The United States may have played a “critical” role in shaping the situation that led to the brief but bloody border war between China and India in 1962, an academic study has argued.
The Asian neighbours have been working to improve relations in recent months, following a deadly clash in 2020.
But the sensitivity of the border issue – one of the most intractable disputes between the two countries – can be traced back to the 1962 conflict, which left a profound fault line.
However, a peer-reviewed study by an Indian academic published earlier this year said “policies pursued by the United States and the Soviet Union during the late 1950s and early 1960s had a mix of intended and unintended consequences on India and China”.
“While the Soviets wanted to collaborate with India and China, the United States desired a clear split,” wrote Lakshmana Kumar, author of the April paper and a research scholar at the Jindal School of International Affairs in India.
The study drew on declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, State Department and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
Kumar said he had used “critical theory ... to examine the sudden downturn in relations between India and China in the late 1950s and the subsequent conflict of 1962, as well as the critical role played by the US in shaping the events”.
He cited a 1951 US State Department document that said “diplomatically, the US should endeavour to use Tibet as a weapon for alerting [India] to the danger of attempting to appease any Communist government”.
US government records released over the decades and a series of academic studies have confirmed that the CIA ran a covert programme in Tibet starting in the 1950s, including paramilitary training, intelligence gathering, propaganda work and the use of Indian soil as a staging ground.
However, the CIA’s covert actions and their scale “were never really revealed to their Indian counterpart until it was too late”, Kumar wrote in the study published in the Journal of Public Affairs run by the American multinational Wiley.
With the increase in US operations before and after the Dalai Lama fled to India following the 1959 uprising, the Chinese leadership “became convinced that [New Delhi] was conspiring to ‘seize Tibet’ by inciting rebellion”, Kumar argued.
“The US intelligence community was satisfied with the results of the Tibetan revolt in March 1959, as it caused enormous friction in Sino-India relations,” he wrote.
“The covert operations of the [US] achieved much more than they desired. It indeed led China and India on a collision course while further deepening the Sino-Soviet split.”
He added that the war with China forced India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to depart from his non-alignment policy to request military aid from Washington, “much to the satisfaction of the US”.
The 1962 war was a defeat for India that has cast a long shadow over the relationship between the two countries. It saw Chinese troops briefly occupying parts of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as southern Tibet, or Zangnan.
More recently, the deadly Galwan Valley clash of 2020 in a disputed region of the Himalayas put the relationship between the two countries into a deep freeze.
“There is clearly a school of thought in India right now that sees its historic conflicts with China through the lens of external manipulation, engineered for American rather than Indian benefits,” political commentator Arnaud Bertrand wrote on social media.
“Which of course, if such thinking were to become mainstream, makes the path to mending relations more intellectually viable: if our rivalry was artificially engineered against our interest rather than organic, why continue it?”
But he said the argument that the US was behind the war was “probably overstated” and described Nehru’s policy of establishing military outposts in disputed territory as the “direct” trigger for the war.
Kumar’s study came out at a time when Beijing and New Delhi were taking gradual steps to improve relations.
In August, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first visit to China in seven years, where President Xi Jinping told him that the border dispute should not define the relationship between the two countries.
His trip coincided with the souring of ties between Washington and New Delhi, driven in large part by US President Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs against India.
Modi told Xi that India and China were both pursuing strategic autonomy and their relations “should not be seen through the lens of a third country”.
Although Kumar characterised Tibet as the “root cause” of the Sino-Indian conflict, his study did not discuss whether the US was involved in the 1959 Tibetan uprising.
In a book published in March, the Dalai Lama noted that some of the fighters who helped him escape from Lhasa that year were from a CIA-backed Tibetan guerrilla force led by Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang.
But the Dalai Lama said he only “later ... came to know” of the organisation’s links to the CIA.
“The United States had become interested in Tibet as part of its concern to stop the spread of communism after the end of the second world war,” he wrote.
Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s late brother, was among the key Tibetan figures who worked with the CIA through the 1950s and 1960s. But he wrote in his 2015 memoir that “the Americans ... just wanted to stir up trouble, using the Tibetans to create misunderstandings and discord between China and India”.
“Eventually they were successful in that. The 1962 Sino-Indian border war was one tragic result.”
In September, another study co-authored by Kumar and two others was published in the international affairs journal India Quarterly, calling on New Delhi and Beijing to draw lessons from the 1962 conflict.
“[India] must remain vigilant against external influences that may seek to exploit Sino-Indian disputes for their own interests,” the paper said.
“China, on the other hand, needs to acknowledge the heavy price it paid in initiating the conflict despite being conscious of the ‘imperialistic conspiracy’ in Tibet.” -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
