When Zhou Enlai visited India in 1960, there was a slender hope that a settlement could be reached under which the Chinese government would recognise the McMahon line (which no previous Chinese government recognised) in return for some recognition on our part of Chinese claims to the ‘disputed’ Aksai Chin area. Zhou had failed to convince Indian leaders to accept the loss of territory in Aksai-Chin beyond the line joining Pangyong Lake, Karakoram and Mintaka passes in exchange for status quo in the East. The last time we heard of a swap was in the early 1980s during the regime of Deng Xiaoping.

Subsequently, China has been riveted to Arunachal Pradesh. It refers to Tawang as it ‘South Tibet’ and very recently renamed as many as six towns in Arunachal. The proposal to settle the boundary dispute by simply swapping territory seems to have been hijacked by broader strategic considerations.

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Jawaharlal Nehru’s unwillingness to condemn China’s invasion of Tibet and the expulsion of Dalai Lama in the 1950s were steps motivated by an anodyne idealism that subsequently led to disaster. Thousands of Tibetans took refuge in India and this prompted the Chinese media to attack Nehru as a ‘running dog’ of the imperialists. The People’s Republic of China, which illegally occupied Tibet in 1950, had engaged for decades in brutal and systematic destruction not only of the Tibetan religion, but of the identity of Tibetans as a free people.

In the aftermath of the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, Nehru and his military advisers thought that neither India nor any other external power could prevent the Chinese takeover of Tibet. In 1954, India signed an agreement with China on Tibet, renouncing its inherited prerogatives and recognising Tibet as a ‘region of China’. In response to arguments in justification of India’s rather tame forfeiture of its rights in Tibet without requiring China to recognise the Indian-claimed boundary, India had no means of preserving its rights in Tibet in the face of China's determination to arrive at a fresh arrangement. Just in case the Far Right finds an opportunity to come crashing on Nehru again on this point, it bears recall that it was Vajpayee who in June 2003 had ceded Tibet to be ‘part of the territory’ tag to China.

“We have lessons to learn from history,” Lu Kang, a spokesperson from the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) said in a press briefing, broadly interpreted to be a warning about what could happen should the protracted Sino-India talks on the border question collapse. Would the Chinese have been kept at bay if India possessed a nuclear weapon in 1962? Nehru simply did not expect a Chinese attack because India was unprepared even in terms of clothing, mountain guns, ammunition and conventional logistics. Therefore, the question of nuclear preparation did not arise in 1962. It might be a matter of two divergent orbits that could explain why India, which started as an equal of China in 1947, its nuclear research ~ far ahead of China by 1964 ~ not only fell by the wayside, but also tamely capitulated to Chinese power and real politik.

Whether a communist party-led single-party system in China won hands down over a fledgling but strong parliamentary democracy may be a rhetorical question. The fact that is apparent is that China was always able to impose a degree of coercive diplomacy on India after 1962, as seen during the mutual stand-off between China and the US in Korea, the dispute between China and the Soviet Union over the Ussuri river in 1967, the Chinese nuclear tests in 1964 and the rapid weaponisation afterwards. All this led to a feeling in the Ministry of External Affairs and the Defence Ministry that China is too formidable to be resisted.

It was heartening to observe that after Dalai Lama’s arrival in Tawang, India did not buckle under the doomsday prognostications of China. In not pursuing India’s own interests like its failure to weaponise after 1974, or failure to protest against the occupation of Tibet, Nehru failed to minimise the risks to its people, as was evident in the 1962 debacle against China.

“This is not the first time that the Dalai Lama has visited south Tibet and called the region Indian territory, which means he is committed to separating the nation,” Zhu Weiqun, head of the ethnic and religious affairs committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, told the Global Times, a Chinarun tabloid. Nor is this the last time that Beijing has said that Arunachal Pradesh is part of South Tibet. Thus, the McMahon Line is once again important because India’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh rests on the Simla Convention of 1914 that also included the great monastery of Tawang as part of India administered by Tibetan monks till the early 1950s. It is time India began to contextualise its claims on the basis of history and countered the counter-claims.

Even if we put aside rhetorical questions, and insist that the two countries have reached an “important consensus” on resolving the dispute through talks and consultations, it bears recall that China is building conventional and strategic missile capabilities in Tibet at a furious pace. This is suggestive of the PLA’s heightened preparedness along the Indian border, for joint and integrated operations incorporating air power and upgraded ground and air-defence forces. During the 2004 Combined Commanders Conference, the issue of augmenting India’s defensive capability against China was taken up in response to the mounting military challenge in Tibet, increased PLA incursions across the LAC, and growing Chinese belligerence. The conference stressed the need to initiate early steps to upgrade India’s military profile and capability and set the target date of 2010 for India to adequately prepare to meet the Chinese challenge. The deadline has expired. The military asymmetry is already far too wide. India must not refuse to learn from history any more.

The writer is a freelance contributor