l**d
发帖数: 189 | 1 THIS IS INDIA’S CHINA WAR, ROUND TWO
The absurd myth of an ‘unprovoked Chinese aggression’ in 1962 has
fermented in India a persistent longing for revenge
BY NEVILLE MAXWELL
15 JUL 2017 / UPDATED ON 25 JUL 2017
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Indian Army soldiers of the Gorkha Regiment patrol the India-China border.
Photo: AFP
Indian Army soldiers of the Gorkha Regiment patrol the India-China border.
Photo: AFP
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THIS STORY
Indian army soldiers patrol during an operation against suspected rebels in
Turkwangam Lassipora in Shopian south of Srinagar on May 4, 2017. Thousands
of soldiers and paramilitaries are engaged in a huge anti-militant
operation in Indian-administered Kashmir, where armed rebels have repeatedly
attacked government forces in recent weeks. Police said government forces
had surrounded at least 20 villages in the drive, launched in Shopian
district in the volatile south of the disputed Himalayan region. / AFP PHOTO
/ Tauseef MUSTAFA
China, India border dispute bubbles over once more, but no one is quite sure
why
With India and China interacting over more than 3,000km of undefined
frontier, friction is constant and that one day it would break back into
border war has seemed inevitable. Two great Indian delusions have created
this situation.
The lesser of these was the outright falsehood spun in the shock of
immediate and utter Indian defeat in 1962’s Round One border war with China
, when, after the hesitant launch of an Indian offensive to drive the
Chinese out of India-claimed territory on the Chinese side of the McMahon
Line, the pre-emptive Chinese counter-attack had in little more than a month
crushed the Indian Army. It enabled the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to
vacate all the territory it had occupied with nothing more than the minatory
– and humiliating – warning to India, “don’t challenge us again”.
This standoff is China telling India to accept changing realities
The absurd myth of an “unprovoked Chinese aggression” which had taken
India by surprise was promulgated to resurrect the broken image of “Pandit
” Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister personally and pre-eminently
responsible for the national disaster. Although long ago exposed and belied
internationally, in India the myth has fermented in high military as well as
political circles a longing for revenge.
Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into
1962 border war
The underlying and greater delusion is that India’s geographical limits are
set by millennial historical forces. The process of boundary formation
established and required by the international community (negotiation to
achieve agreement on border alignment and cooperation to demarcate the
agreed alignment on the ground) thus becomes otiose for the Indian republic.
India, having “discovered” the alignment of its borders through
historical research, need only display them on its official maps and those
would become defined international boundaries “not open to discussion with
anybody”, as Nehru put it in a notorious order in 1954.
Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript
He applied his own ruling literally and categorically, rejecting Beijing’s
repeated calls for negotiation; and every one of his scores of successors in
the Indian leadership has clung, or felt nailed to, that obdurate and
provocative stance, in effect claiming the sole right unilaterally to define
China’s as well as India’s borders. Every generation of literate Indians
is inculcated with that false sense of national oppression by the
cartographic image showing broad areas of Indian territory “occupied” by
China, with reminders that Beijing’s maps reveal an intention to seize even
more.
The Dalai Lama has been the subject of many spats between China and India.
Photo: Reuters
The Dalai Lama has been the subject of many spats between China and India.
Photo: Reuters
The Sino-Indian interface along the undefined and contested frontier is
consequently and constantly a source of international friction, waiting only
for incidental sparks to set off martial conflagration.
China, India border dispute bubbles over once more, but no one is quite sure
why
Border war was narrowly averted in 1987 when a belligerent Indian Army
commander, General Krishnaswamy Sundarj, having been foiled in his plan to
render Pakistan a “broken-back state”, turned his attention to the China
border. He massively reinforced positions there and in deliberate
provocation pushed numerous posts across the established McMahon line of
actual control. China reacted with matching troop concentrations and air
force inductions, and warned India to desist from its aggressions, which, in
the late summer of 1987, it did, probably under US pressure.
Former Indian prime minister Narasimha Rao negotiated the only border
agreement between India and China. Photo: AP
Former Indian prime minister Narasimha Rao negotiated the only border
agreement between India and China. Photo: AP
The heat went out of the confrontation but the Indian Army was left in a
grossly unbalanced situation, with great troop concentrations beyond normal
supply reach. That predicament induced a new Indian government, under Prime
Minister Narasimha Rao, to negotiate in 1993 India’s one and only border
agreement with the PRC: jointly to observe the line of actual control (LAC)
and to reduce force levels to a practical minimum. Later, developments fell
far short of what the treaty required.
The current confrontation in the Sikkim sector might appear to have similar
origins in military rather than political assertions, with India’s army
chief, General Bipin Rawat, beating his chest with boasts that India can
fight and win on “two and a half” fronts simultaneously.
Border dispute an obstacle to building trust between China and India
But the context points to deeper factors. India has recently been goading
China in what can only have been a purposeful series of actions. Rather than
let the LAC mature with the passing years, India has been needling Beijing
by taking such doll figures as the Dalai Lama and loud-mouthed American
diplomats into the disputed border region India proclaims to be its state of
Arunachal Pradesh, and megaphoning the false claim that the McMahon
alignment represents a legal boundary rather than a historical but contested
claim. The McMahon Line in fact rests on a British diplomatic forgery, long
exposed. This may be another indication that Prime Minister Narendra Modi
has decided that India’s interest will be served better in an aggressive
American alliance rather than in a neighbourly relationship with China.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained a strategy of aligning
his nation with the US and Japan. Photo: Reuters
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has maintained a strategy of aligning
his nation with the US and Japan. Photo: Reuters
The sudden convergence of Indian and Chinese troop concentrations around the
current military confrontation in Doklam illustrates again the truth of
Curzon’s observation in his Oxford lecture that borders can be “the razor
’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issue of war or peace”. There
is a spicy historical irony here because this confrontation is precisely
sited in the single, tiny Sino-Indian border sector that was long ago treaty
-defined and demarcated.
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In 1890, rational self-interest brought the mighty British Raj to sit down
in conference, as if on equal terms, with the ruler of the Lilliputian
Himalayan state of Sikkim, agree on the alignment of the state’s border and
jointly mark that out on the ground. Time, weather and probably local human
mischief will have obliterated the border markers but the careful verbal
description in the Treaty prevails to prove that the local Indian commander,
with or without higher orders, has blatantly moved forces into what is now
Chinese territory. Beijing, sorely chafed already by India’s recent
repeated provocations, appears to have decided that this is too much, and
has itself adopted the absolutist Nehruvian position of “no discussion
without withdrawal”.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Photo: AFP
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Photo: AFP
The Indian attempt to depict this confrontation as tripartite should be
disregarded. Bhutan is not an independent actor, is rather an Indian glove-
puppet. A brigade group of the Indian Army, permanently stationed in Bhutan
and now reinforced, is an ever-present reminder to Bhutan’s ruling group of
what happened to Sikkim when its ruler aspired to independence – speedy
annexation.
Thus this still petty armed confrontation has a real and potentially
enormous explosive potential – Round Two of Sino-Indian war. The way out,
and ahead, lies where it always has been, in the opening of comprehensive,
unconditional Sino-Indian boundary negotiation. What bars the way is the
requirement of Indian policy reversal, which in the current bellicose mood
and twisted popular sense of injury in India would require heroic bravery of
leadership.
India’s China policy off target, says Modi’s Mandarin-speaking ‘guided
missile’
There is an example of just such an action, which seeded what now appears to
be the key geopolitical factor of the age, the Sino-Russian alliance:
Gorbachev’s reversal of the Soviets’ no-negotiation stance in the border
dispute with China, blooded in the Zhenbao Island battles of 1969. From the
long-extended negotiations to compromise severely clashing territorial
claims emerged a mutual confidence and trust that, annealed by common
exposure to American hostility, set into an alliance just short of formal
declaration. Should a leader ever emerge in India with the courage and
vision Gorbachev showed, such too could be a Sino-Indian future.
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Neville Maxwell, who covered the 1962 China-India border war as the South
Asia correspondent for The Times, is the author of India’s China War. In
March 2014, Maxwell leaked the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, an Indian
government report from 1963 examining India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian War
that is yet to be declassified. | v**e
发帖数: 8422 | 2 这人研究过1962年中印战争，出版有此主题历史专著，是这方面的专家。
他的研究批驳了西方和印度媒体的大量谎言， 结论是印方是侵略者，中方进行了一场
反侵略的正义战争。
【在 l**d 的大作中提到】
: THIS IS INDIA’S CHINA WAR, ROUND TWO
: The absurd myth of an ‘unprovoked Chinese aggression’ in 1962 has
: fermented in India a persistent longing for revenge
: BY NEVILLE MAXWELL
: 15 JUL 2017 / UPDATED ON 25 JUL 2017
: 4320 SHARE
: Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare on LinkedInShare on
: Google PlusShare on Sina
: 91Comments
: Indian Army soldiers of the Gorkha Regiment patrol the India-China border.
| l**d
发帖数: 189 | 3 对，他的研究主要是基于印度自己出的一份绝密战争调查报告，Henderson Brooks–
Bhagat Report
【在 v**e 的大作中提到】
: 这人研究过1962年中印战争，出版有此主题历史专著，是这方面的专家。
: 他的研究批驳了西方和印度媒体的大量谎言， 结论是印方是侵略者，中方进行了一场
: 反侵略的正义战争。
|
|
