On September 8, 1959, Zhou Enlai wrote to Nehru, explaining his
position: no border, western or eastern, had ever been delimited. A
reasonable solution therefore depended on bilateral negotiations. Zhou’s
letter, however, also contained the first claim by China to the no-man’s-
land between the McMahon Line and the foothills that was now mostly
NEFA, and to everything beyond the Brahmaputra river. This was a
tendentious claim, but possibly a raising of the stakes since the Indian
side was so intransigent. But he still offered to negotiate –Indians kept
missing clues in the Chinese correspondence that not all the territory
China might theoreticallyhave a claim to would actuallybe claimed by
them. Further clues that China might be flexible in the North-East in
return for Indian flexibility in the North-West were also ignored.
Meanwhile the right attacked non-alignment and demanded that
India join various military pacts against China. The opposition was always
more bellicose than Nehru, forcing him, if he wasn’t to look unpatriotic,
into a more and more aggressive posture. If war came, Nehru now found
himself declaring, India would be ready. The assumption always remained
that the choice of whether to go to war or not would be in Indian hands;
alongside these remarks, Nehru’s claims that India was fundamentally
non-violent, even ‘Gandhian’, sat uneasily. From 1958, however, Nehru
had begun taking precautions. With the military dictatorship of Ayub
Khan in Pakistan inaugurated with American support and further
arms sales, a potential two-pronged military threat had to be considered;
in 1959, when Eisenhower visited Delhi, Nehru sought from him a
guarantee that in case of a dispute with China, Pakistan would not attack
India – this Eisenhower believed he could promise, which amounted to an
admission that Pakistan was indeed controlled substantially by the United
States.
On April 25, 1960, Zhou came to Delhi, still offering to negotiate
on the basis of no preconditions and a ‘line of actual control’ principle.
Nehru said later there was no question of ‘barter’ on the boundary
question. When asked after a closed session whether the Indian negotiators
had talked of Chinese ‘aggression’, Zhou said India had not: if they had,
it would have been both untrue and unfriendly. But Nehru, when pushed
by the press, said he could not remember whether he had used the word
‘aggression’ or not – the Indian press clearly thought he ought to have
- but he had referred to the Chinese entering Indian territory ‘which we
consider aggression’. Zhou Enlai, now in Kathmandu, was not amused:
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 243