are conflicting accounts), it would be fair to say that Aksai Chin was not
a necessary part of Indian territory. But the Government of India’s note to
Beijing on October 18, 1958, claimed that the road was across territory
that had been ‘part of the Ladakh region of India for centuries’. This was
a completely spurious claim: Ladakh had been captured by the Dogra ruler
of Kashmir from Tibetin the mid-nineteenth century, and this had been
recognised by his British overlords, who had thereafter contained him
within their arbitrary line, while they themselves played with Aksai Chin
in a positional war with Russia.
All of this was made far more tricky from March 1959, when Tibet
was in rebellion and proclaimed itself independent; the Dalai Lama fled
Lhasa and crossed the McMahon Line into India to (the monastery of)
Tawang. (The United States ‘requested’ Nehru to provide asylum to the
Dalai Lama; CIA operatives conveyed the Government of India’s accep-
tance by radio to the rebels in Tibet, and on March 30, 1959, the Dalai
Lama crossed into India with 200,000 Indian rupees provided by the
CIA.^14 ) There was some sympathy for the Tibetan cause in India, and this
was taken up by the Socialist Party who, in April 1959, organised a
portrait of Mao Zedong to be pasted on the wall of the Chinese consulate
in Bombay and organised a crowd of people to throw eggs and tomatoes
at it. Nehru, once again attempting his balancing act, tried to reconcile
hospitality towards the Dalai Lama with gestures of correctness towards
the Chinese – he refused to denounce the Chinese occupation of Tibet, but
his reception of the Dalai Lama and the latter’s access to the press to
publicise the case for Tibetan independence annoyed China greatly.
Moreover, the Chinese government knew that Kalimpong in the hills
of West Bengal in eastern India had become a centre of exiled Tibetans
and CIA agents and plots, supported by persons prominent in Nehru’s
administration. Members of Nehru’s government were prone to say
in private that the formulation ‘the Tibet region of China’ was merely a
realist concession. What would have been clear to observers in India,
though not necessarily to foreign observers, was that this was not the only
issue on which the Government of India seemed to pull in different direc-
tions. Yet as far as China was concerned, it had no reason to give Nehru
the benefit of the doubt.
From August 1959, border skirmishes between Indian and Chinese
troops occurred not infrequently, with troops on both sides having
advanced up to the McMahon Line. The ‘Longju incident’ on August 25,
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 241