Banglar Bir
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Playing the Tibet card!
Subir Bhaumik, June 9, 2017
PM Modi meets jawans of the Indo Tibetan Border Police in Kinnaur of Himachal
“China’s refusal to acknowledge Indian national security concerns is now leading to a gradual but significant change in India’s Tibet policy,” wrote Indian columnist Harsh Pant in a recent comment piece. “The Modi government seems more open than its predecessors in re-evaluating the utility of the Tibet card in managing China.”
Pant is right insofar as Modi’s government seems “more open” than its predecessor in playing the Tibet card. He might have said “more than open.” On the day Modi was sworn in as Indian prime minister, the list of invitees included Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government in exile in India. The Chinese were quick to protest the presence of the exile government in a ceremony where Modi had brought together Heads of governments of South Asian countries. Lobsang’s facebook page read: “Honourable Sikyong (political leader) attended the swearing in ceremony of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi as an honored guest of the Bharatiya Janata Party.”
Foreign Minister Wang Yi protested to Sushma Swaraj but despite being upset, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India and started his tour with a visit to Gujarat at Modi’s request. But the Gujarati swing enjoyed by both leaders has only led to worsening of relations, as never before in the recent past since P V Narasimha Rao followed up on Rajiv Gandhi’s historic Beijing visit and signed the 1993 Treaty of Peace and Tranquility to facilitate demilitarisation of the disputed border as a prelude to its ultimate resolution.
At the root of the Chinese ire is India’s effort to play the Tibet card. Modi may be keen to end the Nehruvian legacy but his China policy has strangely followed Nehru’s ruse-rhetoric nonsense. Nehru accepted Tibet as an integral part of China when he embraced Zhou En Lai at Bandung — but within months, his Intelligence czar B N Mullick was closeted in secret meetings with Tibetan leaders along with CIA station chief in Delhi Harry Rositzke, who later confirmed much of the Agency’s political activity in India, and use of the subcontinent as a support base for operations mounted in Chinese controlled Tibet. He said that it began in the mid-1950s and continued through the 1960s. Details of these have been provided by John Kenneth Galbraith, who was US ambassador in Delhi when Rositzke was CIA station chief, in his memoirs “A Life in our Times” and by Richard Parker, in his “John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics ”
I would have no problems accepting Indian covert support to Tibetan rebels if India had refused to accept Chinese takeover of Tibet. Like the US refused to accept the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and came forward to aid and abet the Mujahideen in more ways than one. If Nehru had opposed the Chinese takeover of Tibet heeding Sardar Patel’s advice, Delhi would be well within its rights to aid and abet an insurrection and resistance in Tibet. But once Nehru had accepted Tibet as part of China and insisted that Dalai Lama has been given asylum only as a spiritual leader, it defies logic to find the champion of non-alignment, quietly allowing his intelligence to fuel the covert war in Tibet along with the US agencies. Such volte face was characteristic of Nehru — from his betrayal of Subhas Bose and the left wing in the Congress in the late 1930s to his flip-flop over the Cabinet Mission plan that rattled Jinnah and made him determined to press for Partition. A recent ‘Ground Zero’ article in Hindu revealed the experience of one of the Tibetan fighters of 1950s — Dhondup Palden, now in his 80s, a resident of Lama Camp in Tezu, Arunachal Pradesh. Palden describes the formation of the Tibetan resistance group, Dhokham Chushi Gangdruk (DCG) on June 16, 1958 in Tibet by a charismatic nobleman, Andrup Gonpo Tashi.– and how it operated out of India and how some of its fighters were taken to US for training after they had reached India and had been screened by US officials in the High Himalayas.
I have argued before, disagreeing somewhat with Neville Maxwell who believes the border dispute and the ‘forward policy’ led to the 1962 war, that Beijing went on the military offensive to silence Indian support for the ‘little war in Tibet”. Tibet is much more important for China than the border where, as Nehru said, ‘not a blade of grass grows.’
The 1962 war also made it clear to Nehru and India that the US may welcome Indian support and US operations from Indian territory to destabilise Tibet (in which the CIA was heavily involved and firmly backed by IB chief B N Mullick) but Washington would do little to help India in real terms when the Chinese retaliated heavily.
For anyone who has carefully read former State Department official William Avery’s book, it is clear the US needs the India-China confrontation to persist so that it can capitalise on the multi-billion dollar arms market in India.
As the grandson of a freedom fighter who wasted his youth serving a life sentence in Andaman Cellular Jail for nearly killing a British Commissioner, I would not mind going up to the border, rifle in hand, for organising a behind-the-line partisan resistance, were the Chinese to overrun Arunachal Pradesh again. But I would be the last person to do that if it is only to play to the design of some Donald Duck in Washington. For more than two centuries, our countrymen fought for the British Empire. Now we don’t have to do that for the ‘evil empire’ of US. And I don’t have to learn my patriotism from lathi-swinging saffronites, who quietly send Vaidiks for track 2 with LET’s Hafeez Saeed and avoid taking out padyatras from Jammu to Srinagar.
The Modi government would do well to learn the lessons of history when it panders to the US “Asia pivot” strategy and then as part of it decides to needle China on Tibet. I am not taking a moralistic stand, but one of realpolitik.
Is India capable of making a difference if it backs dissent in Tibet — or Baluchistan for that matter. It is one thing for the Prime Minister to go up on the ramparts of Red Fort and raise the heckles on Baluchistan — it is an entirely different proposition for his intelligence to actually aid and abet Baluch rebels fighting on ground to bleed Pakistan.
Funding Baloch exiles in Europe or US does not take India very far except giving Pakistan much needed evidence to prove Indian meddling in the strategic province and raise the heckles in Beijing because China is heavily invested in the CPEC corridor that ends in Balochistan. As I have argued in my book “Insurgent Crossfire,” post-colonial South Asia nation-states, including India and China, have reciprocally backed insurgencies against each other.
There are no heroes or villains in this game. So, no moral issues involved. India intervened militarily and decisively in East Pakistan in response to two Pakistani efforts (1947-8 and 1965) to wrest Kashmir. China unleashed its army on India to preserve its hold on Tibet. Bangladesh started backing Northeastern rebels after India started backing the Shanti Bahini.
The issue is one of capability. If India is capable to hitting Pakistan hard on Balochistan, by all means. What I am opposed to is hollow rhetoric and meaningless ruse — if you can’t make a difference on ground, don’t make tall claims because that will go against the country and its interest. My state Tripura and its first chief minister Sachindralal Singha played the vital role in pushing Delhi into effective intervention in East Pakistan — as detailed in my book “Agartala Doctrine.”
But as shown in that book, it took Singh and later India a long time to do the spadework to break up Pakistan. These capabilities are not achieved in months — not even a few years. It is a stupid idea to provoke hostile neighbors with threats to meddle in their internal affairs when you don’t have any real capability to make a difference on ground. India did develop that kind of capability in Sindh and R&AW veteran Raman described in his “Kaoboys of R&AW” how the agency’s use of Mohajhir assets to light the fuse forced Pakistan to back off on Punjab. After Gujral’s ‘parantha diplomacy’ and his much vaunted doctrine, we surrendered that little war capability in Pakistan. And we never had that in Tibet after the last of the Khampa veterans had hung up their boots in the early 1970s.
It is natural to expect Modi and all the Prime Minister’s Men to explore ways and means to force Pakistan back off on Kashmir by playing the Baloch card. But China, like in 1950s, was not playing any card against India. Nehru started playing the Tibet card in close collaboration with the CIA even as he talked of ‘Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai” and though it only admitted to hosting the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader of Buddhists, it actually played along with the CIA to boost the little war in Tibet.
The Tibetan guerrilla veterans also fought for India in the 1971 Bangladesh War. In the end, Nehru wasted a sector swap offer by Zhou En Lai to resolve the border dispute in 1960 and his ‘Forward policy’ provocations only provoked a massive retaliatory response which his generals Thapar and Kaul had no way of stopping. When generals join their politicians in rhetoric, it is time for worry. It is now known in some detail how Maneckshaw and Jacob-Arora quietly planned the 1971 winter offensive by first devastating Pakistani installations during the monsoon in 1971. Did they issue press statements and thump their chests, as is happening now. As they say, the clouds that roar much does not provide rain. Our military leaders are openly talking of a two-front war now when we know from CAG disclosures how much ammunition the army has in store for a limited war. Military planning is a secret matter — the less one talks about it, the better.
Like Nehru, Modi began his tenure with a provocation to China by inviting Lobsang to his swearing-in. That was followed by the the 2015 McLeod Ganj conference that brought together Tibetans, Uighurs, Falungongs and pro-democracy 1989 dissidents. If India has the capacity to take this forward and create some real problems for Beijing in Tibet, I would say ” give it a try”. But by appointing a Tibet advisor in the Home Ministry, someone who goofed up as R&AW station chief in Dhaka by backing Khaleda Zia’s son Tarique, does Delhi feel it can make a difference and get China to chicken out on any of the bilateral issues like NSG or CPEC going through Kashmir!
It is only in Humphrey Hawksley’s fiction and former Indian army chief S.Padmanabhan’s fictionalised 2029 India-China war narrative that we find India has some capacity to interfere in Tibet using surrogates. In reality, the Tibet card does not exist for India. Except for causing diplomatic irritation in Beijing, needling China would get India very little except for greater wrath from Beijing that may translate into more trouble in Northeast, Kashmir and even Central India where the Maoists are more active than ever before. The rhetoric of “muh tor jawab” (befitting reply) may work for BJP in domestic politics, but it would cost the nation dear in long run unless India can play out the whole script until the very end.
It works for the US to needle China on Tibet and Taiwan. Not for India. China is a next-door neighbour and it is not Maldives or Sri Lanka. If India has not thought out the endgame with China, it is always better to follow Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao rather than Nehru and normalise relations than try playing the Tibet card.
southasianm06/09/playing-tibet-card/onitor.com/2017/
Subir Bhaumik, June 9, 2017
PM Modi meets jawans of the Indo Tibetan Border Police in Kinnaur of Himachal
“China’s refusal to acknowledge Indian national security concerns is now leading to a gradual but significant change in India’s Tibet policy,” wrote Indian columnist Harsh Pant in a recent comment piece. “The Modi government seems more open than its predecessors in re-evaluating the utility of the Tibet card in managing China.”
Pant is right insofar as Modi’s government seems “more open” than its predecessor in playing the Tibet card. He might have said “more than open.” On the day Modi was sworn in as Indian prime minister, the list of invitees included Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government in exile in India. The Chinese were quick to protest the presence of the exile government in a ceremony where Modi had brought together Heads of governments of South Asian countries. Lobsang’s facebook page read: “Honourable Sikyong (political leader) attended the swearing in ceremony of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi as an honored guest of the Bharatiya Janata Party.”
Foreign Minister Wang Yi protested to Sushma Swaraj but despite being upset, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India and started his tour with a visit to Gujarat at Modi’s request. But the Gujarati swing enjoyed by both leaders has only led to worsening of relations, as never before in the recent past since P V Narasimha Rao followed up on Rajiv Gandhi’s historic Beijing visit and signed the 1993 Treaty of Peace and Tranquility to facilitate demilitarisation of the disputed border as a prelude to its ultimate resolution.
At the root of the Chinese ire is India’s effort to play the Tibet card. Modi may be keen to end the Nehruvian legacy but his China policy has strangely followed Nehru’s ruse-rhetoric nonsense. Nehru accepted Tibet as an integral part of China when he embraced Zhou En Lai at Bandung — but within months, his Intelligence czar B N Mullick was closeted in secret meetings with Tibetan leaders along with CIA station chief in Delhi Harry Rositzke, who later confirmed much of the Agency’s political activity in India, and use of the subcontinent as a support base for operations mounted in Chinese controlled Tibet. He said that it began in the mid-1950s and continued through the 1960s. Details of these have been provided by John Kenneth Galbraith, who was US ambassador in Delhi when Rositzke was CIA station chief, in his memoirs “A Life in our Times” and by Richard Parker, in his “John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics ”
I would have no problems accepting Indian covert support to Tibetan rebels if India had refused to accept Chinese takeover of Tibet. Like the US refused to accept the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and came forward to aid and abet the Mujahideen in more ways than one. If Nehru had opposed the Chinese takeover of Tibet heeding Sardar Patel’s advice, Delhi would be well within its rights to aid and abet an insurrection and resistance in Tibet. But once Nehru had accepted Tibet as part of China and insisted that Dalai Lama has been given asylum only as a spiritual leader, it defies logic to find the champion of non-alignment, quietly allowing his intelligence to fuel the covert war in Tibet along with the US agencies. Such volte face was characteristic of Nehru — from his betrayal of Subhas Bose and the left wing in the Congress in the late 1930s to his flip-flop over the Cabinet Mission plan that rattled Jinnah and made him determined to press for Partition. A recent ‘Ground Zero’ article in Hindu revealed the experience of one of the Tibetan fighters of 1950s — Dhondup Palden, now in his 80s, a resident of Lama Camp in Tezu, Arunachal Pradesh. Palden describes the formation of the Tibetan resistance group, Dhokham Chushi Gangdruk (DCG) on June 16, 1958 in Tibet by a charismatic nobleman, Andrup Gonpo Tashi.– and how it operated out of India and how some of its fighters were taken to US for training after they had reached India and had been screened by US officials in the High Himalayas.
I have argued before, disagreeing somewhat with Neville Maxwell who believes the border dispute and the ‘forward policy’ led to the 1962 war, that Beijing went on the military offensive to silence Indian support for the ‘little war in Tibet”. Tibet is much more important for China than the border where, as Nehru said, ‘not a blade of grass grows.’
The 1962 war also made it clear to Nehru and India that the US may welcome Indian support and US operations from Indian territory to destabilise Tibet (in which the CIA was heavily involved and firmly backed by IB chief B N Mullick) but Washington would do little to help India in real terms when the Chinese retaliated heavily.
For anyone who has carefully read former State Department official William Avery’s book, it is clear the US needs the India-China confrontation to persist so that it can capitalise on the multi-billion dollar arms market in India.
As the grandson of a freedom fighter who wasted his youth serving a life sentence in Andaman Cellular Jail for nearly killing a British Commissioner, I would not mind going up to the border, rifle in hand, for organising a behind-the-line partisan resistance, were the Chinese to overrun Arunachal Pradesh again. But I would be the last person to do that if it is only to play to the design of some Donald Duck in Washington. For more than two centuries, our countrymen fought for the British Empire. Now we don’t have to do that for the ‘evil empire’ of US. And I don’t have to learn my patriotism from lathi-swinging saffronites, who quietly send Vaidiks for track 2 with LET’s Hafeez Saeed and avoid taking out padyatras from Jammu to Srinagar.
The Modi government would do well to learn the lessons of history when it panders to the US “Asia pivot” strategy and then as part of it decides to needle China on Tibet. I am not taking a moralistic stand, but one of realpolitik.
Is India capable of making a difference if it backs dissent in Tibet — or Baluchistan for that matter. It is one thing for the Prime Minister to go up on the ramparts of Red Fort and raise the heckles on Baluchistan — it is an entirely different proposition for his intelligence to actually aid and abet Baluch rebels fighting on ground to bleed Pakistan.
Funding Baloch exiles in Europe or US does not take India very far except giving Pakistan much needed evidence to prove Indian meddling in the strategic province and raise the heckles in Beijing because China is heavily invested in the CPEC corridor that ends in Balochistan. As I have argued in my book “Insurgent Crossfire,” post-colonial South Asia nation-states, including India and China, have reciprocally backed insurgencies against each other.
There are no heroes or villains in this game. So, no moral issues involved. India intervened militarily and decisively in East Pakistan in response to two Pakistani efforts (1947-8 and 1965) to wrest Kashmir. China unleashed its army on India to preserve its hold on Tibet. Bangladesh started backing Northeastern rebels after India started backing the Shanti Bahini.
The issue is one of capability. If India is capable to hitting Pakistan hard on Balochistan, by all means. What I am opposed to is hollow rhetoric and meaningless ruse — if you can’t make a difference on ground, don’t make tall claims because that will go against the country and its interest. My state Tripura and its first chief minister Sachindralal Singha played the vital role in pushing Delhi into effective intervention in East Pakistan — as detailed in my book “Agartala Doctrine.”
But as shown in that book, it took Singh and later India a long time to do the spadework to break up Pakistan. These capabilities are not achieved in months — not even a few years. It is a stupid idea to provoke hostile neighbors with threats to meddle in their internal affairs when you don’t have any real capability to make a difference on ground. India did develop that kind of capability in Sindh and R&AW veteran Raman described in his “Kaoboys of R&AW” how the agency’s use of Mohajhir assets to light the fuse forced Pakistan to back off on Punjab. After Gujral’s ‘parantha diplomacy’ and his much vaunted doctrine, we surrendered that little war capability in Pakistan. And we never had that in Tibet after the last of the Khampa veterans had hung up their boots in the early 1970s.
It is natural to expect Modi and all the Prime Minister’s Men to explore ways and means to force Pakistan back off on Kashmir by playing the Baloch card. But China, like in 1950s, was not playing any card against India. Nehru started playing the Tibet card in close collaboration with the CIA even as he talked of ‘Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai” and though it only admitted to hosting the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader of Buddhists, it actually played along with the CIA to boost the little war in Tibet.
The Tibetan guerrilla veterans also fought for India in the 1971 Bangladesh War. In the end, Nehru wasted a sector swap offer by Zhou En Lai to resolve the border dispute in 1960 and his ‘Forward policy’ provocations only provoked a massive retaliatory response which his generals Thapar and Kaul had no way of stopping. When generals join their politicians in rhetoric, it is time for worry. It is now known in some detail how Maneckshaw and Jacob-Arora quietly planned the 1971 winter offensive by first devastating Pakistani installations during the monsoon in 1971. Did they issue press statements and thump their chests, as is happening now. As they say, the clouds that roar much does not provide rain. Our military leaders are openly talking of a two-front war now when we know from CAG disclosures how much ammunition the army has in store for a limited war. Military planning is a secret matter — the less one talks about it, the better.
Like Nehru, Modi began his tenure with a provocation to China by inviting Lobsang to his swearing-in. That was followed by the the 2015 McLeod Ganj conference that brought together Tibetans, Uighurs, Falungongs and pro-democracy 1989 dissidents. If India has the capacity to take this forward and create some real problems for Beijing in Tibet, I would say ” give it a try”. But by appointing a Tibet advisor in the Home Ministry, someone who goofed up as R&AW station chief in Dhaka by backing Khaleda Zia’s son Tarique, does Delhi feel it can make a difference and get China to chicken out on any of the bilateral issues like NSG or CPEC going through Kashmir!
It is only in Humphrey Hawksley’s fiction and former Indian army chief S.Padmanabhan’s fictionalised 2029 India-China war narrative that we find India has some capacity to interfere in Tibet using surrogates. In reality, the Tibet card does not exist for India. Except for causing diplomatic irritation in Beijing, needling China would get India very little except for greater wrath from Beijing that may translate into more trouble in Northeast, Kashmir and even Central India where the Maoists are more active than ever before. The rhetoric of “muh tor jawab” (befitting reply) may work for BJP in domestic politics, but it would cost the nation dear in long run unless India can play out the whole script until the very end.
It works for the US to needle China on Tibet and Taiwan. Not for India. China is a next-door neighbour and it is not Maldives or Sri Lanka. If India has not thought out the endgame with China, it is always better to follow Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao rather than Nehru and normalise relations than try playing the Tibet card.
southasianm06/09/playing-tibet-card/onitor.com/2017/
