as the conference progressed through late 1913 to 1914. Later British
claims to the ‘Tawang Tract’, a sliver of territory then a part of Tibet
but extending onto the plains, had been based on their ownclaim that
the McMahon Line had no validity. By 1947, Britain had occupied
the Tawang Tract, and in 1951 India took it over without protest from
China.
Nehru had told the Lok Sabha in 1950 that he stood by the McMahon
Line; by 1950, the ‘tribal areas’ below the McMahon Line were being
administered as the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) under Nehru’s
dual conciliatory-disciplinary framework for the ‘tribals’ that had been
put in place with the assistance of the anthropologist, Verrier Elwin.
With the establishment of NEFA, the gap between the ‘inner line’ and the
‘outer line’ and consequently the territory south of the McMahon Line
was, in contrast to earlier years, being actively administered by India –
de factoIndian influence had moved northwards; the Line was no longer as
theoretical as before, and from 1956, following an intensification of Naga
‘insurgency’, Indian troops were present in larger numbers.
In the North-West, on the other hand, the border had been arbitrarily
drawn by the British in the mid-nineteenth century to prevent the Dogra
ruler of the new British-created Kashmir state from invading Tibetan
territory. This theoretical line was incomplete; it did not extend as far as
the territory of Aksai Chin – which later became the basis for conflict –
because it was uninhabited and barren and, it was reasoned, a line was
therefore unnecessary. (It was on an ancient trade route between Tibet and
Xinjiang, 17,000 feet above sea level.) In the 1890s, China claimed Aksai
Chin; thereafter, due to a 1907 Russo-British undertaking to stay out of
Tibet, the British decided that Aksai Chin was in Xinjiang in case they
needed to take over the territory. After 1911, China was considered
too weak to protest, so Aksai Chin was shown as British territory; but in
1914, at the Simla Conference, British maps accompanying the attempted
agreement that would have endorsed the McMahon Line – it did not –
showed Aksai Chin as part of Tibet. Through all these machinations, the
mountain kingdoms of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal had been caught in a
web of shifting ‘spheres of influence’ and were handed round indiscrimi-
nately, although they maintained formal sovereignty.
There was a fundamental incompatibility between the Chinese and
Indian positions. China apparently wanted, simply, to settle its borders.
In 1955, at Bandung, Zhou Enlai had said openly that some Chinese
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 239