A new Cold War in the Indian Ocean
Neville Maxwell has already written a book: India’s China War. There have been other books too. What gave you the idea to write a book called China’s India War? That they (previous books) were all wrong! The war was not provoked by Jawaharlal Nehru’s forward policy at all. The Chinese had other things they were more concerned about. We have to remember that in those days China was a very closed country. We knew very little about what was happening inside China and in the late 1950s, Mao TseTung (now Mao Zedong) had pushed his Great Leap Forward, which was a complete disaster — it led to the death of 30-40 million people — and there was chaos in the country. Mao was almost on his way out. And he was at his lowest point since the Communists seized power in 1949.
If you want to re-consolidate your power — and many strong leaders have done this — you find an outside enemy everyone can unite against. India became the thing that Mao could use to unite the party, the military, and the government, because in 1959, India had given sanctuary to the Dalai Lama. There was this border dispute, true. But back in the 1950s it was not a big issue. The Chinese did not even have proper maps for the border. It’s only around 1959 that the Chinese begin talking about the unresolved border issue and that sort of thing.
If you look at what happened in October 1962, there’s no way that the Chinese could have carried out such a massive attack, well-coordinated from the west to the east, without years of preparation. It doesn’t make military sense. And the foreign policy was announced in November 1961 so that was a year before the war broke out. The Chinese began preparing in 1959 so that India could be “taught a lesson”.
There were other reasons — it was not only because of Dalai Lama. In the 1950s, India was the main voice for the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. India initiated the 1955 Bandung conference. The whole concept of Panchsheel — and that language was certainly not Chinese — was initiated by India.
Mao wanted China to become the leader of the Third World, as he called it. And in order to become that it had to dethrone India from its famous position as the leading voice for the developing world.
If you look at what happened after 1962, Mao succeeded and initially bounced back to power. He still had a few enemies left that he had to get rid of. Therefore, he launched, in the late 1960s, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Internationally, China became the great supporter of revolutionary movements all over the third world and was seen as such, even by people in India, the Naxalites. And India’s position on the international stage was reduced considerably. Nehru died a broken man two years later. And India never really regained the position it had held in the 1950s. Nearly six decades later, do you think the idea of One Belt, One Road initiative is a repeat of that — China asserting itself through other means? Yes, of course. But China has changed! In the decades between the 1960s and the 1980s, China exported revolution. Now it exports consumer goods. On a massive scale. China has become a world economic power. And if you are a world economic power, you also become a world political power. And then you need military power to protect your position and the assets you have created. How should we see China’s relationship with the countries around India — Bhutan which seems internally to be reviewing its relationship with China, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives? What I can see is the emergence of a new Cold War in Asia. And it is specifically and more precisely, in the Indian Ocean. Because that’s where the interests collide. I’m not talking about an armed conflict yet — and it may not come to that. But all China’s oil imports come through the Indian Ocean. The import of minerals from Africa go through the Indian Ocean. Also the exports to Africa and Europe go through the Indian Ocean. For the first time in 600 years, China has entered the Indian Ocean. The last time they were there, was in the 15th century when Cheng Ho (Zheng He) led warships across the Indian Ocean. But after that, China withdrew. China never had a navy — not till recently. Now for the first time, they are developing a blue water navy. Naturally, that is causing concern. It is entering a region where many other powers have interests. China has set up its first military base overseas in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, ostensibly to fight piracy. But there are not that many pirates left there! In the Indian Ocean, the United States has its most important overseas military base in Diego Garcia. India accepts that.
Now China is courting small, vulnerable island states in the Indian Ocean: Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius… and they are moving there in a big way, with economic cooperation and military assistance. We don’t know what will happen in the Maldives… this is causing concern. Some would say there is a kind of informal alliance emerging in the Indian Ocean. It is not necessarily against China. But it says: “Something is happening here, we have to watch this carefully…” And then of course, you have India, Japan, the US, Australia, Singapore.
A couple of years ago, I was in Port Blair. And I was reading the morning newspaper. An American naval ship was visiting Port Blair. And I read in the newspaper that they were there to “help the Indians develop a technique for shipwrecks”. And in return, the guys in the Indian Navy were teaching the American sailors “to play cricket”! So I thought to myself: “I’m not buying this. Shipwrecks and cricket? nah…This is about something else.” China has settled land borders with all countries except Bhutan and India. What’s the mystery? China settles its border with other countries when it needs strategic advantage. And they cannot separate China’s border policies from its domestic policies and its regional, and global ambitions. We saw the same thing happening with North Korea in the 1960s when North Korea started moving too close to the Soviet Union, so the Chinese claimed the Paektu Mountain. It had nothing to do with the Paektu Mountain — it had to do with the relations with North Korea. They had a border war with the Soviet Union in 1969 over some islands in the Amu river. It had nothing to do with the island; it was just China’s way of telling the rest of the world : “We can defeat those Soviet revisionists too”.