The Myth of the McMahon Line

Update, November 8, 2016:  I just finished consulting Alastair Lamb's The McMahon Line: A study in the Relations between India China and Tibet, 1904 to 1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).  Lamb's book is a leisurely 650-page stroll through records of the British Foreign Office, declassified in the mid-1960s, that provide the foundation for the narrative provided by revisionist historians, Neville Maxwell, and in the post below. 

Lamb's book makes it clear that the Simla Convention was an unsuccessful gambit in a game of multi-dimensional chess played between Great Britain, British India, Tibet, China, Russia, and Mongolia, and involving interests in Afghanistan, Persia, Nepal, Sinkang and Burma.  Although Great Britain and British India were the driving force behind Simla and most key developments are documented in the records of the Foreign Office (including telegram intercepts revealing the Chinese negotiating strategy), a heroic and multi-lingual scholar could probably put together a fascinating narrative by adding Tibetan, Chinese, and Russian sources to the mix.

The key topic of the tripartite negotiations between Great Britain, Tibet, and China was the definition of a border between China and Tibet (relatively trivial, since it was understood that Tibetan regions adjacent to China would be administered by China anyway), and the drawing of a second, crucial interior border creating Inner and Outer Tibet.  

The British intention was to establish "Outer Tibet"--controlled by a weak and friendly state under the Dalai Lama that had made its foreign relations subject to a British veto--and not China, as the primary point of contact between British India and the northeast.  The pricetag for China's surrender of its claims and opportunities in "Outer Tibet" would be obtaining undisputed sway over "Inner Tibet".  

During the negotiations, there was a lot of scribbling of proposed boundaries between Chinese and Tibetan zones of control on the map.  Unsurprisingly, the Chinese motto was "Go West" and its most extreme proposal placed the boundary between Inner and Outer Tibet 100 miles from Lhasa.  The British, with Tibetan acquiescence, pushed back in the west but alienated Tibetan territory in the east and north with a free hand, as long as a direct "Inner Tibet" a.k.a. China border presence down by Assam (a.k.a. British India, "the precious") could be avoided.

Here's some competing border ideas (Lamb, pg. 485)...

... and the final proposal (in which "Kokonor" a.k.a. today's Qinghai was signed off to China as well as a vast tract north of the Kunlun Mountains).  This is the arrangement the Chinese representative initialed but the Chinese government repudiated and refused to ratify.  [Lamb, pg. 518]

The Simla Convention foundered on the inability of China and Great Britain to come to terms over the boundary between "Inner" and "Outer" Tibet.  The boundary between "Outer" Tibet and British India was not a topic of the tripartite negotiations, understandably since the very purpose of the Simla Convention was to ensure that Tibet, and not China would be British India's designated interlocutor in the northeast.

Negotiations on the boundary that came to be known as the McMahon Line were a bilateral British-Tibetan show.  In fact, maybe only a British India-Tibetan show.

An interesting lacunae in the historical records covered by Lamb concerns the details of the negotiations between the British Indian and Tibetan representatives about placement of the McMahon Line.  According to Lamb (pg. 546), the contents of these negotiations were not even minuted to the Foreign Office in London, another indication that something considerably less than a negotiation between sovereign states was going on.  It would be interesting if these records could be made to appear.

It is known that the key area of concern in delineating the border between British India and "suzerain' Tibet was the "Tawang Tract", a thumb of land at the western terminus of the proposed "McMahon Line" next to Bhutan.  Here's a nice map Andy Proehl drew for China Matters a few years back to give the lay of the land.

Lamb makes the noteworthy observation that Tawang was in several respects a poisoned chalice for the British and Indian governments.

 Lamb documents the lust of British India for Tawang as a strategic asset.  In 1907, the Indian General Staff noted "[Tawang] is a dangerous wedge thrust between the Miri country [Assam tribal area to the east of Tawang] and Bhutan.  A comparatively easy and much-used trade route traverses this wedge from north to south, by which the Chinese would be able to exert influence or pressure on Bhutan...a rectification of the boundary here is imperative..." [Lamb, pg. 534]


However, Tawang was indisputably part of Tibet, culturally, religiously, and politically.  The town of Tawang was (and still is) the site of a large and important monastery affiliated with the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa that administered territorial holdings in Tawang through its monks.  Second, the northern part of Tawang was also incorporated into the administrative structure of the Tibetan government.

Surrendering Tawang was a major concession by the Tibetan government to Great Britain, one that could only be justified if the Simla Convention secured either peace and a mutually recognized border with China, or significant and effective military and diplomatic assistance from Great Britain to Tibet as the dispute with China ground on.  Neither of these materialized and the Tibetan government subsequently declared the McMahon Line was a dead letter and continued to tax and administer Tawang.

Problematically, inclusion of the Tawang Tract below the McMahon Line also made a mockery of subsequent claims that the Line in any way reflected a natural ethnic or geographic boundary between India and Tibet.  

The fact that McMahon moved the line north during the negotiations with the Tibetan delegation (it was first considered adequate to control the Se La Pass, the limit of Tibetan government administration, but then the line was moved north to encompass the monastery itself, presumably because the powerful monastery held authorities over communities south of the pass) is another indication of its less than organic character. [Lamb, pg. 535]

There’s playing with fire and there’s dousing yourself with gasoline and jumping into a flaming pit.  I do the latter in a piece for SCMP’s This Week in Asia magazine, The British Forgery at the Heart of India and China's Tibetan Border Dispute.

My proposed title,  Uncle Sam Plays the Great Game in Arunachal Pradesh, didn't make the cut.

In my piece I take the visit of the US Ambassador to India, Richard Verma, as an opportunity to unpack the history and significance of the 1914 Simla Convention between Great Britain, Tibet, and China, an imperial episode which also saw the birth of the notorious McMahon Line.

The McMahon Line is notorious since India unilaterally—and with some help from the United States and zero agreement from the PRC—asserts that the McMahon Line is the indisputable boundary between India and the PRC in India’s Northeast.

The McMahon Line is a hot-button issue for Tibetan nationalists as well, since Great Britain negotiated it directly with the government of Tibet, so supporting the McMahon Line delivers the dual benefits of supporting the narrative of the existence of a recognized independent Tibetan government and giving aid and comfort to the Tibetan diaspora’s Indian patron.

The actual situation and significant consequence of the McMahon Line is complicated but, I believe, accessible thanks to some deft historical research by several scholars and despite some litigating by Indian and Tibetan partisans.

Having said that, I welcome correction and instruction, so in this post I’m going to lay out the arguments behind the assertions in my SCMP piece in greater detail.  For sourcing, I lean on Neville Maxwell India’s China War (Maxwell was the Times of London’s India correspondent during the 1962 war and a key figure in revisionist analysis of the roots of the war), and an unpublished dissertation by Dr. Heather Spence, British policy and the ‘development’ of Tibet, 1912-1933, that I found very informative on the diplomatic and geopolitical context of the Great Britain-Tibet relationship pre-and-post-Simla.

The story of the McMahon Line is inseparable from—but not identical with—the story of the Simla Convention negotiations between Great Britain—represented by Henry McMahon--China, and Tibet at the hill town of Simla in India in 1914.

First off, the key and most interesting aspects of the Simla Convention are both the de facto independence of Tibet (which had expelled the Chinese by 1914 and had a government in Lhasa under the Dalai Lama with effective control over much of the area of Tibet)…and Great Britain’s consistent and overriding interest in denying de jure independence for Tibet.

Great Britain was obsessed, perhaps unhealthily so, with playing the “Great Game”: forestalling the southern creep of Russian influence in Asia toward India.  

In India’s northeast, this translated into the desire to establish Tibet as a buffer state that was pro-British and secure.

“Pro-British” was not an issue in 1914, since the Dalai Lama at the time was an ardent Anglophile who had spent several years of exile in the sympathetic company of the British administrator Charles Bell.

“Secure” was the problem.  The Raj had no interest in rolling the geopolitical dice by endorsing Tibetan independence and with it the possibility that a hostile new regime and adverse set of circumstances might bring the Chinese or Russians into Tibet and up to India’s doorstep; but it also lacked the will or capacity to assert and enforce a unilateral protectorate over Tibet.

 It was deemed necessary that, if and when China emerged from the chaos of the 1911 Revolution as a power-projecting state, it would acquiesce to the existence of an autonomous Tibetan government that had a special relationship with Great Britain.

So Henry McMahon summoned Tibetan and Chinese representatives to Simla to order the relations between Tibet and China, and between Tibet and Great Britain.  The Tibetans were eager to attend; the Chinese were compelled by McMahon’s threat that he would conclude a bilateral agreement with Tibet if they didn’t show up.

One can speculate—and I will—that the Chinese showed up primarily to stall and throw a spanner in the works.  Simla acknowledged China’s role—and also gave China the chance to act as the spoiler, by participating in the negotiations but refusing to endorse the outcome.

The core of the British agenda at Simla was to partition Tibet into “Inner” and “Outer” Tibet as the Russians had just done with “Inner” and “Outer” Mongolia.  Inner Tibet, the parts abutting Sichuan in which Chinese control was stronger, would be incorporated into China.  Outer Tibet—the big part, the strategic part, the highlands run out of Lhasa by the Dalai Lama—would not become independent: it would be an autonomous government lacking control over its foreign affairs.  

Autonomy, but autonomy of a specific type was preferred.  McMahon came up with the idea of “suzerainty”.

“Suzerainty” served multiple purposes.  By invoking a Chinese aegis, “suzerainty” was a legal fig leaf providing diplomatic cover to Great Britain, which had concluded an agreement with Russia in 1907 that promised neither state would conduct direct negotiations with the Tibetan government.  At the same time, “suzerainty” was intended to forestall any claims from Russia and other nations that “Outer Tibet” was part of China and therefore subject to the Open Door policy declaring that the rights and access of one state in China were to be enjoyed by all.

But most importantly, “suzerainty” was used to assert that, by China’s leave, Tibet would be autonomous, but still conduct its foreign affairs independently with respect to only to one, and only one country: Great Britain.

So, in essence, the Simla Convention was designed to secure a special relationship between Great Britain and Tibet with Chinese endorsement to compensate for the fact that Great Britain lacked the resolve to secure Tibet as a formal British protectorate.  

The Chinese, however, did not endorse.  The Chinese representative initialed the draft agreement, but the Chinese government withheld authorization to sign.  

To explain its refusal, the Chinese government placed the onus on the issue of boundary delimitation.

The Chinese foreign affairs office formally notified Great Britain that “This Government has several times stated that it gives its support to the majority of the articles of the Convention.  The part which it is unable to agree to is that dealing with the question of boundary. [Spence, pg. 36]

I expect it was McMahon’s fallback plan from the gitgo to try to take in the bilateral what China refused to cede in the trilateral.

McMahon had been instructed by London not to sign bilaterally with just Tibet, but he decided to exceed his instructions, concluding an agreement with Tibet that finessed the Chinese non-participation in the Simla Convention with a declaration that China, by not signing, had simply forfeited the privileges for China negotiated in the Convention.

 According to this formula, Great Britain and Tibet would execute the parts of the Convention that pertained to them—mainly diplomatic (Tibet would not enter into agreements with any other foreign power without Britain’s OK) and trade.  The agreement waived all tariffs between British India and Tibet, a piece of free-trade maneuvering that advantaged the Raj but caused no small fiscal problems and resentment of the Tibetan government (which had relied on taxing exports of wool to India for a significant part of its revenue) in the 1920s.

At Simla the Chinese representative, Ivan Chen, was excluded from these discussions, unaware of the content of the bilateral undertakings, and invited to go to a separate room while British and Tibetan representatives signed them.  Correction: According to Lamb: "Signing of the [bilateral British-Tibetan declaration] was done in Chen's presence; but McMahon reported with some satisfaction, 'the nature of the documents executed at the meeting is not known to the Chinese plenipotentiary, who, I am now given to understand, believes the Convention was signed.  This impression I have not thought it necessary to correct.'" [Lamb, pg. 519]

Unsurprisingly, Chen declared the Chinese government would not recognize any agreement concluded bilaterally between Great Britain and Tibet, a declaration that was repeated by the Chinese Minister in London.

No one regarded the gains of the bilateral track as an adequate replacement for a trilateral pact.

It was understood by all concerned—Great Britain, India, Tibet, China, indeed, McMahon himself—Simla was a bust.  McMahon reported to London:

It is with great regret that I leave India without having secured the formal adherence of the Chinese Government to a Tripartite Agreement…The fact is that the negotiations at Simla…broke down… [Maxwell, 49]

 Mindful that without China’s formal participation the agreement at Simla was in conflict with the 1907 convention with Russia, Great Britain did not publish the Simla Convention.  Instead, it belatedly took notice of the negotiations in its official compendium, Aitchison’s Treaties and Sanads 1929 Edition Volume XIV, with the terse remark: “The convention was initialled and sealed on 3 July 1914. As this Convention was not signed and ratified by all three parties, the current Chinese Government does not consider itself bound by the terms of this convention.”  

As for the McMahon Line, it was a separate bilateral sideshow to the main issue of trying to demarcate a border between Tibet and China a.k.a. “Inner” and “Outer” Tibet trilaterally at Simla.

Prior to and contemporaneously with the tripartite negotiations on the Simla Convention, the British and Tibetan teams had conducted bilateral discussions in Delhi and Simla as to the position of the boundary between India and Tibet.  

Since Great Britain regarded Tibet as de facto autonomous in its dealings with Great Britain (and presumably hopeful the special relationship would be shortly confirmed at Simla as de jure) , no effort was made during the negotiations to involve China, with rather disastrous implications for the future.  

 In 1962, India would be facing not the Tibetan government across the McMahon Line but the People’s Republic of China, which with very good reason considered itself in no way bound as a successor to any previous border negotiations.

With equally disastrous consequences for Nehru and India in 1962, McMahon, instead of drawing the boundary in the foothills of the Himalayas, drew it along the crestline, in easy reach of attackers from the north but virtually indefensible from the south.

The key horsetrading occurred in the matter of the “Tawang Tract”.  Tawang was an indisputable locus of Tibetan control, with a big monastery dominating a fertile valley at the southern reaches of the Tibetan plateau and also dominating, in a less than admirable way, a local population of ethnic Manpo serfs exploited in the most dire fashion. 

By virtue of its riverine topography, Tawang straddled an important trade route between Lhasa and northern India and was therefore seen as a potential military threat/power point that the Raj wished to control.

In the bilateral British-Tibetan boundary discussions, the western terminus of McMahon’s line crept north until it included all of Tawang.  The Tibetan delegation was apparently not happy about this state of affairs but accepted it as the price of British support and with the reassurance that they could continue to tax Tawang despite its inclusion into British India.  The Indian-Tibetan boundary agreement was enshrined in an 8 mile to the inch map and held in two copies, one by the British and one in Lhasa.  

The McMahon Line was introduced into the Simla negotiations through the back door, as it were, by presenting it as a fait accompli on the large-scale map intended for attachment to the Simla Convention as a continuation of the crucial line defining the boundary between Inner and Outer Tibet which had indeed been the subject of genuine tripartite negotiations.  

  

Interestingly, the British and Tibetans also bilaterally extended the boundary to enclose Aksai Chin, a barren waste to the west of Tibet, as Tibetan (not Indian) territory in order to give Tibet the incentive or responsibility to keep the Russians out of that sensitive strategic area.  

Ivan Chen initialed the treaty and map—the sole, shaky  basis for India’s subsequent insistence that China had accepted the McMahon Line—but was rebuked by Peking for exceeding his instructions and, as noted above, declined to sign the final Convention.

At the time, as recorded in Aitchison, it was universally understood that China had rejected the Simla Convention, and that this was a problem that overshadowed whatever informal gains had accrued to Britain through the bilateral agreements with Tibet.  We know this thanks to documents demonstrating that both the Tibetans and Great Britain clung to the Simla “suzerainty” gambit, and that they labored fruitlessly for decades to get China back to the negotiating table to validate the policy.  

The key concern was that China, by refusing to sign the tripartite Simla Convention, had refused to countenance the Inner/Outer Tibet arrangement that would have fixed the Sino-Tibetan border,  assured the autonomy and security of the government in Lhasa-- and justified to Lhasa Great Britain’s extensive, unique, and increasingly onerous diplomatic and trading privileges in “Outer Tibet”.

 Immediately subsequent to the Simla negotiations, 1915, internal British correspondence characterized the Simla Convention as “invalid” [Spence, pg. 59] and, in the context of the Great War, without basis as an obligation for arming Lhasa to forestall Chinese mischief.  In 1919, the Tibetan chief minister evocatively expressed his concern that Tibet would find itself abandoned “like tiny fledglings on an open plain.” [Spence, pg. 48]

As for China, instead of returning to negotiations and acquiescing to “suzerainity” over a virtually independent Tibet--an arrangement it was perhaps only pretending to countenance before it backed out at Simla, when China was flat on its back and the Raj was at its zenith—it preferred to mass troops on Tibet’s Sichuan frontier and agitate for direct engagement with Lhasa.

It soon became apparent that China was, shall we say, the “rising power” in the Himalayan regions, the British were the “declining power”, and it became a matter of considerable anxiety in Lhasa that China was piling up troops in the eastern marches and the Tibetan government was being forced to confront these forces without any significant military or diplomatic support from Great Britain.  

Faced with niggardly and tardy provision of guns and ammunition by Great Britain, Lhasa began playing footsie with Russia and Japan via Mongolia to pursue the supply of arms; amazingly, Great Britain was able to veto these initiatives thanks to the special position in Tibetan security affairs it had negotiated bilaterally at Simla.

The Tibetan government came to understand that the Simla Convention and the idea that Britain had the sincerity and capacity to protect Tibet against China were, at best, on life support.  

By 1936, a British political officer reported on the mood in Lhasa as follows:

They regarded the adjustment of the Tibet-Indian boundary as part and parcel of the general adjustment and determination of boundaries contemplated in the 1914 Convention.  If they could, with our help, secure a definite Sino-Tibetan boundary they would of course be glad to observe the Indo-Tibetan border as defined in 1914… [Maxwell, 59]

With Simla moribund, the McMahon Line was never demarcated on the ground and as a result it never acquired any customary force as a precedent.

Notably, there were no serious efforts to assert effective British rule in the remote tribal reaches of the McMahon line, or even over Tawang until the 1930s.  Then, with the Japanese menace replacing Russia as the focus of the Great Britain’s anxieties concerning northern encroachment, the Raj adopted a policy which might be characterized as “F*ck Tibet”: unilaterally extending British control northwards without reference to the original and unrealized vision of backing Tibet in return for the trade and territorial privileges that Great Britain had negotiated two decades before.

 At this point, Olaf Caroe enters the picture.  Caroe was a key official in the British Raj and an enthusiastic geopolitical strategist.  In 1935, Tibetan authorities in Tawang arrested a British spy/botanist and the government in Lhasa made the decision, unwise in retrospect, to issue a protest to the British authorities and thereby bring Lhasa’s claims to Tawang to Caroe’s attention.

In response, Caroe pulled off a rather notorious subterfuge in order to buttress the British claim to Tawang: he published the Simla Convention for the first time in 1938 with a note misrepresenting that it had included settlement of the border (and alienation of Tawang); and he arranged for the publication of official Survey of India maps that, for the first time, showed the McMahon Line as the official boundary.  To advance the narrative, he also corresponded with commercial atlas publishers to put the McMahon Line on their maps as well.

In a telling indication of Caroe’s jiggery-pokery, to avoid the awkward question of why he was first publishing the Simla Convention twenty-four years after the fact in 1938, he instead arranged for the surreptitious printing of a spurious back-dated edition of Aitchison, deleting the original note about the Chinese government’s non-signature, and replacing it with a lengthy note stating, quite falsely, that “The [Simla] Convention included a definition of boundaries…”  

Since 1) the McMahon Line had been concluded in secret bilateral negotiations between Tibet and Great Britain outside the Convention and 2) the Chinese had officially refused to recognize any bilateral agreement, boundary or otherwise, between Tibet and Great Britain and 3) had declined to sign the Simla Convention itself and 4) had notified Great Britain in 1914 that the specific sticking point was “the boundaries” this was hoo-hah.

The replacement copy was distributed to various libraries with instructions to withdraw and destroy the original edition.

The subterfuge was only discovered in 1963 when J.A. Addis, a British diplomat, discovered a surviving copy of the original edition at Harvard and compared it to Caroe’s version. 

That was too late for Nehru, who apparently sincerely accepted Caroe’s maps as holy writ i.e. the accurate depiction of borders that had been trilaterally negotiated at Simla, published, openly acknowledged, and a moral imperative and worthy object of Indian military defense in 1962.

It was also too late for Harvard’s own John Kenneth Galbraith, who as ambassador to India successfully lobbied President Kennedy to declare the McMahon Line as India’s recognized border, apparently as part of his campaign to support India and elevate the PRC-India conflict beyond the mundane sphere of “clash over disputed border” to “Chicom aggression against India”. 

In response to Galbraith’s urgings, President Kennedy overrode the concerns of the State Department and the vociferous objections of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan (the government of China in 1962 as far as the US was concerned) to give Galbraith the leeway to announce “The McMahon Line is the accepted international border and is sanctioned by modern usage.  Accordingly we regard it as the northern border of the [North East Frontier Agency] region.”

Well, “accepted international border sanctioned by modern usage” is something of a stretch.  As noted above, not only the Chinese but the Tibetan government of the 1930s, itself to be extinguished by the Chinese in 1959, regarded the McMahon Line as a dead letter.

In discussions with Nehru in the 1950s, Zhou Enlai had made the rather telling statement that “he had never heard of the McMahon Line”.   The Chinese government only understood the full extent of the boundary understandings between the Tibetan and British governments in 1914 after the PLA seized documents in the Potala Palace during the 1959 invasion, and Zhou subsequently declared the McMahon Line a piece of imperial fraud.  Imperial historians—Addis, Maxwell, and Lamb--had the opportunity to examine British records a few years later, when the fifty-year embargo on government records expired, and agreed with Zhou.

The revelation of these contacts made a good case for de facto Tibetan independence between the two world wars; unfortunately, they also at the same time clearly demonstrated that the Chinese government had never been party to them, or to the McMahon Line.

Much has been made in Indian and Tibetan nationalist circles of Zhou Enlai’s willingness to use the McMahon Line as the basis for a border settlement between India and the PRC.  However, this had nothing to do with any acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the line (which, after all, had never been demarcated in the field) and perhaps had something to do with the fact that, as the 1962 war demonstrated, the task of defending the McMahon Line on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is a tremendous strategic burden for India.

The truth about the legal and military aspects of the 1962 Sino-Indian War are, I would venture, still a matter of denial and disinformation, especially in India.  The Henderson-Brooks Report, which details the strategic and operational failings of the Indian military establishment in 1962, has never been declassified, despite Prime Minister Modi’s previous promises in that regard; only portions of it are in the public domain thanks to Neville Maxwell, who somehow got his hands on a copy.  

Asserting the purported sanctity of the McMahon Line (and Chinese perfidy in refusing to honor it) is a staple of the patriotic narrative, and a litmus test for states eager to develop an India alliance and not averse to irritating China in the process.  In addition to the SCMP This Week in Asia piece I link to above, here's something I wrote in 2015 about the role the McMahon Line dispute plays in contemporary Indian international relations.

In its combination of nationalist posturing and pseudo-historical bullsh*t, the Indian position on the McMahon Line bookends the PRC’s claims in the South China Sea in interesting ways.

And, of course, the United States, as part of its pro-India/anti-China tilt is more interested in enabling the myths of the McMahon Line than supporting resolution of the Sino-Indian border dispute through equitable negotiation.

China 'pivot' trips over McMahon Line

[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on November 6, 2012.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.  Rehashing the Sino-Indian War, with India's unwise fetishizing of the McMahon Line and the principle of sovereignty over genuine national interests that are strategically and tactically viable, has interesting implications for the current Senkakus/Diaoyutai confrontation between the PRC and Japan, as reflected in the closing paragraph: India drew the line in the Himalayas - but it turned out to be the wrong line. As for the Senkakus/Diaoyus ...?  PRL 11-8-12]

China is looking for a "Western" pivot to counter the United States' diplomatic and military inroads with its East Asian neighbors such as Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Myanmar.

For China's strategists, as an interesting analysis in the Indian Express tells us, the "Western" pivot means nurturing the PRC's continental Asian relationships with the interior stans and, across the Himalayas, India. Pakistan's descent into basket-case status and the PRC's concurrent anxiety about Islamic extremism in Xinjiang indicates that the old China/Pakistan lips and teeth united front against India (and offsetting threats of destabilization in Kashmir and Tibet) may be past its sell-by date. [1]

But, if Inner Asia lacks disputed islands and the Seventh Fleet, it has disputed borders and an aggravated Sinophobe faction in India eager to spurn China and strengthen ties with the United States.

This is Sino-Indian friendship year, a good omen for rebooting Sino-Indian relations. Unfortunately for Beijing, it is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Sino-Indian war, a golden opportunity for refighting the battles of 1962.

Sino-Indian relations, like Sino-Japanese relations are potentially hostage to territorial disputes. The disputes date back to imperial escapades from the turn of the 20th century. In the case of Japan, it goes back to the seizure of the Senkakus as war spoils in 1895. For India, it is the McMahon Line, first drawn in 1914, and the grim precedent of the 1962 war.

Although the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 is largely forgotten by Chinese - a Global Times poll apparently showed that 80% of Chinese youth didn't even know it had happened - it is still an occasion for handwringing in India that borders on the masochistic. [2]

That is because India, though it only suffered 7,000 casualties and lost no effective control of territory, lost the brief war in as complete and humiliating a fashion as can be imagined.

The short-form version of the war is that the Indian government escalated its border disputes with the People's Republic of China by establishing military outposts north of the McMahon Line, the Line itself a piece of unilateral boundary-making mischief executed by the British Raj.

The Nehru government calculated that its exercise in establishing "facts on the ground", combined with diplomatic backing from the Soviet Union and the United States and India's position of moral authority, would cause Beijing to back down and accept Indian claims in Aksai Chin (a bleak desert north of Kashmir) and the North East Frontier Administration (the southern face of the Himalayas east of Nepal; now Arunachal Pradesh).

In one of many ghastly miscalculations, the Nehru government had concluded that the PRC would not respond militarily to the encroachment of military posts into the disputed territories.

Unfortunately, Nehru's crystal ball, especially when it came to Chinese supremo, Mao Zedong, was remarkably foggy, especially as it related to the PRC's touchiness over Tibetan issues, the equivocal Indian stance over Tibet and, critically, Nikita Khrushchev's delight in rubbing the Chairman's nose in the debacle of his Tibet policy.

In his study China's Decision for War with India in 1962, John Garver (currently professor of international relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology) describes the encounter:

The question of responsibility for the crisis in Tibet figured prominently in the contentious talks between Mao Zedong and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Beijing on 2 October 1959. After a complete disagreement over Taiwan, Khrushchev turned to India and Tibet, saying: "If you let me, I will tell you what a guest should not say - the events in Tibet are your fault. You ruled in Tibet, you should have had your intelligence [agencies] there and should have known about the plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama" [to flee to India].

"Nehru also says that the events in Tibet occurred on our fault," Mao replied.

After an exchange over the flight of the Dalai Lama, Khrushchev made the point: "If you allow him [the Dalai Lama] an opportunity to flee to India, then what has Nehru to do with it? We believe that the events in Tibet are the fault of the Communist Party of China, not Nehru's fault."

"No, this is Nehru's fault," Mao replied.

"Then the events in Hungary are not our fault," the Soviet leader responded, "but the fault of the United States of America, if I understand you correctly. Please, look here, we had an army in Hungary, we supported that fool Rakosi - and this is our mistake, not the mistake of the United States."

Mao rejected this: "The Hindus acted in Tibet as if it belonged to them."

Mao was determined to assuage his feeling of embarrassment (and his jealousy of Nehru's leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and his anger at Khrushchev's pro-Delhi tilt) by knocking India off its perch.

Nehru apparently misread the conciliatory stylings of Zhou Enlai as an accurate representation of China's military determination, and the Indian military was completely unprepared in every conceivable way - manpower, materiel, logistics, conditioning, positioning, tactics, or strategy - to withstand the People's Liberation Army when it attacked on October 20, 1962.

Actually, Indian failures were not limited to diplomatic and military tunnel vision. They also extended to profound conceptual shortcomings, ones that have relevance to today's standoff between the PRC and Japan over the Senkakus/Diaoyu Islands.

Nehru leaned on the McMahon Line for his definition of the PRC-Indian boundary. The McMahon Line, originally designed to contain China, turned out to be a generous gift to the PRC.

In the early years of the 20th century, protecting India by creating a Tibetan buffer zone between China and Russia and the precious Raj was a priority for imperial British thinkers. To this end, the British government took advantage of China's post-1911 disarray to convene a conference of representatives of China, Tibet, and Britain in New Delhi in 1914 to negotiate the Simla Accord.

Its key objective was to partition Tibet into Chinese-governed Outer Tibet and locally governed Inner Tibet "under Chinese suzerainty" and define a border between India and ethnic Tibetan regions that had the buy-in of the largely autonomous Tibetan government in Lhasa. The Tibetans were eager to sign, since the Accord implied the ability of the Lhasa government to conduct its own foreign policy and conclude treaties; the Chinese government repudiated the treaty.

The British Foreign Office did not support Tibetan independence, however, and was more mindful of maintaining cordial relations with China; it let the initiative fade away. The Accord was published in the official compendium of Indian treaties, Charles Umpherston Aitchison's Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads, with the notation that no binding accord had been reached at Simla.

The Accord and the McMahon Line languished in obscurity until Olaf Caroe, a strategist in the Indian Foreign Office, decided to invoke them in 1937 as a binding precedent for settling persistent border tiffs between India ... and Tibet.

Since the historical record showed that the British government itself did not acknowledge the validity of the Simla Accord, some unseemly imperial legerdemain was called for. A new version of Aitchison was commissioned; instead of noting the Accord was not binding on any of the parties, it stated that Britain and Tibet, but not China, had accepted the Accord.

As Steven A Hoffmann wrote in his India and the China Crisis:

The Aitchison changes were allowed to appear in 1938. In order to publish them quickly, and to give a greater sense of authenticity to the new entry without having it attract undue notice, the India Office (and possibly Caroe) contrived to issue an amended version of the appropriate 1929 Aitchison volume, without giving it a new publication date. Copies of the original 1929 volume - located in offices and libraries in India, England, and elsewhere - were then replaced by request and discarded.

Perhaps only three original versions of the relevant 1929 Aitchison volume exist in the entire world (including one at Harvard University). The McMahon Line found its way onto India Survey maps and never left.

After Indian independence, Nehru inherited the now-sacrosanct McMahon Line, largely by default, and used it as the baseline for many of his boundary discussions with the People's Republic of China. (Caroe's deception was not discovered until 1964, after the war, when a British diplomat compared the two versions of the Aitchison volume at Harvard.)

But the McMahon Line had a fatal flaw: it was in a terrible, terrible place.

The line was conceived as a series of heroic outposts strung along the bleak Himalayan ridgeline. The vision of a hundred fists of stone raised in defiance against the enemies from the north on the edge of the Tibetan plateau perhaps enthralled armchair strategists, but fortifying and defending the McMahon Line demanded that troops and supplies had to be pushed from the southern valleys up to the 4,000- and even near 5,000-meter commanding heights.

For the purposes of a military commander defending Indian territory, it would have been infinitely preferable to have the boundary at the base of the foothills, within reach of reasonably expeditious resupply and reinforcement, and leave to the enemy the glory of clambering across the jagged mountains and battling out of the valleys.

Neville Maxwell, the London Times South Asia correspondent at the time and author of India's China War, a widely-read (and, in India, widely-resented) depiction of the 1962 war as Nehru's folly, described the military state of affairs in an interview:

The very idea of a strategic frontier was out of date by the 1930s. Any sensible soldier will tell you if China is going to invade India from the Northeast the place to meet them and to resist them is at the foot of the hills. So when the invaders finally come panting out of breath and ammunition, you can meet them from a position of strength. The last place, strategically, to meet the Chinese was along the McMahon alignment. Caroe is very much the guilty party in all of this. [3]

In an atmosphere of escalating tensions and distrust between India and the People's Republic of China in the aftermath of the Tibet rebellion and the Dalai Lama's flight to India, Nehru compounded his geographic disadvantage by sending troops beyond the McMahon Line to establish outposts on the Chinese side - the so-called "Forward Strategy".

The PLA pounced, and the result was a humiliating defeat followed by a unilateral Chinese withdrawal to north of the "Line of Control", the unofficial but effective boundary that divides India and the People's Republic of China even today.

On the 50th anniversary of this debacle, it is hard for Indian nationalists to find silver linings. One noteworthy example was an article describing the closer integration of the tribes of Arunachal Pradesh into the Indian linguistic, cultural, and political mainstream: "India Lost War With China But Won Arunachal's Heart"

When the Dalai Lama thinks of India's consolidation of Arunachal Pradesh, however, he probably feels little joy and more than a twinge of bitter melancholy in his heart, relating to the great religious town and market center of Tawang, which occupies a thumb of territory sticking out on the northwest corner of the state and which has always been the critical pivot upon which the northeast Indian version of the Great Game has revolved.

Tawang is triple-Tibetan: it is in a Tibetan cultural area, it has been a major center of Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist practice for centuries (the 6th Dalai Lama was reincarnated there; the town hosts a large monastery); and it holds a special place in the history of the modern Tibetan resistance. The Dalai Lama entered India from the PRC at Tawang in 1959, and actively patronizes the monastery and the town.

In addition to its ethnically Tibetan residents, Tawang also hosts a considerable number of Tibetan refugees.

In 1914, at Simla, the Tibetan government had acquiesced to the inclusion of Tawang into British India by endorsing the McMahon Line. However, as the Simla Accord languished, it was subsequently understood on both sides of the McMahon Line that Tawang was under the administration and effective control of Tibet - if not by Lhasa, then by the local monastery.

In 1935, a British botanist/spy Frank Kingdon-Ward was arrested in Tawang; the Tibetans compounded their error by complaining to a British mission in Lhasa. This disturbing state of affairs came to the notice of Olaf Caroe and led to the resurrection of the Simla Accord and the McMahon Line - and the Indian claim on Tawang.

In 1947, after Indian independence, the government in Lhasa appealed to the new government to acknowledge its rule over Tawang.

Didn't happen.

The India-friendly Wikipedia entry on Tawang states:

[Tawang] came under effective Indian administration on February 12, 1951, when Major R Khating led Indian Army troops to relocate Chinese squatters. India assumed control and sovereignty of the area and established democratic rule therein to end the oppression of the Monpa.

An article in the Guardian provides an interesting picture of the political dynamic that the Indian government found and exploited in Tawang:

Pema Gombu says he has lived under three flags: Tibetan, Chinese and Indian. Although his living room is decked with pictures of the current Dalai Lama, the 81-year-old says the Tibetan administration in the early 20th century was the worst.

"The [Tibetan] officials in that time were corrupt and cruel. I am sure his holiness did not know this. In those days if a Tibetan stopped you they could ask you to work for them like a slave. They forced us to pay taxes. Poor farmers like me had to give over a quarter of our crops to them. We had to carry the loads 40km [25 miles] to a Tibetan town as tribute every year."

It was this treatment that turned Tawang away from Tibet. Mr Gombu said he helped guide Indian soldiers into the town in 1950 who carried papers signed by the Tibetan government which transferred Arunachal's 35,000 square miles [90,000 square kilometers] to India. "It was the happiest day of my life."

Judging from Pema Gombu's references to Tibetans, he is presumably ethnic Monpa. Monpa are an ethnic group that adopted Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism in the 17th century and center their religious practices on Tawang. They form the demographic backbone of Tawang. Although they are "Tibetan Buddhists" ie followers of the Gelugpa sect, they aren't Tibetans, as the history of Tawang makes clear.

It would appear that the Indian government used the same justification to take control of its Tibetan areas as Beijing did: to rescue the local inhabitants - the Monpa, in this case - from the corrupt and brutal rule of their Tibetan overlords - possibly the government in Lhasa, but more likely the overbearing bosses of the monastery in Tawang.

This history provides an interesting and melancholy perspective on the Dalai Lama's 2009 visit to Tawang.

The visit attracted an enormous amount of media interest because there was the Dalai Lama, going up to the Chinese border, stating that the contested territory of Arunachal Pradesh belonged to India, thereby sticking his finger (in a non-violent, Buddhist fashion) in the Chinese dragon's eye!

But for the Dalai Lama it must have been, at best, a bitter-sweet experience.

He is clearly unwillingly to accept that Tawang is Indian territory. In 2003, as the Times of India tells us, the Dalai Lama asserted that Tawang was part of Tibet, before backpedaling:

NEW DELHI: For the first-time, Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama has said that Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, a territory that's still claimed by China, is part of India.

Acknowledging the validity of the MacMohan Line as per the 1914 Simla Agreement in an interview to Navbharat Times, he said that Arunchal Pradesh was a part of India under the agreement signed by Tibetan and British representatives.

In 2003, while touring Tawang, the Dalai Lama had been asked to comment on the issue, but had refused to give a direct answer, saying that Arunachal was actually part of Tibet. China doesn't recognize the MacMohan Line and claims that Tawang and Arunachal Pradesh are part of its territory.

The statement is bound to impact the India-China dialogue, as Beijing has already stated that if Tawang is handed to it, it will rescind claim on the rest of Arunachal Pradesh. The Chinese proposal is strategically unacceptable to India, as Tawang is close not just to the northeastern states but also to Bhutan.

After the Dalai Lama's 2009 trips to Japan and Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian press reported that he had stated categorically that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang are part of India.

In a rather bitter irony, amid the myriad failures of the McMahon Line in securing the borderlands, its only triumph is the modest advance Olaf Caroe intended in 1938: the alienation of Tawang from Tibet.

Nehru's unwise fetishizing of the McMahon Line has been carried on by many in India's political, military, and security elite. In an interesting inversion of the secretive Communists versus transparent democracy framing, the PRC has declassified many official documents relating to the war. The Indian government, on the other hand, has still classified the official inquiry into the war - the Henderson-Brooks report - presumably because it documents the shortcomings of Nehru, the civilian government, and the Indian military in embarrassing fashion.

The cock-up was so complete, in fact that the line between incompetent provocateur and innocent victim has blurred, to India's advantage. Plenty of self-serving assertions have filled the informational vacuum left by the continued classification of the Henderson-Brooks report, allowing nationalistically minded or Sino-phobic Indian commentators to describe the Chinese attack as unprovoked aggression and warn darkly that Chinese perfidy can and probably will be repeated.

On the 50th anniversary of the war, the Deccan Herald declared:

Make no mistake about it. That China is a hydra-headed monster with massive expansionist plans across South Asia is no longer a secret. It was Mao who termed Tibet as the "palm" of a hand with its five fingers as Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, and what has so long been as NEFA [North East Frontier Agency] that pertain to our north eastern states. [4]

Brahma Chellaney found a Western home for this particular brand of historiography at the Daily Beast, the electronic rump of the now-defunct Newsweek, in an article intended to use the Indian experience to educate the democracies of East Asia about how to protect their precious atolls from the PRC: Mr Chellaney declares: China gave India a "lesson" in 1962. Study it now.

My advice: by all means study the 1962, but please don't study Mr Chellaney, especially since he says things like:

China's generals believe in hitting as fast and as hard as possible, a style of warfare they demonstrated in their 1962 blitzkrieg against India. The aim is to wage "battles with swift outcome" (sujuezhan). This laser focus has been a hallmark of every military action Communist China has undertaken since 1949. [5]

In a spirit of scholarly skepticism, I presume to direct Mr Chellaney's attention to the PRC intervention in Korea: three years (1950-53), 500,000 casualties. 'Nuff said.

The key lesson from the 1962 is not that China's neighbors should muscle up in order to counter a PLA "blitzkrieg": rather that it is dangerous to fetishize territorial boundaries in order to make them into national rallying points. As Mr Hoffmann observed in his largely sympathetic account of the Indian government's border catastrophe:

[The] Indian government came to believe that the McMahon Line was not merely a British Invention ... the McMahon line itself constituted recognition that the watershed crest of the Assam Himalaya formed the natural geographical divide between Tibet and [the Assam Himalaya].

... the weight of all the evidence amassed by the Indians ... made for a plausible case ... But to the extent that India claimed absolute rather than relative worth for its border case, by holding that linear borders had been conclusively "delimited' by history and discovered through documentary investigation, the Indian case became vulnerable ...

India drew the line in the Himalayas - but it turned out to be the wrong line. As for the Senkakus/Diaoyus ...?

Notes:
1. China's new 'Look West' policy to give primacy to India: expert, The Indian Express, Nov 1, 2012.
2. Over 80 per cent Chinese have no knowledge of 1962 war: Survey, Niti Central, Oct 20, 2012.
3. China Was The Aggrieved; India, Aggressor In '62, Outlook India, Oct 22, 2012.
4. The Battle of Attrition, Deccan Herald, Nov 2, 2012.
5. How China Fights: Lessons From the 1962 Sino-Indian War, The Daily Beast, Oct 29, 2012.