(TibetanReview.net, Nov02’21) – Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first Deputy Prime Minister of independent India, always saw Tibet as an independent country and wanted to make it a buffer country to prevent border conflict with China, India’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat has said.
“The quintessential visionary that Sardar Patel was, he had assertively voiced the need of an independent Tibet as a buffer state between India and China, as can be found in his correspondence with then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,” the PTI news agency Nov 1 quoted Rawat as saying Oct 31 in his Sardar Patel Memorial Lecture at All India Radio.
Rawat has said history bore witness to the fact that China had been quick to exploit the situation whenever India neglected its armed forces.
In the 1950s, India overlooked this important lesson of history and allowed the security apparatus to drift and the Chinese shook the country up in 1962, he has said.
“We had to relearn this lesson through an ignominious experience. Post-1962, we have had several skirmishes against the Chinese — at Nathu La in Sikkim in 1967, at Wangdung in 1986, at Doklam in 2017 and the recent skirmishes in the eastern Ladakh,” Rawat has said.
Let us tell you that China occupied Tibet in 1950 and after that China shares borders with many states of India. India shares a long border with China from Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India to Ladakh in North India, english.newstracklive.com Nov 2 cited Rawat as saying.
