BEIJING: For anyone who thinks of history as perhaps lacking in adrenaline-pumping excitement, the exertions of renowned historians like Parshotam Mehra will come as an eye-opener.
The scholar with a “long-time fixation” for the Sino-Indian border dispute and the broader relationship between Asia’s two major land powers brings to his study the same rigour and diligence that characterises forensic investigators at a crime scene.
As part of his decade long research into the controversial Indo-China border issue, Mehra has been to “the crime scene”, so to speak: he has travelled extensively along the disputed border area, from Tawang in Kameng division to Walong in Lohit division in current-day Arunachal Pradesh as he wanted get first hand information by visiting these contentious places. Interestingly, he has pored over countless historical treaties and other documents, looking for ‘clues to the whodunnit border mystery’!
It is with the perspective gained from such extensive academic and field research that Mehra, a former Professor of History and Central Asian Studies at Panjab University and author of several books on the Sino-Indian border dispute, states categorically that “China’s claim to Arunachal is very shallow”.
In an exclusive interview to DNA, Mehra said, “To my mind, China’s claim even to Tawang doesn’t really hold as the people living in the area are not Tibetans, but Monpas, a tribal community that is akin to the Tibetans. Before McMahon, the then Foreign Secretary sat for the 1913-14 Simla Conference, he made very sure, after the best possible surveys he could conduct, that these were not Tibetan areas”.
Is there any validity to the charges levelled by historians and commentators, including Neville Maxwell, that McMahon resorted to forgery at the Simla Conference, and that even the Viceroy had disowned his actions? “This is unsubstantiated,” asserts Mehra.
“I do not wish to join issue with Neville in public, but the harsh truth is that most of what he says on this issue is unsubstantiated”.
Mehra points to historical documents that establish that Ivan Chen, the Chinese plenipotentiary at the conference, did in fact put his initial on the Draft Convention and the Sketch Map on April 27, 1914, but that subsequently the Chinese government withheld its signature to the Final Convention.
“And there is no basis to say that McMahon was repudiated by his government while on the contraryhe was rewarded for all that he had done”.
Even so, concedes Mehra, the Indian approach in the 1980s— to go over the border dispute negotiations “sector by sector” rather than discuss a “package deal”— was “stupid and short-sighted”.
In retrospect, “I feel India should not have gone in for this sector-by-sector approach.” In contrast, the approach of the Chinese side has been much more “astute,” in a manner that is intended to maximise its gains, he acknowledges.
How can the dispute be settled now? “To my way of thinking,” says Mehra, “it has to be some sort of a deal across the table the substance of which has been talked about for 50 years now—India renounces its claim to Aksai Chin, and China yields its claim to current-day Arunachal Pradesh.
The harsh reality, he notes, is that “you can’t throw them out of Aksai Chin; they can’t throw us out of Arunachal Pradesh.”
Should leaders in India therefore be preparing their people to reconcile themselves to the prospect of losing the territory in Aksai Chin in order to hammer out a settlement?
“I think if you come to some sort of a reasonable settlement, the Indian people will accept it. There could still be some dissent — people crying from the rooftops and breast-beating but there is no way out except a compromise.
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