Particularly egregious was Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2003 surrender of India’s Tibet card. Vajpayee went so far as to use, for the first time, the legal term “recognize” to accept what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” That opened the way for China to claim Arunachal Pradesh (three times the size of Taiwan) as “South Tibet” and reinforced China’s view of territorial issues: Whatever area it occupies is Chinese territory, and whatever territorial claims it makes must be settled on the basis of “mutual accommodation and understanding.” Vajpayee’s blunder compounded Nehru’s 1954 mistake in implicitly accepting, in the Panchsheel Treaty, China’s annexation of Tibet, without securing (or even seeking) recognition of the then-existing Indo-Tibetan border. In fact, under the treaty, India forfeited all of the extraterritorial rights and privileges in Tibet that it had inherited from imperial Britain. As agreed in the pact, India withdrew its “military escorts” from Tibet, and conceded to the Chinese government, at a “reasonable” price, the postal, telegraph, and public telephone services operated by the Indian government in the “Tibet region of China.” For its part, China repeatedly violated the eight-year pact, ultimately mounting the trans-Himalayan invasion of 1962. In short, China used the Panchsheel Treaty to outwit and humiliate India. Yet, just this summer, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government sent Vice President Hamid Ansari to Beijing to participate in the treaty’s 60th anniversary celebrations. [Good information, more at the link . . . ]
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 06:14:29 +0000
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