Nehru’s Folly and the ‘Loss’ of Tibet continues....

From 1954 onwards, there were cartographic claims by both India and China. India unilaterally decided to delimit its borders with China, based on the proposed Johnson-Ardagh Line in Ladakh, and on the McMahon Line in NEFA. China’s maps showed large areas of Asia as part of China. A map in the book ‘A Short History of Modern China’ by Liu P’ei-hua, published in 1954, showed large parts of Soviet Central Asia, both Koreas, the whole of Indo-China, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, and even large parts of India as ‘lost territories of China’. (See map) Of India, it showed the whole of the northeastern region, including Sikkim, NEFA and Assam, parts of today’s Uttarakhand state, a big chunk of north-eastern Ladakh, (including the entire Aksai Chin region), and even the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as parts of China.

The Indian government had then deemed it too preposterous even to protest. But some other Chinese maps showed about 36,000 sq km of territory on the north-eastern frontier and about 31,080 sq km in north-eastern Ladakh, mainly the Aksai Chin region, as being within China. The PM brought it up with his counterpart, Zhou Enlai, when he met him in October 1954 in China. The Chinese PM sought to treat those maps as of little consequence, and even in November 1956, when he visited India, he repeated the same assurance. Of course, the Tibet-Sinkiang road was then being built through Aksai Chin, but Nehru accepted those assurances in good faith.

To be continued...