China’s Psychological Tactics: Softening Up the Enemy Before the Storm
China had used the India–Pakistan war of 1965 to extend its growing influence in the Sikkim region. Chairman of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong’s strategy was to put more pressure on India. Mao wanted to tie India down in multiple arenas and make Delhi fight fires on many fronts so that China’s creeping into Sikkim would get a distracted, feeble response from an exhausted New Delhi. Indeed, the 1960s were a period when China instigated much trouble in India: there were insurgencies, first in Mizoram and then in Nagaland and West Bengal, all funded by China. There were constant skirmishes on the Sikkim–Tibet border and tension between the Indian government and the Sikkimese monarchy. There was uneasiness on the Doklam plateau.
These disparate events may seem unrelated, but the Chinese hand is the common thread that runs through them all. Mao himself needed desperately to distract his Chinese subjects from the terror that the cultural revolution had unleashed in the country. In China at that time a paranoid Mao was busy purging party leaders he viewed as threats. In this period, a deeply suspicious Mao formed an inner circle comprising his wife Jiang Qing, minister Lin Bao and chief of intelligence Kang Sheng to identify and purge dissidents and rivals. Deng Xiaoping, who was once a part of the circle of leaders, was targeted and Deng’s proclivity towards market-friendly measures resulted in his incarceration. He was sent to work as an ordinary factory worker and his son, Deng Pufang, was tortured, and thrown out of the window of a three-storey building. Pufang survived but was disabled for life.
Kang Sheng, who was given the mandate to carry out Mao’s orders, unleashed a reign of devastating brutality during this period. A number of people disappeared. Those who had fallen out of favour were paraded through the streets of China’s cities, with dunce caps on their heads and humiliating placards around their necks. With so much upheaval and internal turmoil, Mao needed to rally people behind him and there was no easier way to do so than by stirring up nationalist emotions. India was the perfect sacrificial lamb. In this chapter we go on a brief tour of the fires lit by the Chinese which the Indian government was fighting.
Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in Tashkent after the 1965 war left a void that was filled by Indira Gandhi. Adopting a fierce posture in the face of hostility came naturally to her, which meant that she was ruthless in launching pre-emptive strikes against her enemies, external and internal.
A month and four days into assuming the office of India’s prime minister in 1966, Indira Gandhi had to deal with an outbreak of a rebellion in the north-eastern state of Mizoram. The rebels were trained by the Pakistani army in camps inside East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and later sustained by China, which supplied wireless transmitters, medicines and funds through the Chinese consulate in Dhaka. 1 A few years later, the Chinese support would become more explicit, with Mizo rebels crossing over into China to train under the PLA.
On 28 February 1966, insurgents from the Mizo National Army (MNA) revolted against the Indian state, attacking Border Security Force and Assam Rifles garrisons in the districts of Lunglei and Champhai. By 2 March, fierce fighting had erupted in the state and the MNA guerrillas had overrun the Aizawl treasury and armoury. It was threatening to capture more ground and humiliate the Indian authorities. The Indian state had to respond soon but Indira Gandhi’s decision was not merely swift and harsh, it was unprecedented and brutal.
On 5 March, at about 11.30 a.m., four fighter jets of the Indian Air Force – French-built Dassault Ouragan fighters or Toofanis, as they were called, and British Hunters – took off from Tezpur, Kumbigram and Jorhat in Assam. Two of these jets would be flown by two young pilots, Rajesh Pilot and Suresh Kalmadi, who went on to become well-known politicians in the latter part of their lives. The jets took Aizawl by surprise, bombing the town. The next day, the bombings intensified, causing casualties and spreading fear. By the time the planes retreated to their bases, Aizawl was a mess. Four of the largest areas of the city – Republic Veng, Hmeichche Veng, Dawrpui Veng and Chhinga Veng – had been razed to the ground. Indira Gandhi didn’t hesitate to drop bombs on her own people to kill the Mizo insurgents. That was the first and, hopefully, the last time India would ever bomb its own people.
The bombing of Aizawl is a blot on our history and Mizoram observed a black day each year for fifty years on the anniversary of the bombing. As expressed by the sources interviewed, the incident revealed the new prime minister’s unambiguous preference for using force early on over dialogue to quell enemies. She had shown a ready instinct for using the military as a core instrument of resolving a crisis. In the process, she had begun to develop a much firmer, long-lasting relationship with the Indian army than her father or his ministers ever did. But while one challenge had been overcome, at least for the moment, a steady stream of others lay ahead.
In early 1967, Mao got an opportunity to fan a crisis in the lowlands of north Bengal, not too far from the location of Sagat Singh’s 17 Division in the neighbouring state of Sikkim. For centuries, agricultural land in the region had been largely owned by landlords, or jotedars, some of whom brutally exploited the peasants. Landowners would refuse to pay the peasants their dues, usurp land and belongings, harass women and children and drive ryots out of their homes. In 1967 a peasants’ council in Siliguri, north Bengal, declared its intent to enforce the redistribution of land. There was a simmering anger underneath the feudal surface. The epicentre of the labour uprising taking shape was a small village called Naxalbari, about 40 kilometres from Siliguri in the chicken’s neck that connected the larger part of India to its north-eastern part, which was also India’s Achilles heel in case of an attack by China to cut India off from its north-eastern states, as explained in the previous chapters.
In May 1967 Bigul Kisan, a sharecropper, 2 went to ask his landowner for payment of dues and was beaten up. In response a group of people rounded up the landowner and his men and lynched them with arrows, stones and spears. A few days later, Sonam Wangdi, the inspector of a police station, received an urgent complaint from a village called Jharugaon about some people who had been involved in forcible harvesting. He gathered a few policemen and rushed to the village where the local workers surrounded them. He was faced with an angry crowd that attacked the police. They showered arrows on the cops and within moments, Wangdi lay dead. His men, fearing for their lives, ran away.
Each day more such incidents would take place, marking the beginning of a violent communist movement in Bengal. Thousands of villagers armed with bows, arrows and spears rebelled against landowners and took over their lands and granaries. By the end of May 1967 the movement had blown into an armed uprising 3 that had taken its name from the village where it started – Naxalbari. The insurrection was led by fiery leaders such as Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal who dreamt of a Maoist revolution of peasants and workers far beyond this one district. In urban Calcutta, the movement fired up an entire generation, as an anonymous poet wrote on the walls of Calcutta: ‘Amar bari, tomar bari / Naxalbari Naxalbari’ (My home, Naxalbari / Your home, Naxalbari). The uprising challenged the validity of the state. 4
On 5 July 1967, the People’s Daily , China’s official newspaper, carried a gleeful editorial about India’s internal challenges titled ‘Spring Thunder Over India’. It read: ‘A peal of spring thunder has crashed over the land of India. Revolutionary peasants in Darjeeling area have risen in rebellion. Under the leadership of a revolutionary group of the Indian communist party, a red area of revolutionary armed struggle has been established in India.’ 5
A left-wing peasant revolution in a border state close to the Siliguri Corridor was just the kind of schism that China looked to exploit.
Predictably, Charu Mazumdar and his comrades were soon invited by Mao to China. Mazumdar and his colleagues Khokhon Mazumdar, Khudan Malick, Deepak Biswas and Kanu Sanyal soon set off on an arduous trek that took them through the forests of the northeast and the swamps of Myanmar to meet Mao, accompanied by a Mandarin-speaking guide sent by the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu who helped the four Maoists across Myanmar and Tibet.
When the chairman finally appeared before the Naxal leaders, they were enthralled. Mazumdar even coined a phrase: ‘Chiner Chairman, Amader Chairman’ (China’s chairman is our chairman). The comrades were given training in handling machine guns and automated rifles, lobbing grenades and planting anti-personnel mines. 6
The Naxal and the Mizo were not the only insurgencies that Mao supported. The Chinese had identified India’s northeast as an area where they could create a lot more trouble. In fact the Nagas were the first anti-government force in India to receive support from China. 7 Mao even encouraged a radical branch within the Communist Party of India to forsake the parliamentary path and take to the rebel road instead, which later resulted in a breakaway faction known as the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist). 8 The other outcome of Chinese mischief was India’s determination to nip in the bud the desire of autonomy of Himalayan border states. 9 This resolve was tested most strongly in Sikkim, where the Chinese were fishing in the waters of a troubled relationship.
As soon as Indira Gandhi assumed office in 1966, a long-standing desire of the associate kingdom-state of Sikkim was on the king’s mind. Palden Thondup had known Indira Gandhi for a long time and she even attended his wedding. He sought a change in the treaty Sikkim had signed with India in 1950. On the one hand, he enjoyed a cordial relationship with the Indian army, but on the other, he was sceptical about the growing powers of bureaucrats who had been posted as political officers in Sikkim. He had been asking for changes in the treaty which would give greater powers to the kingdom. Palden and Indira Gandhi were cordial, but he was aware of the iron fist of the new Indian prime minister. Moreover, since any change was unlikely before the ensuing elections in early 1967, he waited for the right moment to broach the treaty change with her. But in the summer of 1966, as Palden was biding his time, his wife, Hope Cooke, seen by many parliamentarians in India as a CIA agent – an assumption not based on any evidence – jumped the gun, fatally wounding their project of Sikkimese autonomy. Hope Cooke, disillusioned with the indifference with which her protests against India had been treated during the war of 1965, wrote an article in the Bulletin of the Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok. Titled ‘Sikkimese Theory of Landholding and the Darjeeling Grant’, the article questioned the legitimacy of the grant of Darjeeling district to British India in 1835. 10 She argued that Darjeeling was wrongly given to the British in the past by Sikkim and that it should now be returned to its rightful owner, the Sikkimese monarchy. In 1835 the Chogyal of Sikkim had gifted Darjeeling to British India on the understanding that a certain amount would be paid as annual subsidy to Sikkim. 11 Hope Cooke’s article couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Indira Gandhi’s political future was unsure. She faced stiff competition from rivals within her own party as she headed into the elections of 1967. 12 A headwind of anger and serious internal issues greeted her elevation as a leader. Despite edging out the older Morarji Desai through a secret ballot in internal party elections, Indira was ridiculed by more formidable and older parliamentarians for her inexperience. The economy had plummeted: a trade deficit of Rs 930 crore had sent the economy spiralling into crisis after the United States suspended aid to both India and Pakistan after the 1965 war. To make matters worse, the country was wracked by drought and food shortage after the rains had failed for two successive years. 13 Indira Gandhi couldn’t afford another crisis. Given that Hope Cooke was seen as an American agent by several newspapers and MPs in India, Indira Gandhi rushed to prove her credentials as an anti-imperialist leader. Under no circumstances would she entertain the Sikkimese monarchy’s pleas of renegotiating the treaty, especially not with China waiting to pounce.
But while the political wrangles and the issue over Hope Cooke exercised much of the media, the skirmishes along the border of Sikkim were going unnoticed. China’s aim was to keep up the pressure on Indian soldiers with occasional attacks along the border. There were a few incidents when Indian patrols and soldiers were even fired upon. Though Chinese aggression would be met with resistance, there was no aggression from India. Some of the border spats were patently ridiculous. Once, a group of Indian paratroopers, after an argument with the Chinese, decided to vent their anger by shedding their clothes and dancing naked before them. 14 The Chinese of course complained to the Indian defence ministry and the incident was laughed off.
But Sikkim wasn’t India’s only protectorate where the Chinese were instigating trouble. In 1966, another incident occurred in Sikkim’s backyard involving the most prized piece of real estate in the region called Doklam or Zhoglam (in the Tibetan language), or Donglang in the Chinese language – a plateau that lay to the east of Sikkim in Bhutan, an Indian protectorate. Doklam is just south of the Chumbi valley which itself juts into the Siliguri Corridor in India. A Chinese presence in Doklam could help them control the crucial Jampheri ridge that overlooks the Siliguri Corridor.
In October 1966, when Chinese soldiers entered the Doklam plateau in Bhutan, India strongly disapproved of the move and responded immediately, leading to furious diplomatic exchanges between India and China. 15 The Chinese government accused India of concocting ‘stories about “intrusions” into Bhutanese territory by Chinese herdsmen and patrols’. 16 China wanted to test whether India would take up the cudgels on behalf of its protectorate. Chinese actions may also have been a ploy to test Bhutan’s faith in India’s capability to defend its interests.
Indira Gandhi didn’t take long to lash out at a press conference, asserting strongly that India was committed to protecting Bhutan. She maintained that since Bhutan was India’s protectorate state, the security of Bhutan was India’s responsibility. China protested immediately. The official news agency Hsinhua (now Xinhua) shot back, calling India’s moves despicable and charged India with interference in Bhutan’s affairs under the guise of protection.
But the insurgencies and the volatile Sikkim–Bhutan–Tibet borders weren’t the only sites of Chinese aggression. In a bid to whip up nationalist sentiments Mao was going after Indians inside China. In 1967, reports from the Indian consul revealed that a Sikh gurdwara in Tientsin (now Tianjin) had been desecrated and a Parsi temple in Shanghai had been occupied by the Red Army. 17
In another reported incident, an argument that broke out between an Indian dairy owner and his Chinese employee ended in the two coming to blows. The local newspapers spared no effort in featuring this incident which drew the ire of local labour unions that forced the dairy owners to give in to their employees’ demands. Most Indians who lived in Shanghai were dairy owners and were badly affected.
The Chinese authorities also started a headcount of Indian citizens. The census search found that twenty-four Indian citizens were in China and most of them were of mixed parentage. 18 The Chinese claimed the rest of the Indians in that country to be citizens under their law and the Indian government duly withdrew their Indian passports to save them from persecution.
China was also increasing the gap of military capability between itself and India. In 1964 China had conducted nuclear tests sending shock waves in India. On 27 October 1966, when a Dong Feng-2 medium range ballistic missile with a 12 kiloton nuclear warhead flew dangerously over human-inhabited areas before successfully striking its target in Lop Nur in the desserts of Xinjiang, it was evident this was China’s way of announcing its intentions to the world. 19 A year after exerting a significant influence over India in the 1965 Indo-Pak war, China flew a nuclear missile, which was an ominous sign of things to come for an India that had no nuclear capability. China had already conducted its first nuclear test in 1964, a year before the war and, on 17 June 1967, it would test its first thermonuclear device, conducting more nuclear tests in a shorter time span than any of the other nuclear powers.
These seemingly small, unconnected events – the Naga and Mizo rebellions, the Naxal uprising, the Sikkimese monarchy’s attempted revolt, the stand-off at Doklam – signalled the deep-seated insecurity that China harboured and were all portents of the battles of Cho La and Nathu La that were around the corner.