Indignation & integration

One of the loveliest journeys in the world is the flight from New Delhi to Guwahati and, if you are heading to the tea gardens or the Arunachal hills, the flights to Dibrugarh or Itanagar are equally awe-inspiring. For, you fly west to east along the Himalayan ranges, past Mount Everest and the snows of Kanchenjunga.

Along either side of the Himalayas, mountains that tectonic plates continue to raise heaven-wards, are two ancient civilisations. The Indian peninsula, which continental drift has embedded in the Asian plate, and the Middle Kingdom of China.

Recent tensions across the border echo similar situations in the past. We had been friends. Pandit Nehru had backed mainland China’s claim for a seat in the UN Security Council. Then came the flight of the Dalai Lama, in 1959, to Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. He was followed by thousands of Tibetans. A government-in-exile was set up.

Perhaps it was this sanctuary, generously given by India, after an uprising in Tibet that riled China. The origins of the conflict that erupted between the neighbours in 1962, in the wake of these events, have long been disputed. Firstly, who ruptured the happy ‘Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai’ discourse? Secondly, why did India not use its Air Force, which was perhaps much superior to the Chinese air force in those days? Thirdly, when war did begin, why did our Prime Minister allow the evacuation of the Indian Army from the North-east?

It is time to remember another Prime Minister, who in the course of the Second World War, had vowed, “We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” After the evacuation at Dunkirk in the summer of 1940, Churchill admitted in the British Parliament that “wars are not won by evacuations”.

In the course of having served in India’s far-flung forgotten frontiers in the North-east, for a period of three-and-a-half decades, I have heard numerous people, among them politicians, officers, students and common citizens, say that the great cause of the sense of alienation of the people of North-east India was Pandit Nehru’s statement at the time, after the withdrawal of the Army from the North-east, that “my heart goes out to the people of Assam and the entire region”.

The people of Assam and the North-east felt abandoned and at the mercy of the Chinese. The banks were making a bonfire of the paper currency in their vaults. Coins were being dumped into rivers, lakes and water bodies. The business community was decamping. There was a sense of panic and defeat. The Red Army was making its way down the mountain passes through Arunachal.

The Chinese army, worried and mindful about ambushes in a territory about which they had little geographical idea, did not come down in trucks, tanks or armoured carriers. They were moving on foot, each company holding aloft at the head of every marching column the pictures of two widely different leaders. One was of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and the other of Pandit Nehru.

As they came down the defiles of the Arunachal Himalayas into the verdant valley of the Brahmaputra, they kept on asking people, whom they came across, whether they resembled or looked like Nehru or Zhou Enlai. This was psychological warfare. The common people were being told that they resembled Zhou Enlai and the marching soldiers, and were therefore their people.

In those days, what was insensitively called a lunatic asylum was located on the outskirts of Tezpur district. The doctors and the paramedics had fled. The inmates came out in a state of bewilderment onto the roadside and saw columns of the Chinese Red Army moving past. In utter confusion, some of them started clapping, believing that they owed their freedom and rescue from the facility to these men walking by.

The first administrative casualty of the advent of the Chinese was the District Magistrate of Tezpur, who had made the blunder of flying off to Kolkata to drop his wife and children. At the time of the gravest peril for the nation and the district, the officer was missing and became the first IAS officer to be dismissed in Independent India.

The Chinese are long gone from the Brahmaputra valley, but the river today bears the signs of Chinese decisions and dams up-river. The people of the North-east are much better integrated with the rest of the country. The sense of alienation is on the wane. The Himalayas appear as serene and splendid as ever, although they are witness to probably the largest ever military build-up. History, as always, shall continue to have the last imperious word.

— The writer is a retired IAS officer