Foreign News: Battle for the Himalayas

We have had from time immemorial a magnificent frontier—the Himalayas. It is not quite so difficult a frontier as it used to be; still it is very difficult . . . We are not going to tolerate any person coming over . . .

—Jawaharlal Nehru

The New Delhi communique was brief and noncommittal. Red China and India would meet in Peking next month, at In dia’s request, to discuss “outstanding matters in regard to Tibet.” There was nothing in the wording to show Indians themselves that Prime Minister Nehru had grave complaints to lay at his neighbor’s door. Among them:

¶Armed Red Chinese squads are striking across India’s northeast frontier into Assam, pillaging isolated villages, raping women and seizing livestock. On at least two occasions, the Chinese invaders fought pitched battles against Indian border guards before withdrawing. ¶Red Chinese thugs are waylaying and robbing Hindu pilgrims on the way to the headwaters of the sacred river Ganges, at Gangotri, on India’s northern border. ¶ Mao Tse-tung’s warlords are grabbing the bulk of India’s trade with Tibet, beating, murdering and exacting protection money from Indian merchants who try to compete.

¶Communist agents from Red China are infiltrating India itself. Indian troops have caught 300 in the past year. Some said they were deserters from the Chinese army. Others, disguised as lamas, beggars and traders, were riding brashly into India on the Tibetan caravans. Red Chinese troops cross regularly into Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, cutting timber, surveying the passes, making contact with local Communists.

The Infiltrators. This relentless and growing infiltration of the border states now constitutes a military threat to India’s hard-won freedom. The border states will not let Indian troops come in to guard their passes, and neither their own forces nor the mountains can keep the infiltrators away. Furthermore, the terrain is perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare, with deep-cut gorges and forests to hide the guerrillas, and hillside villages which can serve as listening posts, strongpoints, and arms depots.

Already, Nepal has a strong and fast-expanding Communist movement, which somehow gets plenty of arms and ammunition through the Himalayan defiles. Communist guerrillas launch periodic forays against Nepalese troops and government depots, and have twice tried to blast their way to power in bold but premature uprisings. Bhutan, which lies a full nine days’ mule trek from the nearest Indian trading post, is heavily infiltrated by Red Chinese regulars who patrol across the border at will. And in Sikkim, a resident wrote to the London Spectator, “It will be only a matter of time before [the Chinese] start a movement for incorporation with Tibet.”

This “movement” is the political threat to India. The border peoples—the lean-shanked Nagas, the scrappy Gurkhas, the gentle aboriginal Lepchas—are closer in racial appearance to Tibet than to India; they do not like Indians at all, and might well respond to sly Communist demands for “independence.”

Moreover, China never ratified the 1913 Simla Convention, which roughly established the Himalayan mountain range as the Tibetan frontier and awarded “the southern watershed” to India and the border states. Red China’s new school maps show much of India’s borderland as Chinese territory.

The Preparations. In the three years since Red China swept into Tibet, it has transformed the ancient Forbidden Land into a stronghold; its “liberation army” now numbers an estimated 60,000 men. Since the Korean armistice, the Chinese have moved reinforcements south towards Tibet and India.

Some 4,000 troops of the Eighteenth Red Army line the vital Chumbi Valley between Bhutan and Sikkim. They are quartered in twelve barracks, and up to 50 new barracks are being constructed. To the west, Chinese garrisons at Gartok, trade center of western Tibet, and six other strategic locations threaten the Indians in Kashmir.

The Chinese are building all-weather, heavy-traffic roads across the mountains, linking their garrisons; they are opening Lhasa, the Forbidden City, to China proper and to Russia. Peking newspapers now reach Lhasa in ten days; before Mao they took several months. One 1,400-mile road starts from Sinkiang, at the edge of Russia, and curves through Tibet parallel to the Indian frontier (see map). From this strategic cord, side roads will point toward every major pass of the Himalayan mountains. The Chinese Communists are also laying down airfields in western Tibet, using Russian engineers and Russian equipment on all these projects.

The Defenders. For the record, India is not alarmed by the Communist threat. “We are delighted,” says the External Affairs Ministry, “to see our backward neighbor making so much progress.” Nehru has told the Indian army not to fortify the frontier itself, so as not to provoke the Chinese. “It’s bloody rotten for us that the British never feared any danger from Tibet,” one Indian officer grumbled last week. “They would have fortified all the passes and we could just move in and make tea. As it is now, if we even build a blockhouse on the border. Mr. Lung [meaning the Chinese] would think we were showing bad intentions.” The officer pointed down the slope of the Himalayas. “That is why,” he said, “we have to stay back there.”

But Nehru is perfectly willing to organize the defense of India “back there”—an hour or so from the border. He gives the Indian army remarkable autonomy in such “military matters.” When Lieut. General Thimayya was in command in Kashmir, for example, he dynamited every border pass within reach without bothering to check with Nehru. And “back there” today, India’s generals are quietly mustering the bulk of the Indian army in a great line of camps that ranges, arclike, from Assam to Kashmir. Travelers report that Indian “militia” are everywhere, maneuvering in the field, crowding trucks on dusty mountain paths, riding the narrow-gauge railway that puffs up to the resort town of Darjeeling.

Left Hook. In the event of war, India’s generals do not expect the Chinese to strike their main blow across the Himalayas—although they are taking no chances. They expect instead a Chinese left hook through Burma and Assam towards Calcutta. Short of war, the generals agree that infiltration is the danger.

To meet this danger, the Indian army put a 190-man mission into Nepal, and built the first military road from India to Katmandu. The first dusty Indian jeep sped along this road last week, a symbol of India’s belated concern for her great mountain frontier.