• Genesis of Sino-Indian conflict
  The fact is that after 1947, India instead of reopening and renegotiating the boundary with China, took it for granted that the line as placed on various maps by the British was the real boundary. The Indians further insisted that the Chinese must first accept the line as such before any meaningful talks could take place. It is a strange phenomenon of history that a country which had struggled for its independence from colonial rule was not prepared to accept the point of view of its neighbours who had suffered equally at the hands of the same colonial power. This unsettled boundary and the Indian actions to push it further north ultimately led to the 1962 war between China and India.
• The perennial unkept promises
  Rulers and the ruled

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Genesis of Sino-Indian conflict
By Bashir Ahmad
The writer, a retired Brigadier, works for the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, Lahore.

The political advisor to Indian Prime Min ister Atal Bihari Vajopayee, Parmod Mahajan, has alleged that it was China that started the 1962 border war by attacking India, and that it was still in occupation of large areas in the northwest and northeast of India. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It would be instructive here to recall the sequence of events during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century which ultimately resulted in India's China War in 1962.

The British, like a typical colonial power that they were, always wanted more and more lands under their imperial sway. In the southeast and southwest, this advance came to a halt on the shores of the Indian Ocean. However, in the northwest and northeast, there were no insurmountable barriers except the Karakorams and the great Himalayas, both of which, along their foothills, had vast tracts of land on which the boundary could be placed anywhere by a powerful state, depending on its moods and imperialistic considerations.

As far as the northwestern boundary of British-India was concerned, Ladakh was part of the narrative. Historical records show that till the 10th century, Ladakh was part of Tibet. Later, it became an independent kingdom, but in the 16th century it was forced to become a tributary of the Mughal Empire. During the 19th century, it was once again considered a part of Tibet, which in turn was under the control of China.

Ladakh was captured by Raja Ghulab Singh of Jammu in 1834 and forced to become a tributary of the Sikh Durbar at Lahore. After the Treaty of Amritsar was signed between the British and the Sikhs in 1846, the former tried to demarcate the boundary between Ladakh and Tibet, but there was no response either from Lhasa or Canton. The Chinese, however, brushed aside the proposal by saying, "It would be best to adhere to the ancient arrangement and it would prove far more convenient to abstain from any additional measures for fixing them."

Expansion
By the middle of the 19th century, the continuously expanding limits of the British colonial empire in the subcontinent had reached beneath the foothills of the great Himalayas in the north. Earlier, Assam had been included in the empire. To the east of Bhutan, the boundary ran south of the foothill. Between this boundary and beyond the foothills, a 60-mile wide strip of mountain and dense jungle was considered "No-man's land." It was thinly populated by the local tribes which were quite different ethnically and religiously from those living south of the foothills.

From 1911 onwards, the government of India, once again, started pursuing a deliberate policy of pushing the northeastern boundary further north over the 60-mile wide strip of "No man's land." In Assam, a determined effort was made to incorporate areas under British control which had all along been recognised and accepted as Chinese territory (the present Arunachal Pradesh). Due to a deteriorating internal situation, China's authority suffered a serious setback in Tibet in 1912 (though by 1910 China had felt strong enough to reassert its authority in Tibet).

This gave an opportunity to the exponents of the 'Forward School' in the government of India to push the boundary further north. In fact, it was seriously thought that keeping China away from Tibet would serve the imperial interest, although China's nominal suzerainty in the area could be accepted.

In pursuance of this better policy, a conference was called at Simla in 1914. The British delegation was led by Sir Henry MacMahon, who by now had risen to the post of Foreign Secretary of the Government of India, and who was a member of the boundary mission to Kabul in 1893. The other two participants were Tibetans and Chinese delegations.

The British tried to persuade the Chinese delegate, Ivan Chen, to accept the division of Tibet into Inner and Outer zones; although both would be under the nominal suzerainty of China. The Chinese, however, had already learnt their lesson by accepting a Russian suggestion earlier of the division of Mongolia into an Inner and Outer Mongolia and eventually losing Inner Mongolia. The British suggestion was, therefore, vehemently opposed. Ivan Chen did, however, put his initials on a map showing the new boundary (MacMahon Line), but it was done on the clear understanding that initialling and actually signing the document were two separate acts. The conference finally broke down when the Chinese delegate refused to sign the convention.

The conference, therefore, produced no agreement to which China could be said to be a party. Before finally leaving India, MacMahon admitted this himself. "It is with great regret that I leave India without having secured the formal adherence of the Chinese government to a tripartite agreement (India, China and Tibet)." Throughout the proceedings of the conference, the Chinese delegate repeatedly emphasised that China would not recognise any bilateral agreement between Tibet and Britain.

That notwithstanding, MacMahon proceeded to negotiate secretly with the Tibetans. It is on record that during these negotiations, MacMahon changed the boundary line three times, although after every change, the line was placed further north. The line, which later came to be known as the MacMahon Line, was drawn on two map sheets at a scale of eight miles to an inch (one inch area on the map being eight miles on the ground). The line was so thickly drawn on the map that its width covered an area of nearly four miles on the ground. No delimitation of the boundary was done and no demarcation followed. No principles were laid down either on which the delimitation was based - a normal practice when drawing a boundary between two independent states.

As far as the British were concerned, by drawing the MacMahon Line on the map they had pushed the boundary 60 miles further north at the expense of the Chinese and without their knowledge. The boundary was now, as far as the British maps were concerned, running along the crest of the Himalayas in Assam. It followed no watershed principle; in fact, it cut across many rivers, including the great Brahmaputra.

Radcliffe Award
The drawing of this boundary was a foretaste of what was to follow 33 years later through the Radcliffe Award in 1947, which has remained a major cause of abiding bitterness and frustration for the people of Pakistan. There is ample evidence on record to show that MacMahon had assured the Tibetans that the line was only provisional and open to modifications in their interest. MacMahon, one of the empire builders, emerges out of the Simla Conference as a liar as far as his superiors were concerned and a street bully for the Tibetans and the Chinese.

During the next couple of decades, the MacMahon Line was virtually forgotten. As in Ladakh, there was no forward movement of troops or the administration officials to physically occupy the line. It was a boundary drawn and confined to two map sheets only. The 1929 edition of Adhesion's treaties says about the MacMahon Line that the Chinese government had refused to permit its plenipotentiary to proceed to full signatures. In 1935, the British decided to revive the matter by publishing a new edition of Adhesion's Treaties which could quietly replace the 1929 edition. The new edition was published and passed off as the 1929 edition. All copies of the original edition were recalled and destroyed. The only copy which escaped destruction is reported to be lying in the Harvard University Library – a living proof of British perfidy, duplicity and fraud.

The act was repeated in 1947. Some years after partition, a marked map showing the boundaries of the original Radcliffe Award (quite different from what was announced in August 1947) was discovered in the records of the Government House, Punjab. It had been left behind by the last British Governor Jenkins.

The amazing part of the story is that the fraudulent edition of the Treaties was made the basis of its claim by India during discussions with the Chinese in 1960 by Prime Minister Nehru, who never missed an opportunity to lecture the world on the virtues of morality, justice and fairplay. There is ample evidence to suggest that in 1947, India assured the departing British that it would pursue an even more forward policy than that followed earlier. It was this forward policy by India in the northwest and northeast which forced the Chinese to react in 1962. It is amazing that India in its talks with the Chinese on the MacMahon line has always ignored the fact that the line had been secretly agreed only with the Tibetans, while the Chinese had always repudiated it, repeatedly declaring during the Simla Conference in 1914 that they would never accept any bilateral agreement between Britain and Tibet.

The Communists in China got rid of the US supported Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Between 1950 and 1962, the Indians thought that China's economic difficulties were so grave that it would not be able to overcome them and thought the opportunity was ripe for launching massive armed attacks along the entire Sino-Indian border. On October 5, 1962, the Indian Ministry of Defence announced the establishment of a new corps under the Eastern Command for the sole purpose of dealing with China and the appointment of Lt. Gen. BM Kaul as its new commander. On October 12, Nehru declared that he had issued orders to "free" what, he termed the areas "Invaded" by Chinese troops. On October 14, the then Indian Defence Minister Krishna Menon, called for fighting China "to the last man and the last gun." On October 16, upon returning to New Delhi from abroad, Nehru immediately summoned a meeting of high-ranking military officers to accelerate combat preparedness. On October 17, Indian troops in both eastern and western sectors simultaneously began heavy artillery attacks on the Chinese. On October 18, the Indian Ministry of Defence declared that the Chinese had been "driven back to miles." On October 20, the Indians started attacking all along the frontier which forced the Chinese troops to retaliate.

he fact is that after 1947, India instead of reopening and renegotiating the bound ary with China, took it for granted that the line has placed on various maps by the British was the real boundary. The Indians further insisted that the Chinese must first accept the line as such before any meaningful talks could take place. It is a strange phenomenon of history that a country which had struggled for its independence from colonial rule was not prepared to accept the point of view of its neighbours who had suffered equally at the hands of the same colonial power. This unsettled boundary and the Indian actions to push it further north ultimately led to the 1962 war between China and India.

Before the armed conflict, the Chinese had made repeated efforts to convince India that as this boundary had been unilaterally determined by a colonial power, without the participation of either India or China, it would be renegotiated in a spirit of mutual understandings and give and take. India, on the other hand, always took the unreasonable stand that China must first accept that the MacMahon Line was the real boundary before discussions could take place.

The Indians, after conducting five nuclear explosions, feel strong enough to challenge China and are confident of forcing it to accept their version of the MacMahon Line. Pakistan's future relationship with India must be based on the clear understandings that India, unless it changes its attitude, will remain a menace to peace and security in South Asia. It is an expansionist power which, given the opportunity, will act more highhandedly than the British could dream of doing during the 200 years they were in the subcontinent. — (The News)

The perennial unkept promises
Rulers and the ruled
by Henry Jayasena

Every few years the hapless voters in this country have been used to voting in a new government. There was of course an exception of the now famous Seventeen Year rule by the last government - thanks to the cunning, sagacity, wisdom or whatever one might like to call it - of President J. R. Jayewardene.

People usually get tired of any given government at the end of five or six years - however good, bad or middling it has been. Strangely enough some of the most vociferous campaigners against the last Govt. were the very people who had been hugely benefited by it in the way of new business ventures, travel, new roads, buildings, eating, houses, casinos and what not, due to the policy of 'free economy' it adapted.

For the first time in our post-independence history, money became the most important thing in life, to most people. That was the ugliest thing that happened to our country in the recent past. People who thought of nothing else but money, used their money to kill and maim other people, to rob, to cheat, to hire thugs, to influence politicians - in fact for any and every kind of mayhem.

Money
One need not be an economist to realise that money be gets money, and that one starts requiring more and more money for the slightest thing. So many people start earning more and more money and they start having a ball. At least they think they do. Any economist, politician or even any idiot will tell you that it is not everybody who is clever at making money. Most ordinary people - I almost said most good people - are quite happy to do an honest job of work (the degree of 'honesty' of course varying according to given circumstances) and earn what is called a salary each month, and quietly 'manage' their own affairs. The only excitement in their staid lives is that of applying and obtaining as many 'loans' as possible in the form of housing loans, distress loans, flood relief loans, drought relief loans, bicycle loans (car loans, being only a dream, to be realise in some other fortunate birth) etc.

To digress, just a little bit, I remember applying for a distress loan some thirty odd years back when I was working as a clerk in the Public Words Dept. In fact, I was just getting married and being short of funds as usual, I had to find some way out for the wedding expenses etc. Nuptial loans not being available at that time, I applied for the only loan that was available - the distress loan. In the column that required specific information about the form of 'Distress', I had jotted down 'To meet expenses of my marriage'.

The Chief Clerk of the PWD at that time, one Mr. Sittamparampillai if I am not mistaken - a nice old soul who always liked a good joke - called me up and we had quite a nice chat.

'So, Jayasena, you are going to get married - at last?'

'Why Sir! I am only thirty,' I quipped.

'I say Jayasena, in Jaffna a man of thirty would be well married and having several children too...!'

'What a pity, Sir..' I managed to say at which Mr. S. laughed his usual raucous laugh. Then he looked at me sharply from over the rim of his glasses.

'So Jayasena, I see that you are in distress...?'

Mr. S. sprang a rather long drawn, well accentuated question.

'Not at all, Sir, I am quite okay..' I managed to say amidst my confusion.

'Oh, is that so? But then you have applied for a Distress Loan..?'

'Oh, that, Sir, that is to meet some urgent expenses...'

'Of your wedding..?'

'Yes, Sir..' I managed to say as brightly as I could.

"My dear man, I must point out to you that marriage, according to any religion or law, is not a distress. On the other hand it is considered a blessing!

It is a divine gift to man and woman....'

Mr. S. would have said much more perhaps. He rather liked his own rhetoric. But I had fled away. Needless to say I did not get the loan. Anyway the 'adventure' was worth it.

Salary
To get back to the point, most people in this country live on a salary, a wage, casual pay, daily earnings - and when they can no longer work - on a pension. In more fortunate and more affluent countries, we know that some people, including migrants, live on a state given dole. They say that the dole is quite enough to live a fairly decent life, without having to beg, borrow or steal. Personally I am against that kind of laziness even though it may be state sponsored. Like most people in this country, I would like to earn a reasonable wage, or receive a reasonable and liveable pension and live with it, with dignity. And this is where my world and the lives of many others like me crumble.

Ask any average wage earner of the state or even of the private sector whether it is possible to live with any measure of dignity with whatever they earn. I repeat, the average wage earner. Not of course the top brass of the highly competitive private sector and the pampered, favoured, hired and fired bureaucrats of the public sector.

The people who come to power, who call themselves 'The Government' soon forget the hapless wage earner. The pensioner, the jobless - in short 'the struggling mass of voters' who brought them to power. They will live all kinds of concessions to the businessman, entrepreneur, the tax dodgers and all kinds of swindlers, but they will not lift a finger to help the burden of the poor man. When I say poor man, I mean the wage earner, daily paid worker, the under employed and the unemployed and of course the pensioner. They promise all kinds of things before they come to power, but forget all of them the moment they sit in the comfortable seats of power.

17 years
Even today, after the vociferous and jubilant change of Govt. after the so-called black rule of Seventeen Years the situation is much the same, if not worse. The postage stamp that was one rupee is Rs. 2/50 today. Useless talking about the bread that was promised at Rs. 3/50. All the consumer goods, all the household goods, all food items, All milk powder, vegetables, fish, meat - all have gone up in price by leaps and bounds. The price of petrol and diesel are beyond the reach of even the owner of a scooter or a motor cycle. Electricity, water, telecom services have all gone up beyond our wildest dreams.

I cannot speak for others. Let me speak for myself. I am a very ordinary middle class person. Of course, some watching television might mistake me for a rich and self-centred person. This is far from the truth. My monthly pension, even after the recent rather grumpy increases is Rs. 3329/50 per month. In the bad past (during the days of the 'Black' rule), it was a little over Rs. 3000/-. As against the present increase in my pension let me compare some of the consumer bills of 1993 and 1998:

Electricity - 20.04.93 - 261 units - Rs. 786.25, 20.04.98 - 274 units - Rs. 1426.20. Telephone - 01.04.93 - Rs. 602.60, 31.03.98 - Rs. 1064.76. Water - 05.03.93 - Rs. 39.37, 03.03.98 - Rs. 107.50.

Pension
And so I find that while my pension has increased by a little over Rs. 300/-, the increase on electricity, telephone and water alone amount to over Rs. 1170/-! I will not speak about the increases on food, clothing, travel and other necessary items for living. I must say I am little more fortunate than the average pensioner in that I have a little extra income from such sources as acting, writing and an occasional paid lecture etc. But, of course as time goes on and I become older I will not be able to indulge in any of these extra activities and will be forced to rely solely on my pension.

Most wage earners and most pensioners have no extra income except for their wage or pension. We get no house rent, income from produce of land, other investments etc., except perhaps a very small amount as interest on very limited savings. We are quite well aware that one simple thing like the removal of a cataract can cost whatever little savings we have managed to salvage. A major illness of course will be disastrous.

The elderly
Old people need more medicine, selective food etc. and this costs money. In the good old days there were social service officers, visiting nurses etc. to enquire after the well-being of old persons, to advise young mothers, even to help out in family disputes. Alas, those days are only a dream.

Is it not possible for a Govt. to provide some kind of relief to the unemployed, to the sick and bedridden, to old people living lonely and pathetic lives? The most essential feature in this kind of assistance as far as I can see, is that such assistance should be given without destroying the dignity of the individual. I am aware that relief such as food stamps, destitute allowances, subsidies, etc., are given to certain categories of citizens in this country. I am also aware that most of the time such help is given with the maximum amount of fuss, inconvenience and humiliation to the recipient.

Is there no way of providing some measure of subsidised services to old and needy citizens such as pensioners whose income is static but are forced to live up with the ever rising cost of living? We are aware that in some countries the older citizen are given a lot of concessions such as free travel in public transport, free entry into parks, museums, cinemas, theatres etc., I believe in certain countries they are also given fuel at subsidised rates, subsidised telephone and electricity rates etc.? (Having no reliable statistics with me, this could be wishful thinking too!)

Anyway, if these increases go on like this, without the Govt. paying any heed to the difficulties, the average family faces in paying the monthly bills, soon some of us will have to manage with a kerosine lamp like in the days when we did not have electricity. Cooking too will have to be done on a kerosine-burner, firewood also being quite expensive.

We will have to manage without a telephone, and as public transport is extremely difficult to manage, specially for old folk like me, we will have to stick at home after disposing whatever old jalopy we possess. Still I hope we will have the strength of muscle and mind to walk upto the polling booth, when the time comes....