Then there was Tibet. Much of the disputed border was actually
one between India and ‘the Tibet region of China’: Chinese governments
were understandably nervous about Tibet and potential foreign activities
to destabilise Chinese claims to Tibet. At the Asian Relations Conference
in Delhi in 1947, the Chinese delegation (still represented by the
Guomindang) had insisted that questions of Tibet’s political status should
not be discussed. Tibetan representatives were to be included in the list of
Chinese representatives and treated merely as ‘cultural representatives’.
Right through the border dispute, Indian documents maintained the
reference to the ‘Tibet region of China’; but part at least of the problem
was the arbitrary boundaries sought to be imposed for the purposes of
Tibet’s buffer state status in between Russia, China and India, and
the need to detach it from China and encourage its ‘independence’. There
were fears that this game was continuing, and some Indian officials did
indeed wish to detach Tibet from China – in 1950, a British official had
suggested that to pre-empt a Chinese takeover of Tibet, India should
invade Tibet itself. Nehru had refused to contemplate this, but Chinese
suspicion of India’s intentions with regard to Tibet continued throughout
the 1950s.
In the North-East of India under British rule, from 1873 an ‘inner line’
had demarcated the plains from the ‘tribal’ territories, a sort of no-man’s-
land, or rather no-country’s-territory, which had been off limits to
plainsmen without necessary licences to travel. The ‘outer line’ was the
international frontier. But there was uncertainty as to exactly where this
was. From about 1900 to 1910, during a period of Manchu ‘moderni-
sation’ in Tibet that had attempted to replace Tibet’s ancient theocratic
institutions and inter aliareduce British influence, British viceroys of India
had responded by unilaterally pushing the ‘outer line’ northwards. After
the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the weakness of the Chinese government
had provided Tibet with de factoindependence from China, but not from
Britain.
The so-called ‘McMahon Line’ was sought to be imposed at a
conference in Simla from October 1913, based on the British decision
to leave Tibet formally in China while controlling Tibet from India;
the line had never been accepted by the Chinese government (even in the
late 1950s, the Guomindang in Taiwan continued to protest that the
McMahon Line had no legal validity) and the Tibetan representatives seem
not to have noticed that the line had moved progressively northwards238 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63