(TibetanReview.net, Apr03’24) — India’s External Affair Minister, Mr S Jaishankar, has said Apr 2 that mistakes made by independent India’s first Prime Minister had led to problems including Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and China’s occupation of some parts of the country’s territory.
Speaking at the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Ahmedabad, Jaishankar has said, “In 1950, (then home minister) Sardar Patel had warned the then PM Nehru about China. Patel had told Nehru that today for the first time we are facing a situation on two fronts (Pakistan and China) which India had never faced earlier.
“Patel also told Nehru that he does not believe what the Chinese are saying as their intentions seem different and we should take precautions.”
But “Nehru’s stand was completely dissenting. He replied to Patel that you are unnecessarily suspicious of the Chinese… Also, it is impossible for anybody to attack us across the Himalayas,” hindustantimes.com Apr 3 quoted Jaishankar as saying,
Jaishankar has continued: “A few years later there was a debate about the UN, should India be given a UN seat at that time? So Nehru’s position at that time was he said, we deserve a seat, but first we must ensure China gets a seat. So today we are talking of India first. There was a time when the PM of India talked about China first.”
Nehru saw China as a natural ally in the post-colonial, post-WW-2 world order and did not want Tibet to be an hindrance in the realization of this one-sided romantic vision. He went on to sign a trade agreement with China in 1954, in which India recognized Tibet as an autonomous region of China and which enshrined “five principles of peaceful co-existence” or Panchsheel between the two sides.
China never reciprocated India’s overly-cordial overtures in all these matters and instead accused it, falsely, of fomenting unrest in occupied Tibet. In 1962, it launched an armed aggression on an unsuspecting India, inflicting a humiliating defeat before withdrawing from Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh but cementing its occupation of Aksai Chin, which belongs to India’s Union Territory of Ladakh.