India became Independent on 15 August 1947. And, it was only good two yearslater,ie. on 01 October 1949, that the Chinese Communists with MaoTse Tung, at their helm,came to power in China. When the British left the Indian sub-continent in August 1947, Tibet was an independent country and there was a trading mission in Lhasa,the capital of Tibet. It was a failure of our foreign policy and that of the then Hon. Prime Minister of india, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, that we failed to formulate & conclude a treaty of peace & friendship with Tibet and protect its territorial integrity, like what we did in the case of Sikkim & Bhutan. There is no denying the fact that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was an able leader and one of the greatest statesman of his time. However, like all humans, he too had his failings. He failed to appreciate, the astuteness & intellectual brilliance of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the then Home Minister of India, when he as early as on 04 November 1950 informed Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, in writing,that Communist China was a potential threat / enemy to India, and to watch out. Unfortunately, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in his exuberance as a world statesman and in his over enthusiasm to cultivate the Chinese, disregarded the venerable Sardar%u2019s advice, for which India paid a heavy price in 1962, and continues to pay even today.
RE:Independent Tibet
by kedem kemorah on Mar 24, 2008 12:20 AM Permalink
Well said. Indians are very poor at politics & that is why we fail to score at every international fora whenever India's interests are involved. Pakistanis are far better at it, leave alone China. Our politicians are only good at scoring brownie points against each other within India. The moment they step outside the country, they make a fool of themselves, whether it is the Shimla Agreement or the Agra Summit.Why can't we clearly state that what is happening in Tibet is gross infringement of Human Rights by a totalitarian regime? China keeps harping on this to keep us out. It does not compare with Kashmir as it has always been a part of India before the Muslims came to India and made their religion the sole arbiter for seperating the original people of India. The Partition is incomplete without 100 percent population exchange. The same is not the case with Tibet which the expansionist and imperialist China has suo moto annexed. If Tibet was an integral part of China as the Chinese claim, then why resettle the plains Han Chinese in Tibet for upsetting the demographics by making the Tibetans a minority? Obviously, like the Xingian regions of the extreme West which is dominated by the non-Chinese Uighurs, Tibetan culture is far removed from the post-Mao Chinese one. After the Evil Empire had broken up in the 1990s, the biggest menace the world faces today is the Yellow Peril. The rest of world in general and India in particular will ignore this latest danger at its own peril !!
