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A lesson from Mao, courtesy of my father

 


Written by Vikram S Mehta |

Posted on July 6, 2020, at 3 h 08 min 53 s


Chinese President Xi Jinping. (File photo)

I am not an expert in China. And I certainly cannot add to the wisdom already expressed in these pages on the Sino-Indian border crisis. But I had, in a very narrow sense, a side view of this conundrum. It has been a staple of our family table conversations for decades. So motivated by the reflection that the past can offer some, although imperfect, benchmarks for the future and that we should read nothing but biography because it is history without theory, I would like to share some personal thumbnails.

My father, Jagat Singh Mehta was a diplomat and as far as our foreign service recognizes his specialization, he was considered a sinologist. Directly or indirectly, he has been involved with China for most of his professional life.

Directly, he was part of the Indian delegation in 1960 who sat opposite their Chinese counterparts for six consecutive months to collect and compile historical data in support of the border claims of the respective governments. The 600-page Indian report was presented to Parliament in 1961. Obviously, these discussions did not have the impact that everyone hoped for when the two countries went to war in October 1962. Almost immediately afterwards, in 1963, my father was assigned to the Indian mission in Beijing. I remember we lived in a big, ugly block of a house. There must have been at least 25 rooms in the house, but we were advised to limit our family conversation to only three rooms. The rest of the house was reportedly tapped. We had eight Chinese servants, they were all spies and didn’t pretend to be anything but that. Our movement was restricted and we were followed everywhere. It was exciting for us children to live among the ghosts and to know that perhaps much of what we said was recorded by someone in the back of the Chinese government.

But I suspect my father was on the brink. He returned forever from banquets to a meal of dal and chawal. Indeed, Chinese hosts used to deliver anti-Indian speeches before dinner. He had to go out to protest, leaving a banquet of more than 20 dishes intact. I remember a time when he came back to say that he had just acquired the distinction of being the first diplomat to come out of a banquet organized by Chairman Mao.

One day he was summoned to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the middle of the night to receive an ultimatum that India should remove some yaks and demolish bunkers at the border. Or else… It was in 1965 and the Indo-Pakistan conflict was in full swing. My father advised Delhi not to react. He said the threat to open a second front was a bluff and nothing more than an assertion of diplomatic support for Pakistan. He said it right and was praised for his judgment by Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. The congratulatory message is hung on the wall of our house in Udaipur.

On another occasion, my father, who was back in Delhi, received a call to be informed that the Chinese had dispatched a plane to recover two of their diplomats who had been expelled by our government in response to the treatment of our officials a few days earlier. The cultural revolution was at its peak and the Chinese had accused two of our diplomats of spying. They had put these diplomats on a jumping flight from Beijing to Hong Kong and at each stop, crowds at the airports had subjected them to verbal abuse and sometimes physical humiliation. My father must have already erased his lines because I remember having unequivocally informed him of the appellant that if the Chinese plane were to pierce Indian airspace, he would be shot down. The Chinese hijacked the plane to Kathmandu.

My father considered Maos China to be a disruptive force. He believed that Mao was determined to stir up the ideological polarities of the Cold War to bring the developing continents of Latin America, Africa and Asia (the villages of the world) to surround the developed continents of Europe and North America (cities). Mao supported Che Guevara’s strategy in Latin America, the anti-colonial revolutions in Africa, the embargo of the Naxalites and OPEC on the supply of oil, all for this purpose. He was not interested in any form of detente.

My father saw Deng Xiaopings China in a different light. Deng, too, was motivated by great aspirations for power, but sought to realize them through policies that were grounded in the rules-based framework of the post-WWII multilateral system. My father thought that the Sino-Indian border problems could have been legally resolved during the Deng era. What they were not was because of the demands of our domestic policy.

I suspect that my father would have regarded President Xi Jinpings China as cut off from the Maoist mold. He allegedly argued that President Xis ‘aggressive and expansionary Belt and Road strategy was comparable to Maos’ policy of polarizing the world between the haves and have-nots. That China’s brutal actions to change the status quo in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and now the LAC region are a contemporary reflection of Maos’ efforts to overthrow the established international order.

One can only speculate on the reasons why President Xi decided to start the crisis with India. But if he really thinks like Mao, he may have made the strategic calculation that given the weakness of the Indian economy, a conflict with India would be a low-risk way of diverting attention from its vulnerabilities. interior.

I know that my father would have recommended to India to find a diplomatic solution to the current imbroglio. No one wins conflict. But given his experience in Maoist China, he would also have insisted that our velvet glove of diplomacy now cover a resolute iron fist.

Author is President and CEO of Brookings India

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