Tibetan roots of 1962 Sino-Indian war

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http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-01-260314.html

Tibetan roots of 1962 Sino-Indian war
By Abanti Bhattacharya
Mar 26, '14

Indian news media are awash with reports of journalist Neville Maxwell's disclosure on his website of the first part of the classified Henderson Brooks Report on the 1962 India-China war. The timing of the leakage is intriguing, given India's general election around the corner. Quite expectedly, the Indian government has blocked the report, written by two Indian army officers in 1963. There were apprehensions it would expose the role of Jawaharlal Nehru - India's first prime minister - in triggering the war and causing a humiliating defeat for India.

In fact, Maxwell's 1970 book India's China War is already drawn from the Henderson Brooks Report, which the author had access to. The book squarely blames Nehru's "Forward Policy", which placed outposts beyond India's border with China, for the 1962 war. And it is imperative to point out that if Neville Maxwell's polemical account on the 1962 war is largely responsible for distorting the truth behind the conflict and spreading deep apprehension in Indian minds, other scholars, mostly foreign, are equally at fault for treating Maxwell's account as authoritative. They have not only allowed the distortions relating to the responsibility for the war to prevail, but more critically, blurred the truth on the Tibet issue, the real cause behind the 1962 conflict.

Beijing hailed its invasion of Tibet in 1950 as the "liberation" of Tibet from the "double oppression" of the imperialists and the feudal Lamas. But the occupation of Tibet was driven by the security imperatives of China, to integrate its vulnerable periphery into the national geography. Tibet was, in fact, the only area that could not be "provincialized" by the last of the Qing emperors, as was Xinjiang in 1884 and Taiwan in 1887, when Western imperialism in the post-Opium-War era pushed the dynasty to bring its periphery under direct Chinese rule.

Tibet escaped such a fate thanks to the "Great Game" of the 19th century, and, more particularly, the British aim of using Tibet as a buffer between its domains and advancing czarist Russia.