If China was a friendly country and its claim on Tibet was acceptable to us, where was the question of granting the Dalai Lama and his entourage asylum in India to establish and run a parallel government? We even posted a foreign ministry officer to Dharamsala to represent India in the durbar of the Dalai Lama. If we believed in the justness of the Chinese claim over Tibet, then the maximum we should have done was granted asylum to the Dalai Lama with a small entourage (not thousands of followers) on humanitarian grounds, but permitted no political activities.
Alternatively, we could have objected to the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, albeit in soft, diplomatic language, insisted on retaining our mission in Lhasa as per the 1906 convention with Tibet and agreed to and ratified by China; protested when they forced Tibet to surrender its sovereignty and permitted it to maintain only regional self-governance in 1951, and in 1956 when they began to deny them self-governance, eventually forcing the Dalai Lama to flee. Granting political asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959 would then have been justified. As a result, the Chinese would have certainly remained hostile to us on this point, but respected us for what we are.
Instead, in 1955, while relinquishing the rights and privileges India had enjoyed in Tibet from the times of Colonel Younghusband's expedition in 1904, Nehru declared: "Free India has no wish to continue with any imperialistic rights or privileges."
