Navendu Sharma
PATNA: The Lok Sabha was warned of China’s impending invasion of India much before Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is said to have rebuffed his Chinese counterpart Chou En-lai in 1960 “when he was visiting and appeared ready to settle the (border) issue”, as written by AG Noorani in his recently-released book.
According to a book China Strikes’, authored by a member of the first Lok Sabha from Bihar, Satyanarayan Sinha, Nehru was warned as early in 1952 of threat from China. The book was first published in 1964, and has a foreword by General KS Thimayya, Chief of Army Staff (1957-61). The author had started writing the book, in his own words, “in the death cell of Ranchi prison in India”. He had also published “The Chinese Aggression” in May, 1961, again with a foreword by General Thimayya. To quote the author ad verbatim from the book, “As long ago as June 11, 1952, in a speech in the Lower House, I told the Prime Minister and my countrymen: “I wish to give you a warning. A time may come when the Chinese are going to attack India. We must be prepared for it and must prepare our defences accordingly.”
As it turned out, on October 20, 1962, Chinese troops crossed the Indian frontier in the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). Sinha had placed on the table of the House some Cominform maps showing large tracts of India marked as Chinese territory. He underwent an eight-month-long investigation by the Privilege Committee of the Lok Sabha on the charge of faking the maps, before he was vindicated. Sinha had the right credentials to speak on the issue. He had got a doctorate from a German university with the help of Maxim Gorki. Then he spent two years in Russia training with the Comintern and learnt much about the terrain on the northern side of the Himalayas and about the Chinese, as well as the Russian, army training methods. He also served as a member of the Indian diplomatic community for a few years and was also an interpreter during Krushchev’s meeting with Nehru. Sinha had based his startling revelation in the Lok Sabha on a copy of some secret Hitler-Stalin protocol he had obtained in East Berlin in 1947. The protocol divided the British Empire. In Prague, a little later, he obtained a Cominform-sponsored Soviet map of Asia, which was different from other international maps of post-war years. The entire North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) was shown as Chinese territories. He observes in the book, “In the post-Stalinist era, Peking (now Beijing) considered that only she herself was entitled to acquire all the Himalayan regions, including those which Stalin had coveted since 1940 for the Soviet Union.” The author makes the point that “Peking government from the very start had taken full advantage of the Indian ignorance of Chinese designs”. This comes from a man who was imprisoned during Sino-Indian war. His book shows that Nehru turned out to a gullible victim to China’s Machiavellian designs.
