A long series of events triggered the Sino-Indian War in 1962. According to John W. Garver, Chinese perceptions about the Indian designs for Tibet, and the failure to demarcate a common border between China and India (including the Indian Forward Policy) were important in China's decision to fight a war with India.
Friendly relations Numerous changes occurred in the late 1940s, with the independence of the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1947, and the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. One of the most basic policies for the Indian government was that of maintaining cordial relations with China. The Indian government wished to revive its ancient friendly ties with China. When the PRC was declared, India was among the first countries to give it diplomatic recognition.
After coming to power, the PRC announced that its army would be occupying Tibet. India sent a letter of protest to China proposing negotiations on the Tibet issue.Mohan Guruswamy, Mohan, "The Great India-China Game", Rediff, 23 June 2003. The newly formed PRC was more active in posting troops to the Aksai Chin border than the newly formed Indian republic was. India decided to take moves to ensure a stable Indo-Chinese border. In August 1950, China expressed its gratitude to India's attempts to "stabilize the Indo-Chinese border". To clear any doubts or ambiguities, Prime Minister Nehru stated in Parliament in 1950 that "Our maps show that the McMahon Line is our boundary and that is our boundary...we stand by that boundary and we will not let anyone else come across that boundary". China expressed no concerns at these statements.
By 1951, China had extended numerous posts in Aksai Chin. The Indian government, on the other hand, concentrated its military efforts on stopping Ladakh from being taken by Pakistani troops and did not establish itself in Aksai Chin.VK Singh resolving the boundary dispute On various occasions in 1951 and 1952, however, the government of China expressed the idea that there were no frontier issues between India and Chinese Tibet to be worried about.
Later, in September 1951, India declined to attend a conference in San Francisco for the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan because China, which India viewed as an important factor in this treaty, was not invited because of its status as an international pariah. In the coming years India strove to become China's representative in world matters, as China had been isolated from many issues. India vigorously pressed, since the start of the 1950s, for the PRC to be included within the UN.
The People's Liberation Army defeated the Tibetan army in a battle at Chamdo in 1950 and Lhasa recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet in 1951. The Indian army asserted control of Tawang at this time, overcoming some armed resistance and expelling its Tibetan administrators. In 1954, China and India concluded the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence under which India acknowledged Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. Indian negotiators presented a frontier map to the Chinese that included the McMahon Line and the Chinese side did not object. At this time, the Indian government under Prime Minister Nehru promoted the slogan Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai (India and China are brothers).
In 1954, B. R. Ambedkar in the Indian Upper House, said that by "allowing the Chinese to take possession of Lhasa, the Prime Minister has practically helped them bring their border down to the Indian border... Aggression might well be committed by people who are always in the habit of committing aggression." Ambedkar further urged for alliance with western world and said, "is better for us to align ourselves with what we call the free nations if we believe in freedom".
On 1 July 1954 Nehru wrote a memo directing that the maps of India be revised to show definite boundaries on all frontiers, where they were previously indicated as undemarcated. The new maps also revised the boundary in the east to show the Himalayan hill crest as the boundary. In some places, this line is a few kilometres north of the McMahon Line.
Beginning in 1956, the CIA used Indian territory to recruit Tibetan guerrillas to fight Chinese troops, with a base in Kalimpong, India.Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, "The CIA's Secret War in Tibet", University Press of Kansas, 2002, pp. 96-97 The Indian public was outraged when it learned in 1958 that China had built a road between Xinjiang and Tibet through Indian territory in Aksai Chin (historically a part of Indian state of Ladakh).
In 1956, Nehru expressed concern to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that Chinese maps showed some 120,000 square kilometres of Indian territory as Chinese. Zhou responded that there were errors in the maps and that they were of little meaning. He stated that the maps needed revising from previous years where such ideas were considered to be true. In November 1956, Zhou again repeated his assurances that he had no claims based on the maps.
Tibet disagreements According to John W. Garver, Nehru's policy on Tibet was to create a strong Sino-Indian partnership which would be catalyzed through agreement and compromise on Tibet. Garver believes that Nehru's previous actions (befriending China on such issues as war in Korea, the PRC's U.N. admission, the peace treaty with Japan and transfer of Taiwan to the PRC, Indochina, and decolonization and the Afro-Asian movement) had given Nehru a confidence that China would be ready to form an "Asian Axis" with India. Much misunderstanding between the two nations led to diplomatic spats over Tibet, with Nehru's move to accommodate the Dalai Lama overshadowing his other actions and opinions on Tibet, including the opinion that an armed resistance movement in Tibet would be suicidal and counterproductive. While China treated India's concerns with Tibet as expansionist, some in India claim that its concerns were in fact sentimental and culturally-linked, as Buddhist Tibet had been under influence of Indian culture for many years.
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong was humiliated by the reception the Dalai Lama obtained in India when he fled there in March 1959. The Tibet disagreements heightened in the Chinese media, with Mao himself asking Xinhua News Agency on 19 April to produce commentary on unknown Indian expansionists operating in Tibet. Mao decided on 25 April to openly criticize Nehru for his Tibet policy:
Tensions steadily increased between the two nations when Mao implied that the Lhasa rebellion in Tibet was caused by Indians. On 6 May 1959, Mao published "The Revolution in Tibet and Nehru's Philosophy" where he accused Nehru of openly encouraging Tibetan rebels. This publication was evident of China's perception of India as a threat to its rule of Tibet, which became an underlying reason for triggering the Sino-Indian War. India had become the imperialist enemy, with Nehru and his "big bourgeoisie" striving to "prevent China from exercising full sovereignty over its territory of Tibet" to form of a buffer zone. On the same day, Zhou Enlai lashed out at Nehru's "class nature".
India continued negotiations about Tibet. According to the Indian official history, India wished to express goodwill to China and stop the claims of it having a hostile design in Tibet.
In August 1959, the Chinese army took an Indian patrol prisoner at Longju, which falls north of the McMahon Line coordinates drawn on the Simla Convention, signed in 1914, map (27°44'30" N), but claimed by India to lie directly on the McMahon Line. There was another bloody clash in October at Kongka Pass in Aksai Chin in which 9 Indian frontier policemen were killed. Recognizing that it was not ready for war, the Indian Army assumed responsibility for the border and pulled back patrols from disputed areas.
On 2 October, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev defended Nehru in a meeting with Mao. The Soviet Union's siding with Nehru, as well as the United States' influence in the region, gave China the belief that it was surrounded by enemy forces. On 16 October, General Lei Yingfu reported on Indian expansionism on the Thagla Ridge. On 18 October, the Chinese government approved the PLA's plan of a "self-defensive counterattack" against India because of its actions in Tibet.
However, Mao decided against further escalation because he feared that India would retaliate by permitting the U.S. to station U-2 surveillance aircraft on its territory.Chang, Jung and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (2006), pp. 568, 579. This would allow the CIA to photograph China's nuclear test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang. A few days after Kongka Pass, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai proposed that each side withdraw 20 kilometres from a "Line of Actual Control". He defined this line as "the so-called McMahon Line in the east and the line up to which each side exercises actual control in the west". Nehru responded with a proposal to turn the disputed area into a no man's land."The Shade of the Big Banyan" Time, 14 Dec. 1959.
Chinese studies of the 1990s still maintain that India was planning aggression in Tibet. Most Chinese scholars believe that the root cause of the war was India's plan to seize Tibet and turn it into a protectorate or colony of India. The official Chinese history of the war states that Nehru was planning to create a "great Indian empire". It was also insisted that there were right wing nationalist forces that influenced Nehru to pursue the goal of controlling Tibet. Zhao Weiwen, of the Chinese Ministry of State and Security, places emphasis on Nehru's "dark mentality".
China's policy on Tibet did much to heighten the conflict and tensions between the two nations. The perceptions of India as a capitalist expansionist body intent on the independence of Tibet to create a buffer zone between India proper and China were fundamentally erroneous. The negative rhetoric led to what Zhou himself called the Sino-Indian conflict. Because of these false fears, China treated the Indian Forward Policy of the 1960s, which India admits as a fundamental mistake, as the beginning of Indian expansionism into Tibet.
Border negotiations China's 1958 maps showed the large strip of Northeastern part of Jammu and Kashmir (the Aksai Chin) as Chinese. In 1960, Zhou Enlai proposed that India drop its claim to Aksai Chin and China would withdraw its claims from NEFA. According to John W. Garver, Zhou's propositions were unofficial and subtle. Zhou consistently refused to accept the legitimacy of India's territorial claims; he proposed that any negotiations had to take into account the facts on the ground. Zhou tried many times to get Nehru to accept conceding Aksai Chin, he visited India four times in 1960. However, Nehru believed that China did not have a legitimate claim over both of those territories and was not ready to give away any one of them. However, they had different opinions as to the legality of the Simla Convention which eventually led to the inability to reach a decision. Nehru's adamance was seen within China as Indian opposition to Chinese rule in Tibet, as China needed the highway through Aksai Chin to maintain an effective control over the Tibetan plateau.