Sovereign Tibet vs sovereign China

Abhijit Bhattacharyya

Author and Columnist

Didn’t sovereign India have a full-fledged diplomatic mission in sovereign Tibet’s capital Lhasa and trade missions at Gartok, Gyantse and Yatung in 1947? Was Beijing a sovereign state under the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1947? Sovereign China was established on October 1, 1949, and full-fledged diplomatic relations between New Delhi and Beijing were established on April 1, 1950. Hence, the Himalayas always constituted the natural boundary between an age-old sovereign Tibet (not China) and geographical India.

It would, therefore, be preposterous to get carried away by the Goebbelsian falsehoods of CPC autocrat Mao Zedong and his successor dictators that the present Hindustan-Han Himalayan border problem is the legacy of British imperialism. Does the CPC forget fast, or is it fast enough to fox the people to forget facts fast?

The fact is, long before the advent of the Europeans in South Asia, it was the imperial rulers of the Middle Kingdom who were in a state of ceaseless conflict in the land between Beijing, Gansu and Tibet, which ultimately surged with the unprovoked invasion of the Lama land by the decaying Manchu ruler’s ruthless General Chao Er-feng in 1910. This effectively gave the Chinese the first-ever entry to the Tibet capital against the Buddhist rulers’ wishes. That’s the beginning of the Himalayan odyssey, which subsequently hit Delhi hard by the Dragon from across the highland, which thus far constituted the natural and benign border-cum-barrier for thousands of years.

Tibet had always been an independent theocracy till 1950-1951, notwithstanding the sporadic Han invasion to forcibly capture this Himalayan land. Indeed, the history of Lhasa’s political geography is well known and well documented. And factually, the Tibet-China border fluctuation and territorial dispute constitute the core issue around the Himalayas, which wasn’t the making of either the British or the post-1947 Bharat.

Hindustan’s Himalayan frontier has never had any problem whatsoever. If anything, Delhi was forcibly dragged into the Lhasa-Beijing dispute in the early 20th century, as a peripheral and secondary factor; it had never had any issue with its shared Himalayan border with the sovereign Tibet.

It’s the existence of the ancient sovereign Tibet which became an eyesore to the newly-born Han state in October 1949. This political Tibet was perceptively defined by Hugh Richardson, the last British and first Indian Head of Mission in Lhasa, as a territory of half a million square miles, wherein ruled the “Tibetan Government continuously from earliest times down to 1951.” This indisputable fact and reality of history is one that Indians usually didn’t bother to stress upon, or forgot while taking on the 1949-born CPC dictatorship and its private militia-type People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

What stands as geopolitical Tibet today was actually broader, longer and larger, encompassing both the Qinghai and Sichuan provinces of Beijing’s empire, which ethnographically were Tibetan from antiquity; but diabolical and destructive ethnic cleansing drastically changed them into a Han habitat centre.

Thus, the early 20th century’s India got entangled with the tussle of the two independent nations of Tibet and China indirectly as it was the diplomatic venue of her British rulers in 1913-1914 at the Simla Conference. Interestingly, the British here weren’t the aggressor or combatant, but appeared as the mediator between the Lhasa-Beijing fight with a distinct Beijing tilt, as found in the original Simla plan, wherein “Thibet” was referred to as forming a “part of Chinese territory.” Both London and Beijing were agreeable to Tibet being a part of China, but retaining her suzerainty under Chinese sovereignty.

Nevertheless, since the Chinese refused to sign the 1914 Simla Accord, they lost the opportunity of an international law document stipulating Tibet as a part of, and under, Chinese sovereignty. The end result was a reversion to status quo. The 1912 declaration of Tibet’s sovereignty by the 13th Dalai Lama got fresh validity, which subsequently was never repudiated or rejected by any international diplomatic document. By not signing the Simla Conference documents, the dragon became the end loser as sovereign Tibet emerged unchallenged.

In retrospect, when the CPC-PLA duo realised the monumental blunder of its 1914 predecessors, it came back with a vengeance to forcibly capture and crush independent Tibet in October 1950, exactly a year after gaining independence in the aftermath of a two-decades-long civil war.

In one stroke, the huge Tibet became occupied land under the CPC-PLA dictatorship in 1950-1951. And, unlike today’s diplomatic cacophony on Russia’s Crimea annexation, there was no West or EU, NATO, USA or UN to sanction the Chinese aggressor or to supply tanks, missiles, bombs, guns and HIMARS rocket launchers to Tibet for fighting or taking action against the CPC-PLA’s naked aggression and occupation of a sovereign landlocked state on the world’s roof.

For that matter, the main subsequent sufferer, Delhi, too misread the potential CPC-PLA diabolical scheming to suppress India and usurp her land at an opportune moment.

Much has been made out post the 1950 CPC-PLA’s Tibet conquest. Beijing went ballistic in its India-China border dispute as a “legacy of British imperialism” and attributing its origin to the Simla Convention which made the McMahon Line as the Himalayan boundary.

However, close scrutiny reveals that the “sole original ground of Beijing objections, so far as frontiers were concerned, was the line proposed for boundaries between” (sovereign) Tibet and (remote) China, not for India. In the eyes of the CPC-PLA, how could a sovereign Tibet border, claimed by sovereign China, be allowed to be passed on, or handed over, to India peacefully?

True to the CPC-PLA design, which couldn’t be deciphered by Delhi for seven decades, things haven’t changed one bit. Transformation and transfer of the Himalayan border sharing from Lhasa to Delhi in “superior” Han rulers’ eyes is as reprehensible and odious as it was before. If anything, the insatiable CPC-PLA appetite for Indian land doesn’t show any sign of abatement even today.

Sixty years after the Chinese invasion of India, the stage is set to install Xi Jinping as China’s lifetime ruler, even as the CPC-PLA’s hardline approach to New Delhi is more than visible. And any Indian thinking otherwise, ie a change of heart of 21st-century China’s leader, the “Second Mao”, will be under the delusion that India won’t lose any more land or will regain her lost sovereignty or that the Himalayan border will shortly be back to being a pristine and benign abode of peace and tranquillity as it existed during the days of sovereign Tibet as the neighbour of sovereign India from 1947 to 1950.

Unfortunately, whereas the sovereign Buddhist land of the lamas is unacceptable to the Hans, sovereign democratic Delhi as a neighbour, too, is an intolerable eyesore to the CPC-PLA dictator(s) of the 21st century.

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