The Darker Nations, page 24
In 1954, the two countries had signed the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, the Panchsheela, which called for mutual understanding and cooperation on all issues. At Bandung, Nehru and Zhou En Lai stood shoulder to shoulder to proclaim a new Asia. Nehru’s closing speech proclaimed this new “spirit of Asia today.” This is the Asia that is “dynamic; Asia is full of life. Asia might make mistakes, and has made mistakes in the past, but it does not matter so long as life is there in it. We can make advances if life is there, but if there is no life, all our right words, our right actions will not hold good, and whatever we have achieved will be lost.”3 Nehru’s metaphysical poetry sat uneasily next to Zhou’s practical forthrightness. When challenged about Chinese expansionism, Zhou noted, “We are ready to restrain our government and people from crossing even one step across our border. If such things should happen, we would like to admit our mistake.”4
The People’s Republic of China had common borders with many countries, but there were four that had border disputes with China: Burma, India, Pakistan, and the USSR. In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic “renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory, all the concessions in China and returns to China free of charge and forever all that was ravenously taken from her by the Tsar’s Government and by the Russian bourgeoisie.”5 In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated. The breakdown came only from a question of territory. The border dispute provided an occasion to continue the Sino-Soviet doctrinal debate in a military fashion. Nevertheless, for at least two decades, when instability raged in China, the Soviet statement provided the window to an alternative mode of international relations—where the advantages of the imperial past would not determine the state of relations between contiguous states in the present.
The Soviet initiative in 1920 represents an unusual move in interstate relations, but it is not the only model for postcolonial boundary resolutions. China had an unclear border with Burma, where more than seventy thousand miles in the Wa region remained in dispute right up to 1956. The conflict got so bad in 1955 that the Burmese army fought a major encounter with the PLA in the Wa state, where the Burmese had been conducting operations against the Kuomintang army at the same time. The mess on the Sino-Burmese border could easily have led to war, as it did in the Sino-Indian sector. Yet the Burmese prime minister and a leading light at Bandung, U Nu, went to Beijing, forced the Chinese to the table, and negotiated their approach to the dispute and the actual border. Both the Burmese and the Chinese rejected the British borders at the same time as they assumed those older lines as guides for their new settlement. China absorbed some villages in the Kachin state, whereas Burma would have control over the Namwan Assigned Tract.6 While the agreement began a process that ended in 1960 with a formal declaration of the border, within Burma the Kachin peoples rose in rebellion the following year because they had not been consulted in the arrangement, nor did they wish to be a part of China.7 For all the talk of self-determination, neither U Nu nor Zhou had considered the views of those they had shuffled to one side or the other of the new international border. There was conflict, but it was not between states.8
The values on formal display in the Sino-Burmese negotiations had been enshrined at Bandung and Belgrade. The eighth principle in the Bandung communiqué pledged the countries to settle disputes “by peaceful means” within the framework of the United Nations.9 While this principle was sacrosanct in rhetoric and sometimes in practice, it could not be sustained in many instances. India and Pakistan fought a border war over Kashmir before the British troops had even left the subcontinent, while the Israeli state and its Arab neighbors went to war as the former came into existence. The People’s Republic of China threatened Formosa with an invasion, while Algeria and Morocco (1960) as well as Mauritania and Mali (1963) went to war over their various disputed boundaries. Wars over borders provided a major excuse for the growth of the military in each of these national liberation states, and even those that did not succumb to a military dictatorship created an immensely powerful military apparatus that suffocated the social justice side of national budgets. Border disputes that stem in many cases from both an inappropriate theory of the border and lines drawn for colonial reasons provided the postcolonial military with the pretext for its own ascendancy.
The PLA was battle hardened in war against the Japanese occupation, its civil war against the Kuomintang that ran from the 1930s right to the 1950s, and its assault on outlying regions like Tibet that continued to the late 1950s. As the PLA dug into its forward positions on the line that divided India and China, it had better equipment and far better battle readiness than the Indian army.10 Following one of the precepts of Bandung, the Indian government tried to reduce the importance and size of, as well as the financial commitment to, the Indian army. In 1958, when the Indian army earned an increase in the budget to modernize its equipment and raise the salaries of soldiers, Congress leader Acharya Kripalani told the parliament, “We had believed that in a nonviolent India the last thing the Government would contemplate would be an increase in the military budget, but I am sorry to say, and I think that it would disturb the soul of the father of the nation [Gandhi], that in recent years there has been an increase.”11 Nehru’s Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with the British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951 to 1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war. Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947–48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget, and despite this relatively low amount, the armed forces reported savings from what it had been designated.12 After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world’s largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
Why did the PLA invade India in 1962? One answer is that India had threatened to invade China, and the Chinese did so preemptively. They had an intractable border dispute, and both sides began to encroach on each other’s claimed territory.13 Neither the Chinese nor the Indians decided to withdraw beyond sight of each other, call for arbitration, or create a demilitarized zone that might be several miles in depth as a way to cool tensions. Both governments padded their forces, brought them on to each other’s heads, and set up a situation for war. Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more “European” notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form. The very idea of nationalism that had sustained the anticolonial movements would be challenged in the process of state formation. To remain on the level of the details of the SinoIndian conflict from 1950–62 would inform us as to the reasons why the war took place, but it would not itself tell us about a broader problem for postcolonial states—the adoption of a mystical version of nationalism that had been alien to the anticolonial movements.
The Chinese built a road in the Aksai-Chin sector claimed by India, and they justified this not only as always having been part of Tibet (and therefore China) but as a crucial artery to join the Chinese provinces of Tibet and Sinjiang. Aksai-Chin is a barren region, where no one can survive year-round. By 1962, the Indian and Chinese armies stood at the many checkpoints that dotted the unmarked border. Border clashes from the mid-1950s resulted in the loss of some lives, but even those who did not perish spent months on end in the harsh high-altitude outposts where few would otherwise tread. When the snow got too heavy, the army abandoned the post, and each spring rushed back up to make sure that they were the ones to reclaim the spot and not the other side. This insane game went on for eight years.
Meanwhile, the Indian army moved to forward posts in the Tawang region, in northeastern India, into areas that were previously claimed by the Tibetans. Various ethnic communities for whom the border is an inconvenience people the Tawang region. Nations don’t have natural borders, nor do most of them have well-defined historical borders. The tendency to see mountains or rivers as natural boundaries from the standpoint of security or ease of delineation is not universally accepted, nor does it everywhere have ancient roots.14 Before mountains could be scaled or rivers could be forded, these geographic phenomena did provide a barrier for movement, but once humans learned to overcome these obstacles, they ceased to be effective barriers. Many premodern states did not put too much stake on the accurate delineation of the boundary, and the people who lived in its vicinity moved around for trade and pilgrimage with only minimal concern for the niceties of monarchal logic. Indeed, the Himalayas that run along the borders between today’s states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people, because in many cases it not only inconveniences trade or belief but also bifurcates a linguistic group or an ethnic community. People who see themselves as part of a community are rent by a logic that is antithetical to their own history.
In 1913, the British Indian government sent two surveyors to northeast India. Frederick Markham Bailey and Henry T. Morshead traveled along a well-trod trade route that would soon be known as the “Bailey Trail.”15 Bailey and Morshead found that traders and their yaks moved goods from the highlands of Tibet to the plains of Burma and India, without any care for passports or identification, without a sense that they lived in what had already become a disputed border region. When Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf visited the Bailey Trail in 1944 as the special officer of the Indian External Affairs Department, he reported that the people in the region, the Monpa, had an oblique relationship with either Tibet, China, or India.16 International borders meant little to them because their ancestors had hewed trails that created their own geography, their own mundane and spiritual maps. At the crossroads of this interconnected border region stood Tawang, a town dominated by a monastery (gompa) called Galden Namgyal Lhatse built between 1643 and 1647. The circumstances of the monastery illuminate the lack of importance borders had for the lives of the people. Lodre Gyaltso, known also as Merak Lama, allowed his horse to take him where it willed. The horse stopped, and Merak Lama named the place Tawang, “chosen by a horse.”17 The story mimics the Brahmanical ashwamedha yagya, the horse “sacrifice” of ancient Vedic India, where a monarch would allow a horse to run its paces, and all the ground the horse covered would be the monarch’s terrain. The impulse of the horse determined the rough border of the Vedic kings, while the resting place of the horse along the fuzzy boundary between regions provided Merak Lama with the site for his monastery.
Bailey and Morshead were the advance team of a colonial state that had a classic approach to borders. Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.18 Security as the British understood it was the paramount reason for the way they understood the borders, and frequently they signed agreements with parties (such as King Abdul Rahman Khan in Afghanistan or Ivan Chen of the “Order of the Chia Ho” and the Dalai Lama for the Tibet-India border) whose own legitimacy would be questioned later. In the Durand and McMahon cases, the British simply drew up a line that met their security needs and got the line ratified by parties that had little option but to sign on.19
In the colony, the border provided security. In Europe, the border offered a divide between one nation and another. Indistinct zones between countries were redefined in the nineteenth century as nations came into their own.20 Border technology (such as the quadrant and the theodolite as well as border cartography) supplied the means for the emergent European nations to produce finely wrought territorial markers and maps for their national imaginary. These new technologies met a social demand: to remove the nebulousness of the border and unify a nation. Border making was not neutral because it bore within it the values of European ethno-nationalism. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, European nation-states emerged out of the monarchies and baronies of earlier epochs. The idea that motivated many of these nation-states was that they must contain within them people of the same ethnicity or race—that the French and the Germans are divided not simply by language and custom but by the strains in their blood. While nationalism is indeed a modern phenomenon, nationalists enlivened their national demands with ancient stories of their nation, and therefore they saw their quest not as the production of a nation into a state but as the reclaiming of a nation under a state. The nation was always there, waiting for the nationalist to bring it into its own.21 The creation of tradition and the accoutrement of nations strengthened the claim that a people, such as the English or the French, had a natural desire and need to be selfgoverned (where the “self” had racial connotations and did not simply designate a political unity).22
Anticolonial movements were conscious of these dual (security and racial) roots for border construction. Many of them had a great unease about the linkage between “national dignity” and territorial integrity. Multinational states had little need for chauvinist sensibilities about where the state started or stopped. Within the country, the division of the landmass was often conducted on lines that did not privilege the fault lines of race or religion; in India, for instance, the internal states were divided along the lines of language (which can be learned and therefore is not ontologically derived).23 A strict border would inconvenience those who lived in the zone that straddled it, and in most cases, the harsh climate or terrain in the border region made its fortification unnecessary and impossible. When Soong Ch’ing-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) traveled to India in 1956 as China’s vice president, she assured the national audience on All-India Radio that “friends may live far apart from each other, but friendship knows no barriers.”24 In late 1958, Nehru wrote to Zhou to set aside the “very minor border problem” and concentrate on larger matters. Zhou wrote back that the minor border matter “should not affect the development of Sino-Indian friendly relations. This small question can be settled.”25 Borders were a pragmatic issue, not a principled one.
Such high-minded ideas on internationalism and mutual respect for sovereignty (the basis of Panchsheela) could not withstand older ideological and cultural pressures. In China, the power of what some Communists called “Han chauvinism” or “Great Hanism” was strong. Liu Shao-chi’s political report at the eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (September 1956) cautioned cadres not to fall prey to the idea that the Han people are the best, and that others are inferior, that only the Han can take charge of the minority communities (called “nationalities”) and do their work for them.26 In July 1957, Zhou went before the National People’s Congress to caution the delegates against “big-nation chauvinism.” “China is a big socialist country,” he said, “so we must realize that the nationalist countries, whose social systems are different from ours, may have misgivings and fears toward China.” Such statements offered an alternative to the virus of chauvinism and territorial fetishism that had become apparent in Tibet and in Formosa.27
If currents of ethno-nationalism emerged within and around the broader internationalism of Chinese Communism, similar leakages broke the barriers of Nehruvian secular internationalism. As the border dispute became more and more intractable, marginal political parties of the intransigent Right set the terms for the debate. The leader of the Swatantra Party told the Indian parliament that the Chinese were “soiling our motherland with their cancerous fingers.”28 When Zhou visited Delhi in 1960, Nehru stood beside him and said, “Not an inch of Indian soil would be yielded to China.” Whereas Nehru was clear that the dispute was about “two miles of territory,” his firmness came from the need to defend “national prestige and dignity.”29
The reduction of dignity to territory had two important effects. First, it enabled previously subterranean chauvinism to parade in public. In India, the marginal Right took center stage as the defender of not only the border but also the ancient culture of India (which would be portrayed by these forces as Hindu). Tendencies against ethnic or religious minorities that would otherwise have no room in the broad expanse of secular national liberation squeezed into the public sphere, just as the state’s own cultural institutions began to imagine the history of the state in ethno-cultural terms rather than anti-imperialist ones. From the rich resource of the past, state leaders drew elements to create the symbols and myths of the new nations; currency bore these emblems, as did national songs and history books. Anti-imperialism remained part of the agenda, but it now began to share the dais with an ideology that largely contradicted it: that the nation had always been there, that the freedom movements only returned it to its rightful place, and not that the nation had been produced by the national liberation movements. War encouraged chauvinism.
