pmaitra
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1962: How China lost the battle for hearts
Read full article by By Ajai Shukla and Sonia Trikha Shukla: Broadsword: 1962: How China lost the battle for hearts
Read full article by By Ajai Shukla and Sonia Trikha Shukla: Broadsword: 1962: How China lost the battle for hearts
Peering out of her window in the early morning light, Phurpa saw two lines of soldiers, in battle fatigues, moving cautiously down the twin spurs that led down to Sangti. At first she assumed they were Indians but, as they came closer, she realized that they walked differently, more spread out and weapons at the ready. Even when they were in plain sight and she could see their Chinese features, the awful reality took some time to sink in: the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was here in Sangti. The Indian Army was gone. Nobody knew, or was ready for, what might lie ahead.
Forgotten in the shame of 1962 are the stories of the Monpas of Monyul; the Membas of Menchuka and the Mishmis of Walong. These are the only Indians who have lived under foreign occupation since independence.
The PLA had come prepared to fight, and also to win hearts and minds through a coordinated, made-in-Beijing, public relations campaign. This was uniformly implemented, down to the last phrase, across all the areas that they occupied in 1962. Our research across the Tawang area; in Menchuka, and in Walong and Kibithoo in the eastern corner of Arunachal Pradesh, finds locals recounting exactly the same phrases that the PLA soldiers used while dealing with the people of NEFA.
In the confusion of defeat after the Namka Chu battle on Oct 20, 1962, as Monpas fled Tawang on the heels of the army and the administration, it was easy to be overtaken by the fleet-footed PLA patrols. The Monpas who were caught, and those who stayed behind because they were too poor, old or infirm to leave, found the Chinese giving them a uniform message. Tashi Khandu, who went on to become an MLA in Arunachal Pradesh, stayed on in his village, Kitpi. According to him, the Chinese would regularly say, "Our fight is with the Indian government, not with the people of Tawang. Look at you and look at us: we are the same people."
There seemed to be little recognition, or at any rate acknowledgement, amongst the PLA soldiers and apparatchiks, of the bitter anti-Communist feeling amongst the Buddhists of NEFA (and Chinese ingress was almost entirely in Buddhist areas). With the Monpas having actually seen the Dalai Lama pass through the villages of Tawang after entering India at Khinzemane in March 1959; and after hearing first-hand from Tibetan refugees about the PLA's brutal subjugation; there were few Monpa buyers for the PLA's simplistic thesis that the Chinese and the Monpas were one people.
But the Chinese --- who favourably contrasted the Monpas' cheerful cooperation with the sullen resentment that they continued to face in Tibet after the 1959 revolt --- believed they were making headway in winning hearts and minds. During the period of occupation, the PLA's young soldiers routinely offered to help locals till their fields, harvest the crop, and even gifted them clothes. Leaving a vessel full of water on the doorstep of an elderly Monpa was another PLA tactic.
Even as the Monpas subconsciously rejected these gestures, there was admiration for the discipline that the PLA displayed, especially when contrasted with the unseemly flight of the defeated Indian Army. The Chinese would always dress smartly, and they would never ask the locals to work as porters, something that the Indian Army of that time regarded as a natural privilege. Although most of the Chinese soldiers were very young, not a single case was recounted of misbehaviour with Monpa women. Anything taken from the locals was scrupulously paid for.
Such steadfastness from a people who had experienced Indian administration for barely a decade, and who had very recently been abandoned, did not occur by accident. Its stemmed from India's restrained and sensitive non-interference with local tradition, a policy backed by Nehru himself, his powerful tribal affairs advisor, Verrier Elwin, and a superb cadre of officers that was organised in 1953 into the Indian Frontier Administrative Service. The sophistication of this policy is reflected in an entry in Elwin's diaries, which remarks on Nehru's belief that this frontier was not necessarily India, but it could be made so.
That belief has been vindicated. The People's Republic of China continues to struggle in Tibet, the underlying reason for China's military attack in 1962. Notwithstanding India's military defeat, Arunachal is today a full-fledged and enthusiastic Indian state and the only one amongst the Seven Sisters of the northeast that has never had a separatist movement. In 1962, the Chinese guns spoke, scattering the Indians. But the people of NEFA spoke too, and they have won India the war.
