Nehru taken for a ride by Chinese: CIA
Sridhar Krishnaswami in Washington
June 29, 2007 16:59 IST
In what could be seen as a possible obstacle to the growing ties between
India and China, a recently de-classified paper of the Central Intelligence
Agency has said that late prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was consistently
taken for a ride by the Chinese in the months and years prior to the 1962 war.
The top secret documents of March 1963 were approved for release only in May
2007.
The declassification of documents pertaining to several aspects of domestic and
international politics has been seen by the current CIA brass as a part of a
new transparency as also providing a glimpse into the thinking and workings of
the nodal intelligence outfit.
One set of documents called the Cesar-Polo-Esau Papers deal with Communist
countries notably China and the erstwhile Soviet Union and three sections of
which are devoted to an analysis of the Sino-Indian relations leading up to the
1962 debacle.
One of the major points of contention of the CIA is that the Chinese premier
Zhou en Lai (at the time going by the spelling of Chou en Lai) consistently
impressed upon Nehru that Peking (Beijing [Images]) had no territorial
ambitions and that the maps that the Chinese were suing to portray vast tracts
of Indian territory as theirs were 'old' maps from the Kuomintang era that had
no time to be revised.
'The Sino-Indian dispute, as we see it, did not arise as a function of the
Sino-Soviet dispute,' the CIA said in its analysis in 1963.
According to the CIA analysis the developments between 1950 and late 1959
were marked by Chinese military superiority which, combined with cunning
diplomatic deceit, contributed for nine years to New Delhi's reluctance to
change its policy from friendship to open hostility toward the Peiping
(Beijing) regime.
'It emerges that above all others Nehru himself -- with his view that the
Chinese Communist leaders were amenable to gentlemanly persuasion -- refused to
change this policy until long after Peiping's basic hostility re-think his
China policy, Nehru continued to see a border war futile and reckless course
for India,' the CIA analysis said.
'His (Nehru) answer to Peiping was to call for a strengthening of the Indian
economy to provide a national power base of effectively resisting an eventual
Chinese military attack.
In the context of the immediate situation on the border, where Chinese troops
had oocupied the Aksai Plain in Ladakh, this was not an answer at all but
rather an implicit affirmation that India did not have the military capability
to dislodge the Chinese,' the CIA maintained.
'Chou En-lai, in talks with Nehru in 1954 and 1956, treated the Chinese old
maps as representing Peiping's claim but, on the contrary, as old maps handed
down from the previous mainland regime which had 'not yet' been corrected,' the
analysis has said.
'This provided the Chinese premier with a means for concealing Peiping's
long-range intention of surfacing Chinese claims at some time in the future
(when there would be
no longer any necessity to be deceptive about them) while avoiding a dispute
with the Indian Prime Minister at the present,' the CIA reasoned.
'As Peiping and New Delhi were generally cordial to each other in these early
years, the Chinese had not wanted to change their policy toward Nehru and
thereby lose the benefit of an important champion of Peiping's cause in
international affairs,' the CIA said.
'They had not wanted to alert the Indian leaders to their move on the road
until such time as the Indians could do nothing about it. They apparently
believed that like China's other borders, the Sino-Indian border need not be
delimited and that the matter could remain in limbo,' the agency surmised.
The Central Intelligence Agency also believed that there was a domestic
political angle for the fashion in which China acted with Nehru -- a perception
that somehow the then Indian prime minister was more positively reconciliatory
to the Chinese regime than the opposition in India.
'His (Nehru) prestige is so great in India that the masses in crisis situations
merely follow his lead,' the CIA said as being in the minds of Chinese leaders
at then time.
'A great political leader with Nehru's enormous prestige could prevent vigorous
anti-China outbursts if he so desired. And he if he cannot prevent sharp
outbursts he could certainly control them when once they took place,' the
agency has said on Beijing's thinking at the time.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/jun/29cia.htm
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