Nehru’s Tibetan Blunder

Map of Tibet from FreeTibet.org (Fair Use)

(Cross posted at Dharma Dispatch)

On August 20, 1950 Chou En-Lai was of the opinion that the liberation of Tibet was a sacred Chinese duty, but that would be done only via negotiations. On October 7, 1950, the Chinese attack on Tibet started. As Chou En-Lai was filling sand in hourglass in which the Tibetans were trapped, on October 21, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Chou En-Lai emphasizing the need for a peaceful settlement of the Sino-Tibetan problem. It was not because Nehru was concerned about Tibet but because it would be detrimental to China’s admission to the UN Security Council. The letter emphasized that the timing was bad:

“In Tibet there is not likely to be any serious military opposition, and any delay in settling the matter will, therefore, not affect Chinese interests or a suitable final settlement. The Government of India’s interest in the matter is only to see that the admission of the Peoples’ Government to the United Nations is not again postponed due to causes which could be avoided.”

This is from the great man who gave speeches like “It is not right for any country to talk about sovereignty or suzerainty over any area outside its own range… The last voice in regard to Tibet should be the voice of the people of Tibet and of nobody else.” Nehru’s pompousness as well as cowardice was known to Gandhi, who once observed, “Jawaharlal is extreme in the presentation of his methods, but he is sober in action. So far as I know, he will not precipitate a conflict.”

There were two reasons why Nehru should have recognized an independent Tibet. First, it was the morally right thing to do. Except for a short period in history, Tibet was never under Chinese rule. For the past two centuries it was under a vague relation and even then the Chinese did not have a viceroy at Lhasa. In 1912, the agent known as Amban was driven out and since then there was no Chinese control. The fact that there was nothing in common between Tibet and Hans — in culture, religion, language and script —- was known even to Nehru. Tibetans had their own coins and currency, their own postal system and army. From 1912, there was nothing resembling China in Tibet. Even the passports issued by Tibet in 1948 were recognized by other countries. In a book written by Nehru (Glimpses of World History), he showed an independent Tibet, lying outside the Chinese empire.

Second, it was important for India’s security and many Indians recognized it. On March, 17, 1950, a member from Assam said in the Parliament said, “there should be no loose ends in our relations with the Tibetans…with the success of the Communists and also the likelihood of Tibet being swallowed up, there is great danger and apprehension of complications arising in the near future… something has to be done to strengthen our relations with the Tibetan authorities in this area”.

Buddhist Monk (Peter Hershey, Unsplash)
Buddhist Monk (Peter Hershey, Unsplash)

Even the British recognized the strategic significance. According to General Tucker from British Army, Tibetan plateau was a good airfield to cover eastern India and for the airborne assault and occupation of U.P, Bihar and Bengal. Thus it was in India’s strategic interest to prevent the military occupation of the Tibetan plateau.

This was not the first time Nehru messed up with Tibet. On October 16, 1947, the Tibetans sent a telegram to New Delhi asking for the return of certain territories. There was no response. At that time the Tibetan border with India, Nepal and Burma were not properly delineated. Nehru could have rejected this territorial claim and instead recognized Tibet as independent. If he had done that, Britain, USA and maybe even the USSR would have recognized it. Instead the great anti-imperialist kicked the can down the road.

Why did Nehru sacrifice Tibet? The simple answer was given by Gandhi. Another reason is that Nehru was scared of China. He was an admirer too. The First Asian Relations Conference was held in New Delhi in March 1947 and Tibet was one of the 28 delegates invited by Nehru. When the Chinese protested at the invitation, their status was reduced to that of a representative. The boundary line on the big map of Asia dividing Tibet from China was at the same time erased. During the conference Nehru declared that he was not going to offend China by recognizing Tibet. A few months after Indian independence, the Tibetans sent a delegation to persuade Nehru to recognize Tibetan independence. Nehru refused.

Potala Palace, Tibet

When China attacked Tibet in 1950, Nehru forgot about all his anti-imperialistic speeches. Krishna Menon too argued that there was no historical background for Tibet’s independence. When the Tibetan invasion took place, Prime Minister, Nehru, told the country that a backward feudal country like Tibet could not remain isolated from the world and that it was not an independent country. What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason?

When Chinese troops advanced to Tibet, Lhasa wanted to appeal to the United Nations. Since it was not a member of the United Nations, it asked India for support. India did the typical panchayat officer maneuver and asked Lhasa to talk directly to the UN. Meanwhile Nehru’s sister had already declared that India would not change it’s attitude of neutrality, despite the invasion. The country which had the courage to sponsor Lhasa was El Salvador. India, meanwhile, influenced Britain and made sure that this issue did not pop up in the General Assembly. Like how Chamberlain sacrificed Czechoslovakia, Nehru sacrificed Tibet.

After messing up the Kashmir issue, Nehru was looking for a larger opportunity to mess up. The opportunity to be a better fiddler than Nero and a better windmill chaser than Don Quixote came up soon. The secular liberal god requires human sacrifice and the Tibetans were sacrificed in it’s altar. This vertiginous enigma of blunder and stupidity will baffle any sane person, but Nehru was not done yet. Sometimes it’s darkest before it’s … pitch black. In 1954 the Panchasheel was signed and India recognized the end of Tibet’s autonomy.

This crime was hidden with myths. The Tibetans have forgotten who looked away while they were being attacked. The one redeeming act in the whole episode was granting asylum to a young Dalai Lama. We should not let that one act whitewash the historical crime of letting a culture be purged.

(Adapted from Six Thousand Days: Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister by Amiya Rao and B.G. Rao)

Review: Uri: The Surgical Strike

One of the best scenes in the movie Uri: The Surgical Strike is at the Prime Minister’s meeting to decide how India should react following a Pakistani terrorist attack at Uri killing 19 soldiers. While everyone throws out ideas, Ajit Doval, played by Paresh Rawal, suggests surgical strikes. Then he gives a speech on how this is a new India. — an India that does not remain silent in a moment of crisis and takes the fight to the enemy. He also reminds people not to worry about what US or UN would say and cites the example of what Israel did after Munich.

At the same time, on the Pakistani side, there is no fear of retribution. One character ridicules India, saying they will ban movie actors and singers for a while. Then everything will be back to normal. During the days of the Accidental Prime Minister, the national sport was competitive dossier exchange — a dereliction of generational duty. It appeared as if we had run out of cheeks to show the enemy to hit.

The Prime Minister and Mr. Doval put an end to it. The rest of the movie is a detailed retelling of how a team of Indian army soldiers cross into Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and send the Islamic terrorists to party with the 72 virgins. (Incidentally, I noticed that a line on this was present in the trailer, but was removed from the movie in a kind of Nehruvian move). The technical prowess of India is on display – on how ISRO and DRDO ably supported the soldiers. You bear witness to how people who don’t want to see India going tukde, tukde, do whatever sacrifice it takes to make this a Mission: Possible.

Surgical Strikes would have made Navjot Sidhu sad, but this is the India that we all want to see; to move away from the outlandishly cautious to a bold and courageous one; to be the nation where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; to be the nation which has the political courage to order a surgical strike.

This movie is of a new genre, – a contemporary war procedural, with a no-nonsense retelling of actual events. The director had a bold unwillingness to entertain any material unreleated to the core narrative. But it is just not a cold kill-the-enemy movie. The human grief is given equal footing and the emotional intensity is high when the young child of the murdered soldier comes to pay homage to her father and shouts that the sacrificing life is the ultimate dharma. It is hard not to be shaken by that scene and you long for justice. Now, this not the first time in our country’s history that many such children had to go through such trauma. But this is probably the first time that a political leadership had the courage to bring the culprits to justice.

The technical aspects of the movie are absolutely world class. The music and the appropriate silences, intensify the tension. The final sequence is purely edge-of-the-seat stuff that is thrilling and nailbiting. The movie would have fallen flat if not for the brilliant performance of Vicky Kaushal who is intense throughout the movie. It is also rare to see such perfection from a first time director and kudos to Aditya Dhar for making this movie. If you asked me, “How was the josh, after watching the movie?”, I would say “Very high sir!”

The only hope is that an India, stretched by such boldness, will never go back to its old dimensions.

Briefly Noted: Jade Dragon Mountain: A Mystery by Elsa Hart

Jade Dragon Mountain: A Mystery (Li Du Novels) by Elsa Hart
Early in the 17th century, the English were trying to get a foothold in India as traders with the visit of Thomas Roe to Jehangir’s court. In China, at around the same time, the Ming dynasty was getting replaced by the Qing dynasty. The world was changing, not just in terms of a dynastic change, but also in terms of Western religious and economic imperialism. Jesuits and Dominicans were wandering around China looking for converts. The English East India company was also looking for a way to gain foothold in the country. (The Virginia Company was already setting the template for destroying native civilizations in the America)
In Elsa Hart’s work of historical fiction set in this period, a Jesuit priest is found murdered in the town of Dayan near Tibet. The magistrate of the town does not want this incident to upset the celebrations that have been planned for  Emperor Kangxi, who is visiting shortly. There are many suspects – the Dominicans, the trader from the Company, the library clerk, the first lady, the Tibetans and a wandering story teller — who have their own secrets. While the magistrate is happy to ignore the incident, his cousin Li Du is not. An imperial librarian and now an exile, he  happened to be in the magistrate’s house when the murder happened and will not rest till the mystery is solved.
The book is interesting in the way any historical fiction is. It gives an introduction to an interesting phase of Chinese history. It brings out the transition from Ming to Qing very well and also the way the Tibetans are treated. The details in the story gives a good feel for Chinese culture and social norms. The story follows the three act structure very well, but the intensity of the transitions is timid. There is no violence, or torture or gruesome deaths, thus making it different from most other historical fiction. In a book market where historical fiction focuses mostly on the Western world, this book is a welcome change.

Katasraj Update

In 2005, Pakistan said that they would spend $25 million on the restoration of the Katasraj temple. 7 years later, looking at a picture of the temple, it does not look like much has been done.

At a time when the Hindu community in the country is crying over ‘conversion and forced-marriages’, they have been inflicted by another misery: the sacred pond at Katas Raj here is drying up because its water is being supplied to the nearby towns, Dawn has learnt. A cement factory near Katas Temples has installed tubewells in the area which have reduced the water level in the pond. The water from the pond is being supplied to Choa Syedan Shah and Waula village as the Punjab government could not provide any alternative facility to the residents of the area. [Holy pond at Katas Raj drying up]

Salman Rashid who visited the region recently writes

Last Sunday I was at Katas Raj, the ancient religious site (Buddhist and Hindu) in the Salt Range. It is useless to lament the destruction of the pristine site with marble flooring and steel pipe banisters to the stairways where none had ever existed in history. Culprit: the department of archaeology.[What is the matter with us?]

 

Maldives: Destroying the Indic Heritage

Here is some shocking news from Maldives

Several historical artifacts exhibited at the Maldives National Museum, including Buddhist statues were destroyed in a mob attack on Wednesday morning, an act of vandalism that is said to have caused “unimaginable damage” to the treasured Maldivian heritage.
According to a source, a coral stone head of Lord Buddha, an 11th century piece recovered from Thoddoo in Alifu Atoll, was smashed up by the attackers, one of the most significant pieces at the museum inside Sultan’s Park.
Other pieces vandalised include the Bohomala sculptures, monkey statues and a broken statue piece of the Hindu water god, Makara, while the two five faced statues discovered from Male’ were also damaged – the only remaining archaeological evidence proving the existence of a Buddhist era in the Maldives.
AFP reported Nasheed as saying that the vandals included Islamist hardliners who had attacked the museum because they believed some of the statues inside were “idolatrous”.[Mob storms National Museum, destroys Buddhist statues: “A significant part of our heritage is lost now”]

Briefly Noted: The Triple Agent

Last month, a Taliban member came with a message from the Quetta shura to meet Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who was leading the peace council. The Taliban member — Mullah Esmatullah — had bought two audio messages from the shura and one of them was for Mr. Rabbani. The messenger was treated with respect and bought into Rabbani’s room where he exploded, taking a few lives with him.
In 2009, in Khost, Afghanistan, a similar event happened. A Jordanian agent who had provided spectacular reports on Al-Qaeda members was invited to Camp Chapman for a debriefing. To show that he was trusted, CIA officials in Khost who had never met him decided to let him inside without a search. As soon as he saw the line of CIA officers and their Blackwater guards he started chanting something and only his Jordanian handler knew what was going to happen.
According to a NY Times report

The attack at the C.I.A. base dealt a devastating blow to the spy agency’s operations against militants in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, eliminating an elite team using an informant with strong jihadi credentials. The attack further delayed hope of penetrating Al Qaeda’s upper ranks, and also seemed potent evidence of militants’ ability to strike back against their American pursuers.[Attacker in Afghanistan Was a Double Agent]

The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who infiltrated the CIA by Joby Warrick tells the story of what happened in Khost by following the lives of the bomber Humam al-Balawi, his Jordanian handler Sharif Ali bin Zeid, the station chief Jennifer Matthews, the analyst Elizabeth Hanson and even their guards. It starts with the arrest of al-Balwai who was a doctor who moonlighted as an online Islamic warrior. He was arrested by Jordianian Intelligence, but then bin Zeid decided to make him a double agent. He was to infiltrate al-Qaeda in Pakistan and report back. The doctor who had never been to Pakistan before vanished into the tribal regions and very soon started giving inside information like they had never seen before. No one in Jordan or Langley realized that it was a setup. The al-Qaeda folks turned out to be smarter than the ones who flew the drones.
The book compiles decisions made the various actors and how they all added up to a disastrous end. Excited by the possibility that they could get al-Zawahiri, the CIA let their guard down. The blame is finally attributed to the station chief Jennifer Matthews who made the decision to let the bomber in without a search. The book is less than 300 pages, but reads a Frederick Forsyth novel.

The Destruction of the Buddhist site of Mes Aynak

Bamiyan
When Buddha met Taliban (via Hadi Zaher)

Last December, the Hosni Mubarak’s government gave 2.8 square kilometers of land around lake Qarun to developers to build a tourist resort. If the resort was built, a Neolithic site would have been lost. Now, due to the revolution, that land deal has been revoked.

Archaeologists say the remains of rain-based Neolithic farming in the reserve may hold vital clues to a technological leap that led to irrigation-based farming along the Nile.
Around 4,000 BC, humans occupying a strip along the northern shore of the lake seized a window of only a few centuries of rainfall to grow grain in previously inhospitable desert, archaeologists say.
“We have the evidence of the earliest agriculture activity in Egypt. So it’s before the Pharaohs, it’s before the early dynastic period when Egypt becomes a state,” said Willeke Wendrich, an archaeology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.[Egypt’s revolution may save Neolithic treasure]

But the Buddhist monasteries of Mes Aynak in Aghanistan are not so lucky.

Mes Aynak (Little Copper Well) lies 25 miles south-east of Kabul, in a barren region. The Buddhist monasteries date from the third to the seventh centuries, and are located near the remains of ancient copper mines. It is unclear whether the monastery was originally established to serve the miners or if the monks set up there to work the mines themselves.Here, 7,000 ft up the mountains, Bin Laden set up a training camp in 1999 to prepare terrorists for the 11 September attack. All traces of the camp have gone, but the region still remains a Taliban stronghold.
During the early 2000s, widespread looting occurred at the Buddhist sites after the Kabul government found it difficult to impose control. Archaeologists are now uncovering dozens of statues with missing heads that were broken off to sell.
Mes Aynak’s fate changed again in 2007, when the government negotiated a 30-year mining concession with the state-owned China Metallurgical Group. The archaeological remains sit on the world’s second largest copper deposit. The $3bn deal represents the largest business venture in Afghanistan’s history.[Race to save Buddhist relics in former Bin Laden camp]

Now that mining the place is lucrative, you can say bye bye to the monastery next year. After all who wants that in Afghanistan now? Definitely not the Chinese and definitely not the folks who run the country. In 2001, the Taliban used  mortars, dynamite, tanks and anti-aircraft weapons to destroy Bamiyan. Now the Chinese are going to use dynamite and heavy machinery to destroy the remains of an Indic religion.
There is not much in the news about this Bamiyan type destruction. There are no screaming voices in the Guardian from international award winners who usually get upset when they hear the word mining.
If you want to know more about Mes Aynak and what the world is losing, please take a look at the ebook created by The Association for the Protection of Afghan Archaeology. (blog)
 

Saving History from Terrorists

Baitullah Mehsud’s Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan has only hatred and disdain for the golden relics of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, the first of the urban civilizations built on syncretic ideas which are anathema to the Kalashnikov-wielding Taliban. Imagine the damage caused in any attack on sites which have only in recent years started yielding pointers to the journey our modern society has traversed. Visualize the Taliban plundering the ancient site of Taxila, a few hours north of Islamabad, not far from where the Pakistan army is now fighting them. The worries aren’t mine alone. Many young men, who make a living by acting as guides to tourists told me during a visit to Taxila two years ago that they are already being frowned upon for talking about Buddhism and Buddhist history. [We need to save history from terrorists too!]

Ranjan Roy writes about terrorism against history in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistan for Dummies

You could read a lot about Pakistan to understand what happened and what is going to happen. Or you could watch the two clips below. In the first one Fareed Zakaria explains what Gen. Musharraf did in plain simple words. The second clip shows what Pres. Zardari is going to do in plain simple words.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Fareed Zakaria
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Economic Crisis Political Humor
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Apakalypse Now
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Economic Crisis Political Humor

Rashomon Effect – 10: Sri Lanka

Recently Sri Sri Ravishankar visited Sri Lanka and provided some video footage.
Ms. Jayalalitha:

“I met Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravishankar who has just returned from the war-zone in the Vanni. He gave me CDs and photographs of the atrocities. My heart boils when I looked at it,” the AIADMK leader said. If this pathetic situation of the Tamil people has to be removed, if the problems of the Lankan Tamils has to come to an end, an independent Eelam is the only solution, she added

Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa

“When Ravishankar met President (Mahinda Rajapaksa) after visiting the IDP camps he said it was one of the best camps he has ever seen in the world,” the powerful official, who is the brother of the President, said.

See Also: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9