“No, my son! Never forget that Chairman Mao went on the Long March. He fought the Japanese and then Chiang Kai-shek. He established the People’s Republic of China. Just look at the experience and history of the country! How could Nehru even think to compete with Mao Zedong? We are nothing compared to China, and our foreign policy since independence has been a disaster!”
The outburst was just one more of the periodic railings against a then-monolithic Congress dispensation that had ruled India for the many decades before the emergence of a viable alternative. My father was immersed in public life, an erstwhile cadre of a socialist-Communist organization founded on the bulwark of a grass-roots constituency in the states of West Bengal and Kerala in the halcyon days long before Mamata Banerjee stormed the seemingly impregnable Red Bastion with her peculiar method of angry mass-mobilization and consigned the comrades to political oblivion.
Given the antecedents, it was no surprise then that the contours of his social and political identity and accompanying mesh of resentments should in the same breath include an admiration for the spectacular success of the agrarian Chinese version of Marxism-Leninism as well as a deep aversion for the first prime minister of independent India, what the dapper man stood for, and the manner in which his individual brand of domestic and foreign politics was viewed by tens of millions as a mere extension of an inflated personality.
Through such jaundiced eyes, therefore, Jawaharlal Nehru could do little right, and was condemned by a significant section of public opinion as the principal architect of the series of political and economic misadventures since 1947 which culminated in the military disaster of 1962.
With a view to infusing objectivity to the study of our shared modern history, the credit for attempting some rehabilitation of Nehru and his spectacular political and social vision must go to the determined scholarship of recent years, which seeks to assess events based on the facts at hand and, in the course of its scientific endeavours, overturn many a stereotypical notion relating to the first disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.
The reality, however, whether justified or not, is of an anger which festered, like an open sore, across the span of India and which is, interestingly, shared by millions of citizens even today, whether they are the now-aged members of the independence generation who faced the vicarious humiliation of defeat at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, or those who suffer an inherited resentment nourished on the hurt further exacerbated at home by parents and grandparents. My father’s pique was representative, is real, and therefore must serve as the anchor, trigger, and pivot of the story that we seek to now narrate.
“Dear comrades! Today, I hereby declare the formal establishment of the People’s Republic of China and its Central People’s Government!” And so it was that amidst an ocean of fluttering red, at exactly 3:00 PM Beijing Time on October 1, 1949, after the national anthem had been played, Chairman Mao Zedong pronounced this simple message to the nation from the top of the Tiananmen Gate. Arguably the most momentous political act of the twentieth century, the portly dictator, tall and beaming, was transformed into a beacon for the struggling polities of the post-colonial era.
But did this actually portend the beginning of an era of fruitful co-operation and partnership amongst young nations eagerly emerging from the wilderness of centuries of rapacious colonial and imperial plunder?
Perhaps it is the inherent tragedy of human existence that we forever seek to dominate, overpower, and rule. And as an outcome of this desire, it is modern geopolitics that attributes the “Palm and Five Finger” policy to Chairman Mao Zedong which at its heart considers Tibet, as represented by China’s “right palm,” as an inalienable part and possession of the People’s Republic and the five protruding “fingers” as the peripheral and disputed territories of Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Arunachal Pradesh.
Similar to the spirit that prevailed in the United States of a century ago, this was perhaps China’s version of a Manifest Destiny that required the newly-minted Communist nation to “liberate” those regions considered as an integral part of the Middle Kingdom.
On October 6, 1950, shock formations of the People’s Liberation Army, battle-hardened and experienced from years of fighting foreign occupation and the subsequent civil war, crossed the Jinsha River into the remote mountain fastness of Tibet. It was inevitable that a country of six million people subject to a theocracy built on the foundations of Lama Buddhism would fall prey, ironically, to the imperialist ambitions of a young and vibrant nation that had been similarly devastated by the economic, social, and political policies of ruling elites.
Decisive action in the region of Chamdo incapacitated the Tibetan army stationed there and hastened the decision of the administration in Lhasa to capitulate. The “Agreement of the Central People's Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet,” a classic example of Orwellian bombast and otherwise known to the world as the Seventeen Point Agreement, was swiftly foisted upon a nation which would soon begin to suffer the consequences of systematic “sinification.”
What the Third Reich failed to implement in Stalin’s Soviet Union as its raison d’etre, Mao achieved with a speed and success as astounding as it was alarming. Overnight, the Chinese, previously crushed and murdered in their millions, had become the face and harbinger of a new era of absolutist hegemony.
One wonders whether a new world order could not have been forged in the hope of a post-war world. What are the historical and ethnic compulsions of the Middle Kingdom? What are the dynamics and markers of civilization that drive the Chinese nation in its relentless pursuit of world dominance? Does the oldest civilization of the world, representing the single longest continuum of complex human existence, have an unrequited, unfulfilled Manifest Destiny? Who, at their core, are the Chinese?
Join me, dear reader, in examining the various facets of the story as it unfolds.
Sumit Basu is a freelance contributor based in India.
