‘He did not say it to our face but as soon as we had left he attacked the
Chinese government as aggressors. That is not an attitude to take towards
guests. We were very much distressed by such an attitude, particularly
as we respect Prime Minister Nehru.’^16 These were, perhaps, the last civil
words on Nehru to emanate from Chinese sources. The Chinese view
up to 1960 – largely correct – was that Nehru was a captive of reactionary
forces he couldn’t control, but that he might just break free and become
a progressive influence. By 1962, this had given way to denunciation
of Nehru as a representative of the big bourgeoisie and landlords. China
also correctly identified US pressures on India regarding aid, therefore
explaining why India was having to move closer to the USA; it related the
USSR’s support for India on the border question to the recent Sino-Soviet
split. China thus found herself isolated in international opinion, with both
the capitalist and socialist side backing India. Ironically, one of the reasons
the USSR took India’s side was that its foreign policy observers found it
impossible to believe that any country as weak as India would challenge
or provoke China; the Soviet Union’s public support for the Indian side
encouraged the militancy of the Indian position.
By this time the argument between India and China was rapidly
degenerating in standards – the Indian side was resorting to claiming a
‘mystical affinity’ with the Himalayas, and N.G. Ranga of the Swatantra
Party declared that the Chinese were ‘soiling our motherland with their
cancerous fingers’.^17 The 1960 summit was destroyed largely by Indian
intransigence; on the same trip, Zhou arrived at amicable boundary
agreements with Nepal and with Burma – on the basis of the McMahon
Line. Officials’ consultations between India and China simply produced
two contradictory reports in 1961: the Indian side paraphrased the
Chinese position as ‘India, like Britain, had invaded and occupied various
portions of Chinese territory along the Sino-Indian boundary’; they
then rejected this accusation, ‘since these areas were correctly part of
India’.^18
Now, a ‘forward policy’ – a provocative sending of adventurous
border patrols into disputed territory, to imply de factoIndian control –
was inaugurated by the Indians. This absurd policy could even be seen
as a satyagrahaof the Gandhian kind, claiming the moral right not to
face Chinese retaliation – but ‘the satyagrahiswould be armed troops’.
‘We thought it was a sort of game,’ an Indian army officer recalled in
November 1962; indeed, Defence Minister Krishna Menon called it ‘a244 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63