A look at India’s last years 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 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. 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 detail by Claude Arpi in his four volumes on Tibet’s relations with India. Digging into the material at the National Archives and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, his 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? The China-as-afriend 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 Panchsheel agreement with China that formally recognized Tibet as a part of the People’s Republic. One of the important documents Arpi has dug out is a report filed by Apa Pant to the Indian foreign ministry of his observations in Tibet.
Pant was the Political Officer based in Gangtok. 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. His observations about the sentiments of the Tibetan people under their new rulers and his predictions about China’s plans for Tibet are prophetic: “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.”
Arpi’s 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 restrictions imposed on the consulate for its closure. One wonders whether the closure was wise. If it had remained open, 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.