|
Himalayan Blunder is no longer banned in India, but even today
there are unspoken rules within the army about openly reading or
discussing the book, because it contradicts the official version of the
India–China war written by its commanding officer, Brij Mohan Kaul, in
his book The Untold Story.
Dalvi’s book opens with the lines, ‘This book was born in the
prisoner of war camp in Tibet on a cold, bleak night.’
20
But its most
haunting line comes a few paragraphs later when he writes, ‘This is a
record of the destruction of a brigade without a formal declaration of
war.’
21
Himalayan Blunder is a story of the calamity of the border, and
the lengths men in power would go to enforce these absurd lines,
knowing well the human cost. But it is also a story about how truth is
silenced, and how in its place acceptable lies form the basis of a national
history.
The Naga officer pointed to the paragraph in the book where Dalvi
discusses his return to India:
We deplaned and were greeted with correct military protocol,
tinged with chill reserve. It was only later that I found out that
we had to clear ourselves of the charge of having been
brainwashed . . . Without a doubt, the prisoners had been
declared outcasts. Apparently, we should have atoned for the
past national sins of omission and commission with our lives.
Our repatriation was embarrassing as the national spotlight
had again been focused on the Sino-Indian Conflict.
22
A real accounting of the 1962 war has never occurred, at least not in
India. For such an accounting would also lead to the important question
of Indian culpability, and require the country to reflect on its ongoing
propaganda practices.
In the early 1980s, Karunakar Gupta, a London-based scholar who
was studying the India–China border, presented his thesis that the
ongoing strife at the border stemmed entirely from the suppression of
facts, distortion of history, possible alterations of maps and withholding
of official documents relating to the frontier. He also argued that there
was a deliberate and even official incitement of nationalistic emotions in
India to justify the series of political blunders that led to the 1962 war.
As a young student in London, Gupta had started researching the
origins of the McMahon Line, the border between British India and
Tibet. The legal basis for the McMahon Line rests on the negotiations
between British, Chinese and Tibetan representatives, which took place
in Simla between 1913–14. The precise nature of what transpired in
these negotiations remains unclear, and the validity of the Anglo-Tibetan
agreement they produced is dubious. During the meeting, the Chinese
refused to sign or ratify any of the conditions discussed.
Aitchison’s Treaties, a collection of British Indian treaties published
in 1929–33, reported that the Simla Convention was of no political or
international significance because of China’s refusal to sign it.
23
A few
years later, the same volume was reprinted with very different and
altered information, this time portraying the negotiations that led to the
Simla Convention as significant and binding. Gupta discovered both
versions of Aitchison’s Treaties, and proved that the British Indian
government, mainly on the advice of Sir Olaf Caroe, a British
administrator and the governor of the North-West Frontier Province,
arranged for the records to be falsified by republishing the original
volume with different information. Gupta argues that the documents
were forged in an attempt to confuse the matter, perhaps to gain some
leverage in future negotiations, but later the falsified version became an
accepted fact.
24
The newly independent India inherited a fabricated
border, and Gupta believed that Prime Minister Nehru was misled by his
reliance on the forged British papers about the McMahon Line. Gupta’s
argument and conclusions brought into question India’s historical claims
along the Sino-Indian border and reveal the danger of flawed and forged
maps—the same maps India went to war over in 1962. Gupta, almost
twenty years after the 1962 war, wrote that ‘Distortion of history,
suppression of facts, and withholding of official documents relating to
the frontier from independent historians have been as much responsible
for the aggravation of the Sino-Indian border conflict as the deliberate
and even official incitement of “nationalistic” emotions in India.’
25
Gupta continued to write, research and publish his work, but was
increasingly isolated from state-funded institutions. The British
diplomatic historian Sir Alastair Lamb foresaw Gupta’s future in his
1976 review of The Hidden History of the Sino-Indian Frontier:
‘[Gupta], indeed, is one of the very few Indian scholars to have
published in India, observations on the nature of the Sino-Indian
conflict, which disagree in fundamentals with the received official
opinion enshrined in the writings of Dr. S. Gopal and his cohorts. For
this, he may well win neither fame nor fortune in his own country, but
elsewhere his courage and integrity deserve every commendation.’
26
Gupta died in the 1980s, and as predicted, while he was admired
overseas, he never received recognition in India. Students of history or
current affairs do not teach, cite or reference his scholarship. Today,
much of Gupta’s thirty years of meticulous research has simply
disappeared.
If Gupta is to be believed, much of the Sino-Indian Frontier, the
war, the current militarisation of the region and the increasing
nationalistic jingoism might all be premised on a lie fabricated by a
departing colonial power and forged maps.
I
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
