“India was Wrong in Signing Panchasheel with China,” Says
Ambassador Fabian
“India-China war occurred in 1962 primarily because Mao
wanted to “teach Nehru a lesson,” says Ambassador K. P. Fabian, former diplomat and foreign policy
analyst. Mr. Fabian who has been nominated
to the K.P.S. Menon Chair for Diplomatic Studies, School of International
Relations and Politics (SIRP), Mahatma Gandhi University, was delivering the
Inaugural Lecture 2012 on “The 1962 War Between India and China” at the SIRP
today. Mr. Fabian said that Mao sought to initiate
a war because he believed that Nehru was behind the 1959 anti-China
uprising in Tibet and that therefore in order to secure Tibet for China, Nehru
and India should be made to understand the might and determination of China to
hold on to Tibet. But the fact of the matter was that Nehru had nothing to do
with the 1959 revolt, pointed out by Mr Fabian.
Ambassador Fabian observed that it was wrong “to have signed
the Panchsheel with Mao who believed that power came from the barrel of the gun.” He
further argued that “India facilitated China’s invasion and occupation in two
ways. India prevented a discussion of the matter at UN when El Salvador raised
it. India argued that there was no need for any discussion as China had ‘assured’
India of its peaceful intentions.” Moreover, “India helped China use the
Calcutta port for sending supplies to Tibet as China had no convenient land
access to Tibet till it completed stealthily the Aksain Chin Road while India
slept.”
Ambassador Fabian said
that India signed a trade and transit agreement on Tibet charitably giving away
all its rights there in return for China’s agreeing to sign on the Panchsheel. He
said that that Indian foreign policy “attached more importance to the text
rather than to the context.” After the war, V K Krishna Menon who was India’s
defence minister during the war wrote that China violated the Panchsheel as
“the territorial limits of India were clearly and distinctly laid down in the
Indian Constitution of 1950.”
Ambassador Fabian argued that “India’s trade with China should
not be romanticised.” India exports iron ore and imports finished products. The
two-way trade amounts to $74 billion with a $24 billion deficit for India. “It
is a wrong view that the more trade between India and China the better would be
the political relations between the two. Let us not forget that France and
Germany had a high level of trade in 1914, yet they had gone to war.”
Ambassador Fabian said that it would be in India’s interest
that the “US has a large military presence in East Asia(being shifted from West
Asia) so that China is kept in check and prevented from causing trouble at the
border.” He said that “it is important to learn from the past. Of course, it is
preferable to learn from other people’s mistakes rather than from one’s own. Yet,
at times, we refuse to learn from our own mistakes.”
Ambassador Fabian said that India signed a trade and transit agreement on Tibet charitably giving away all its rights there in return for China’s agreeing to sign on the Panchsheel. He said that that Indian foreign policy “attached more importance to the text rather than to the context.” After the war, V K Krishna Menon who was India’s defence minister during the war wrote that China violated the Panchsheel as “the territorial limits of India were clearly and distinctly laid down in the Indian Constitution of 1950.”
