THE ‘NATION’ AND THE CHINESE SHADOW: DISPUTE,
WAR, CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
The skirmishes with China were a long-standing result of simmering
disagreements between the Indian and Chinese governments over where
exactly the borders between the two countries lay. Initially, both Nehru
and Zhou Enlai deferred the problem; Nehru believed it would be a minor
issue of readjustments and comparisons of incompatible Indian and
Chinese maps to determine where the borders between India and China
actually stood. This was a vexed question that had its origins in the
machinations and disputes of predecessor governments of an imperial era
that neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Republic of India
necessarily wished to claim as theirs; in the heady days of Sino-Indian
friendship, neither side was keen to bring up an issue that might lead to
disagreement.
The border dispute with China and the eventual ‘China War’ in 1962
had major consequences for both Indian domestic and foreign politics and
did great damage to Nehru’s position and reputation, making him far
more vulnerable to attacks from the right than ever before. In retrospect,
the whole affair might even appear a little bit ridiculous: the dispute was
largely about uninhabited territory of little importance to either side.
However, the implications for nationalist pride in a new state that had
internally unresolved problems of defining its nationhood must be taken
into account: it was relatively simple to manipulate public opinion around
the idea of defending the ‘national borders’.
But there were several intertwined issues, leftovers from an era of Great
Power rivalries, which made the border question difficult. On the Indian
side, if its borders were acknowledged as resulting from arbitrary imperial
actions, there were implications for Nagaland and the ‘tribal’ territories
in the North-East. The claim that imperial borders were arbitrary and
had no connection with the intrinsic integrity of the Indian ‘nation’ could
not be admitted without damaging the process of ‘nation-building’ or
forcing an acknowledgement of the multinational instead of the national
character of the Indian state. At the North-Western end, China’s borders
with Kashmir were a major part of the dispute, and Kashmir’s attachment
to India for the purposes of communications, external affairs and defence
empowered India to negotiate on Kashmir’s behalf; but by this time
significant sections of Kashmiri opinion were in favour of Kashmiri
independence.
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 237