Nehru taken for a ride by Chinese

WASHINGTON: In what could be seen as a possible obstacle to the growing ties between India and China,  a recently de-classified paper of the CIA has said that the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was consistently taken for a ride by the Chinese in the months and years prior to the 1962 war.

The top secret documents of March 1963 were approved for release only in may 2007. The declassification of documents pertaining to several aspects of domestic and international politics has been seen by the current CIA brass as a part of a new transparency as also providing a glimpse into the thinking and workings of the nodal intelligence outfit.

One set of documents called the Cesar-Polo-Esau Papers deal with Communist countries notably China and the erstwhile Soviet Union and three sections of which are devoted to an analysis of the Sino-Indian relations leading up to the 1962 debacle.

One of the major points of contention of the CIA is that the Chinese Prime Minister Zhou en Lai (at the time going by the spelling of Chou en Lai) consistently impressed upon Nehru that Peking (Beijing) had no territorial ambitions and that the maps that the Chinese were suing to portray vast tracts of Indian territory as theirs were 'old' maps from the Kuomintang era that had no time to be revised.

"The Sino-Indian dispute, as we see it, did not arise as a function of the Sino-Soviet dispute" the CIA said in its analysis in 1963.

According to the CIA analysis the developments between 1950 and late 1959 were marked by Chinese military superiority which, combined with cunning diplomatic deceit,  contributed for nine years to New Delhi's reluctance to change its policy from friendship to open hostility toward the Peiping (Beijing) regime.

"It emerges that above all others Nehru himself - with his view that the Chinese Communist leaders were amenable to gentlemanly persuasion - refused to change this policy until long after Peiping's basic hostility re-think his China policy, Nehru continued to see a border war futile and reckless course for India," the CIA analysis said.

"His (Nehru) answer to Peiping was to call for a strengthening of the Indian economy to provide a national power base of effectively resisting an eventual Chinese military attack.

"In the context of the immediate situation on the border, where Chinese troops had oocupied the Aksai Plain in Ladakh, this was not an answer at all but rather an implicit affirmation that India did not have the military capability to dislodge the Chinese," the CIA maintained.

"Chou En-lai, in talks with Nehru in 1954 and 1956, treated the Chinese old maps as representing Peiping's "claim" but, on the contrary, as old maps handed down from the previous mainland regime which had 'not yet' been corrected" the analysis has said.

"This provided the Chinese Premier with a means for concealing Peiping's long-range intention of surfacing Chinese claims at some time in the future (when there would be no longer any necessity to be deceptive about them) while avoiding a dispute with the Indian Prime Minister at the present," the CIA reasoned.