It is entitled "Claude Arpi's Latest On India-Tibet Is An Important Work Coming At An Important Time."
 

Here is the link...

'The End of an Era: India Exits Tibet' is as extensive a work as any scholar would find on the subject. Arpi’s strength, apart from his vast knowledge, is his love for the subject which makes the book racy, almost fiction-like.

In 1948, John King Fairbank, considered the godfather of American Sinology, noted, that to understand the policies and actions of Chinese leaders, historical perspective is “not a luxury, but a necessity.”
One of the reasons Indian policy makers fail to decipher Chinese actions lies in the comparatively scarce historical work about Chinese strategic thinking and actions, which in turn ensures that India falls for the same traps ad nauseam.
That the Henderson Brookes-Bhagat report on the reasons behind the 1962 debacle still remains officially classified, despite portions of it being available on the internet, epitomizes India’s failure to what Fairbank referred to as getting a “historical perspective.”
Perhaps it is this lack of historical and strategic understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s psyche which has resulted in India having a trade deficit of $48.66 billion in FY 2019-20 with China.
The belief that strong commercial and economic engagements with China would compel them to desist from military coercion in the fear of losing out on the Indian market, should now be buried in the vast cold terrain of Eastern Ladakh where a strong sense of déjà vu of the events preceding the 1962 war prevails.
Claude Arpi’s book, The End of an Era: India Exits Tibet, is an attempt to fill out on this void. This is the fourth volume of Arpi’s work on the relations between India and Tibet (1947-1962). It retraces the steps between 1958-1962 which witnessed the consolidation of China’s military presence in Tibet, the failed Tibetan uprising of 1959, the Dalai Lama’s escape to India and how political, bureaucratic and military leadership in India failed to grasp Chinese intentions in Tibet with serious ramifications for India.
The 1962 military drubbing was the culmination of the failure to understand that allowing PLA to ride roughshod over Tibet would resulted in the conversion of the peaceful India-Tibet border into a hostile India-China border.
As Maj SL Chibber, the Consul General in Lhasa, would point out in his ‘Annual Political Report’ of 1957: India’s relations with the Tibetans were rather cordial which came to a sudden end with the arrival of the Chinese.
Apa Pant, who was the Political Officer in Gangtok made his third visit to Tibet in 1957. His report elaborated how with each visit his first impression was confirmed that Tibet was a “country forcibly, with the might of military strength, ‘occupied’ by the Chinese.”
Pant reported the presence of 15,000 PLA troops in Lhasa itself and noticed the rapid construction of roads in Tibet. During the visit, Pant observed multiple PLA establishments and reported the presence of at least 30,000 troops within “a hundred miles of Lhasa.”
Any strategic observer would have been alarmed at this massive infrastructure and military build-up in the neighbourhood. Yet, New Delhi continued to live in delusion about peaceful Chinese intentions.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s idealism as a tool of statecraft was to soon unravel disastrously before Mao Zedong’s hard core pragmatism combined with Sun Tzu’s ‘deception’ as means of war.
Pant presciently warned that Chinese regime’s failure to assimilate the Tibetans into their way of life and “emotional and spiritual contacts” between them being non-existent, had the danger of China pushing in millions of Hans into Tibet, converting the Tibetans into a minority in their own land.
The warning, unfortunately, has come true.
While Nehru and defence minister VK Krishna Menon obfuscated over reports of PLA build-up in Tibet, China had a specific purpose behind introducing a disproportionate number of troops to combat Tibetan resistance.
Arpi cites from Jiangling Li’s book Suppressing Rebellion in Tibet and the China-India Border War, edited by Matthew Akester, that the PLA directly inducted seven of the twelve military commands for military operations and two for logistical support in Tibet.
The Central Military Commission sent nearly all military branches to fight in Tibet, including the chemical warfare unit. This massive mobilisation of troops to combat an enemy which was disorganised, scattered into groups, and what Li calls “a force with practically no military training,” should have raised eyebrows in New Delhi.
Arpi is convinced that PLA was indeed rehearsing for a “forthcoming conflict with India.” India was however playing the ostrich and refusing to read the writing on the wall.
This strategic blindfolding was however not a fresh development.
The ‘Pannikar doctrine’, as Arpi refers to Ambassador KM Pannikar’s thoughts of not speaking “of a border which is settled, if it were not settled China would have brought the issue to the negotiating table,” despite Premier Chou En-lai’s ominous sounding statement of “we are prepared to settle all such problems as are ripe for settlement,” was a harbinger of a dispute which started with Barahoti in 1954 and continues till date.
Indian shortsightedness in failing to mention specifically the passes mentioned in the 1954 ‘Agreement on Trade and Intercourse with Tibet Region,’ as border passes, led to Chinese repudiation of the principle of watershed as marking of international boundary and the disputes which followed in its trail.
The 1954 agreement proved critical for China as India, for the first time, agreed to Tibet as the ‘Tibet Region of China’ and gave up the right to military escorts in Yatung and Gyantse which it had inherited from the British. India also handed over postal, telegraph and public telephone services operated by them in Tibet to China. In short, India had decided to become blind in China which would prove tragic, as subsequent events showed.
Acharya JB Kriplani would later refer to the 1954 agreement as “born in sin” and rightfully so, as India did not even raise the border issues with the Chinese and abandoned Tibet to its fate.
The building of the road connecting Xinjiang to Lhasa about which Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt said: "little doubt that the newly constructed 1,200 kilometre road passes through Aksai Chin," which was till then Indian territory, without any Indian effort to stop the construction, was a manifestation of India’s apathetic approach towards its national security.
Dutt’s official response expressing regret about China neither taking permission nor informing the Indian government about the road while appearing surreal, represented the spineless Indian response to this perfidy.
Ironically, while China was preparing for war, Nehru was busy promoting PRC’s cause at various international forums.
BN Mullik, Director, Intelligence Bureau (IB), claimed that he had reported the building of Chinese road in the area in November 1952 and that the Indian trade Agent in Gartok had reported about it in 1955 and 1957. Arpi also cites SS Khera, the Cabinet Secretary, accepting that information about Chinese activity in Aksai Chin had “begun to come in by 1952 or earlier.”
The Indian Military Attaché in Beijing, Brig SS Malik, had passed on the information about the road in Aksai Chin to the Military HQ in 1956. The formal road opening on 6 October 1957 was reported by a Chinese newspaper Kuang-ming Jih-pao, but the Indian leadership was busy promoting the utopia called ‘Panchsheel’ rather than realising the importance of loss of a strategically vital territory.
Arpi narrates an interesting incident when in 1955, Sidney Wignall, a British mountaineer was asked by the Army Chief Gen KS Thimayya to get proof of the Aksai Chin road. Like a spy thriller, Wignall was arrested and interrogated by the Chinese and finally released in the hope that he would never make it back to India amidst the heavy blizzards.
Wignall, however, reached India with his report which was trashed by Krishna Menon in Nehru’s presence as “lapping up American CIA agent-provocateur propaganda.”
Lt Col RS Basera’s equally daring mission in 1957 resulted in the Director of Military Intelligence being “more or less rebuked” by Nehru for sending the patrol. Nehru officially acknowledged the construction of the Sinkiang-Tibet highway through Aksai Chin in Parliament only in August 1959. It was this laissez faire which perhaps compelled General Thimayya to tell his officers that “I hope that I am not leaving you as cannon fodder for the Chinese Communists.” The foreboding would come true three years later.
Arpi brings out excruciating details about the failed Tibetan uprising of March 1959 which led to the Dalai Lama’s escape under extremely arduous conditions. By the end of it all, Consul General Chibber concluded; “The Chinese have entrenched themselves so firmly that they will not care about anything, even world opinion, and will go ahead with their policy of annihilating the Tibetan race.” The decisions arrived at the Seventh Tibet Forum in August 2020 under President Xi Jinping shows that ‘Sinicisation’ of Tibet is not far off.
Non-utilisation of the Indian Air Force (IAF) in combat mode during the 1962 conflict remains one of the biggest mysteries of the war. The IB is said to have cautioned the government that the use of offensive air power could result in the PLAAF attacking Indian cities like Calcutta.
Arpi mobilises facts to demolish the myth of superiority of the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). India had airfields in the vicinity of the conflict zone which would have allowed them to fly shorter distances and carry higher payloads than PLAAF which had only one airfield in Tibet. And PLAAF had no fuel to fly its aircrafts.
The amount of gasoline reaching Tibet from China was not sufficient enough to maintain both the occupation force and PLAAF.
While in 1960, 2,220 tons of gasoline was imported into Tibet, in 1962, this figure had dropped to 30 tons. Further PLAAF’s planes were engaged on the Korean front and the Soviet Union had stopped supply of spare parts for MIG fighter planes. Squadron 106 of the IAF with Wing Commander Jag Mohan ‘Jaggi’ Nath had been flying extensively over Tibet between 1959-1962 on reconnaissance missions. Wing Commander ‘Jaggi’ Nath was categorical; “If we had sent a few airplanes (into Tibet), we could have wiped the Chinese out. They did not believe me that there was no Chinese air force.”
The End of an Era: India Exits Tibet is as extensive a work as any scholar would find on the subject. Arpi’s strength, apart from his vast knowledge, is his love for the subject which makes the book racy, almost fiction-like, which stands apart from the pedantic style writings generally available on such subjects.
He brings out the Dalai Lama’s escape, the harassment of the Indian Trade Agencies and Indian pilgrims, and a rarely touched subject—the treatment of Indian PoW’s in China in a manner where the reader can almost visualise the incidents.
This is a must read for all those who ponder on the reason behind the recent developments in Eastern Ladakh. As George Orwell said: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Arpi goes a long way in helping understand the past to understand the present and the future.

Putting Tibet Back in Focus

The Indian Prime Minister in Yatung, Tibet (1958)

Another book review of my Volume 4, by Maj Gen M. Vinaya Chandran (Redt). 

It is entitled Putting Tibet Back in Focus

Historian Claude Arpi goes beyond the British and Chinese narratives to examine older ties between India and the region

Here is the link...

Relations that India and China have with Tibet form the foundation of India – China relations. Even though the current narratives of these relations begin by quoting centuries of friendly relations between these ancient civilisations, actually it began from 1950, when Chinese occupation of Tibet began, and India and China came to be neighbours. Official records of interaction between India and China from 1950 to 1962 and India’s Tibet policy during this period have remained concealed from not only the Indian public, but also policy makers, since then.

Claude Arpi has done a yeoman’s work in ferreting out documents and interviewing experts to bring out four volumes on India – Tibet relations from 1947 to 1962, which brings a lot of clarity in understanding India – China relation, which is firmly rooted on their relations with Tibet. The fourth volume of ‘The End of an Era: India Exits Tibet’, brings out how India lost a friendly Tibet and gained a hostile China on her northern borders, during the years 1958 to 1962. Arpi has cited a large number of primary sources to clearly show how the Indian Government did not pay heed to the situation in Tibet, thereby leading to the India – China war of 1962 and closure of the Indian Consulate in Lhasa. Many books have been written on the subject but Arpi brings in greater clarity by analyzing the correspondence and activities of the Indian Consul Generals in Lhasa and how Indian establishment chose to disregard those, thereby getting surprised by the PLA in 1962. Details of the talks between the Indian Charge d’ Affaires in Beijing and a senior Chinese diplomat in 1962 corroborates the fact.
It is widely known that up to the start of 1962 war, BN Mullick assured Nehru that China would never attack India and Menon assured the armed forces that even if there is a war, he will win it diplomatically. Arpi has thrown light on these fallacies using documents, which are currently in public domain. Few surprising facts are as follows:

• There was intense militarization of Tibet from 1957. Indian Consul Generals at Lhasa had provided accurate details of these to Indian government, even to the extent of trenches being dug at Rutok and a big logistic hub being established at Nagchuka.
• PLA Fourth Army commanded by Gen Su Chiang was located at Tsaidam and had sixty-seven Russian instructors attached to them.
• From 1959 onwards, China commenced active survey and reconnaissance of Indian borders.
• On 11 June 1962, a few months before the war, Tibet Military Command set up a special organization named ‘Tibet Military Command Advance Command Post for China – India Border Self-defence Counterattack’. By the end of June 1962 they started collection of intelligence, preparing battle plans and intensive military training.

Border negotiation with China is another area where our policy makers seem to have faltered. A boundary commission comprising Chinese and Tibetan officials, accompanied by PLA were visiting the border areas and collecting evidence from 1957 onwards, to prepare their claims. India apparently did not take it so seriously. While negotiations were on for Bara Hoti, in 1958, the Foreign Secretary said that India should ask China, “first to indicate more precisely where according to them the international border lies. Surely they should be able to do so if their claims are genuine.” Indian bureaucrats did not realise that there is nothing genuine regarding Chinese claims. Even now, Indian media’s insistence on defining the Chinese LAC and reluctance of the bureaucracy to clarify the issue, shows that the situation has not improved.
During the 1962 war, many Indian soldiers were taken prisoner by China. The plight of these prisoners and the steps taken or not taken by Indian government was not made known to the public, rendering their sacrifices to be forgotten. Arpi has worked hard to collect evidence by interviewing people with firsthand knowledge of the events and finding documents to substantiate the same. Our understanding of the 1962 war will be incomplete without knowing the facts, known only to these brave soldiers.
Experts on the India–China boundary question, generally refer to the lines drawn by the British and China. Centuries of trade and religious interactions between India and Tibet have a different story to tell. British made compromises to suit their commercial interests, China drew lines to suit their hegemonic interests and post 1947 Indian government signed treaties to exhibit statesmanship. All of them kept Tibet out of it. Very few scholars like Claude Arpi have delved into the history of India–China boundary, giving importance to the history and views of the people actually living along the boundary.
The book, published by Vij Books India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, is a highly recommended read for anyone interested in knowing the facts regarding India–China boundary issue.

Review: The End of an Era; India Exits Tibet

Prime Minister Nehru meeting the Indian traders
in Yatung, Tibet in September 1958

My last volume, The End of an Era; India Exits Tibet (India-Tibet Relations 1947-1962 - Part 4) has been reviewed by Thubten Samphel in The Hindustan Times

Here is the link...

Claude Arpi’s four volumes on Tibet’s relations with India show how China developed its Tibet playbook that includes encroachment, occupation, and the spinning of a narrative of false claims. The last book in the series focuses on the last five years of India’s diplomatic presence in Tibet
 
 What’s happening with China these days? It is picking fights simultaneously with most of its neighbours. The only time communist China opened two fronts was in 1950 when it invaded and occupied Tibet and fought the US-led UN forces to a standstill at the present demilitarized zone between South and North Korea. Now, China is harassing Japan in the East China Sea, restricting the freedoms of the enraged people of Hong-Kong, and firing missiles across the Taiwan Strait and claiming most of the South China Sea, disputed by many countries in South East Asia.
The latest is China’s encroachment on Indian territory.
On 15 June, PLA troops crossed over the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh and were repulsed by the Indian army. China is doing everything according to its Tibet playbook: in the early 1950s, it occupied the Indian territory of Aksai Chin. Both in Ladakh and in the South China Sea, Beijing hopes to apply its Tibet playbook to establish facts on the ground and on water and later argue that possession is nine-tenth of the law.

How China developed its Tibet playbook that includes encroachment, occupation, and the spinning of a narrative of false claims is examined in rich detail by Claude Arpi in his four volumes on Tibet’s relations with India. Digging deep into the material at the National Archives and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Claude Arpi’s latest offering focuses on his findings on the last five years of India’s diplomatic presence in Tibet.

As he writes in his first volume, the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 presented newly independent India with a policy choice: was new China a friend or foe? In this debate, the friend camp led by India’s first Prime Minister Nehru wanted deeper cooperation with its new neighbour. The foe camp wanted India to treat China, now at its door step, as harbouring malign intent and recommended that the country beef up border security from Ladakh in the west to North-Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, in the east. In the policy choice India made, the China-as-a-friend camp carried the day. India handed all its extraterritorial rights including the trade agencies in Gyantse, Dromo (Yatung) and Gartok in Tibet to its new rulers,. In 1954, India signed the Panch Sheel agreement with China that formally recognized Tibet as a part of the People’s Republic.
One of the important documents Arpi has dug out and commented on is a report filed by Apa Pant to the Indian foreign ministry of his observations in Tibet. Pant was the Political Officer (PO) based in Gangtok. Since the days of the British Raj, the PO had looked after the affairs of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Apa Pant travelled to Tibet from November 1956 to February 1957 and met with the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, members of the Tibetan ruling elite and leaders of the Tibetan resistance. The observations Apa Pant made in his report was, in the words of Claude Arpi, “an eye-opener” for New Delhi.
Pant’s observations about the sentiments of the Tibetan people under their new rulers and his predictions about China’s plans for Tibet in the future are sharp and prophetic. Regarding the true feelings of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule, Apa Pant observed, “Due to fear and the realization of their military, (as well as) the weakness of the Tibetans (they) are keeping quiet but have neither mentally or emotionally submitted themselves to the Chinese rule nor accepted it as the final dispensation.”
About China’s future plans for Tibet, Pant wrote: “Only when roads, aerodromes and perhaps a railway line are completed millions of Chinese will start flooding into Tibet and settling there permanently.” Claude Arpi adds that this “has come true 60 years later.”
Claude Arpi’s fourth and final volume in his examination of Tibet’s relations with India from 1947 to 1962 ends with the closure of the Indian Consular General in Lhasa. New Delhi cited the severe restrictions imposed on the consulate for its closure. In hindsight one wonders whether the closure of the Lhasa consulate was a wise thing to do. If it had remained open, weathering Chinese restrictions and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, New Delhi would have had a keener sense of what was happening behind the Himalayas.
For scholars and researchers interested in this phase of Tibet’s relations with India, Claude Arpi’s books will remain essential reading. These four volumes are a seminal contribution to our understanding of Tibet’s interaction with both India and China and India’s interaction with China on Tibet at a critical period in history.

Thubten Samphel is an independent researcher and a former director of the Tibet Policy Institute.