Sunday, June 21, 2015

Editorial, "India China Relations" in LAW ANIMATED WORLD, 31 May 2015 issue: Vol. 11, Part 1, No. 10.

INDIA CHINA RELATIONS


were never more chummy and euphoric than in the 1950s when all the stalwart idealistic leaders of the emerging post-colonial Asia were alive and zealously pursuing the peace agenda of a new anti-imperialist,  non-aligned pro-people new world order they had in mind. But we know how the supercilious conduct of our leaders, especially the Nehru-Krishna Menon-Kaul axis, had spoilt the ecstatic Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai climate. The Henderson Brooks-Bhagat duo entrusted by the Indian Army to look into the causes for the humiliating debacle suffered by us seem to have put the blame squarely on the aggressive forward policy and the disgusting favoritism followed by our top political, military authorities of the day. Unfortunately, this HB/B Report has not been made public even after all these decades, though its text seems to be readily available to all foreigners to point fingers and heckle at our incompetent and corrupt top brass. Just to quote the starting lines of an excellent introduction to the same by the world famous political analyst Nevill Maxwell, whose historic eye-opener account, “India’s China War” is still banned in India – “WHEN the Army’s report into its debacle in the border war was completed in 1963 the Indian government had good reason to keep it ‘Top Secret’ and give only the vaguest, and largely misleading, indications of its contents. At that time the government’s effort, ultimately successful, to convince the political public that the Chinese, with a sudden ‘unprovoked aggression’, had caught India unawares in a sort of Himalayan Pearl Harbour was in its early stages, and the Report’s cool and detailed analysis, if made public, would have shown that to be self-exculpatory mendacitywould suffice to highlight the real problem between the two countries. Needless to stress that without solving the border dispute with an amicable ‘give and take’ perspective and a cordial forget-the-colonial-past and look-to-the-bright-future-ahead spirit, no amount of friendly ‘selfies’ taken or vasudhaiva kutumbakam (world is one family) exhortations made by our new premier would do to meaningfully improve the relations between these two Asian giants, especially in the background of raging international state and religious fundamentalist terrorism, the dagger of which is being pointed at us through our daayaadi (kinsman) neighbor now in so close terms with the newly emerging superpower of the world – so aggressively expansionist now as at no time in recent history. §§§