Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:

Comparisons, Negotiations and Attitudes continues....

China has quite deliberately undertaken the absorption of its buffer zone into its state boundaries, with the intention of providing depth to its Han heartland. Mao had clearly enunciated this task. His list of

peripheral foreign areas to be integrated or ‘liberated’ were: (1) Manchuria (2) Mongolia (3) Eastern Turkestan (4) Tibet along with its peripheral Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan, in spite

of his having promised during the Long March to repay the Tibetans

for their kindness, (5) Burma. China would have liked to ‘bring back’ a

few other areas into its borders as well, including the southern part of

Eastern Siberia and the Korean peninsula (i.e., both the two present-day

states, North Korea and South Korea) but having achieved the occupation of its four most desired areas by 1951, it decided to take a realistic view and accepted the impossibility of taking any of Eastern

Siberia from Soviet Russia or all of Korea in the face of a significant American military presence there.

India, too, has not been a laggard in this process, though much of it

had been done under the British Government of India. Assam, which had

never been part of any Indian Empire, even though the Brahmaputra

valley was inhabited by Hindu Assamese, was acquired through annexation by the British only in 1826.

This brought Assam into India

for the first time. The British followed on from 1886 onwards to eventually take control over all the surrounding hills and mountains inhabited by a wide variety of peoples with commonalities with different peoples of Burma and South-east Asia, rather than with Hindustan proper

or with Bengal.

The Anglo-Nepali Treaty of Segowli in 1816 was replaced by a Tripartite Treaty and the Indo-Nepal Friendship Treaty of 1950, the

British Protectorate over Sikkim was renewed with independent India and

then replaced when Sikkim’s earlier disfranchised majority Nepali speaking population decided to merge with India in 1975. The British Treaty with Bhutan (Treaty of Sinchu La, 1865) was replaced by a new one with India.

To he continued....