MOHAN GURUSWAMY:
The roots of our problem with China go back a couple of hundred years when Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met in July 1807 on a great raft moored on the river Niemen at Tilsit in east Prussia to conclude a treaty of partnership against the British, thereby beginning 'The Great Game.' This expression was first found in the papers of Arthur Connolly, a British artillery officer and adventurer whose Narrative Of An Overland Journey To The North of India chronicled his travels in the region in the service of the British empire. As the Russian empire began its eastward expansion, which many felt was to culminate in the conquest of India, there was a shadow contest for political ascendancy between the British and Russian empires -- The Great Game.
Napoleon's waterloo at Waterloo did not see a let-up in the fervour with which the game was played. The Russian longing for a colonial empire and a warm water port did not diminish any and so the game continued. The British response to meet the Russian threat was to establish a forward defensive line in the northern region so that a Russian thrust could be halted well before the plains of Hindustan.
This called for making Afghanistan and Tibet into buffer states and for fixing suitable and convenient borders with these states. At various times, several such lines were proposed.
The most notable of these was the 1865 Ladakh-Tibet/Sinkiang alignment proposed by W H Johnson, a junior civilian sub-assistant with the Survey of India. This line was to link Demchok in the south with the 18,000 feet high Karakorum pass in the north, but it took a circuitous route beyond the Kuen Lun mountains and thus included the barren and cold Aksai Chin desert.
It is believed that Johnson may have had some personal reasons for doing this. He was an Indian born 'Englishman' and in the subtle social graduations that guided an individual's destiny under the Raj, there were limits to where he could go. Johnson could not aspire to either a commissioned rank or a high civilian status with the Survey of India and what better way to improve his prospects than by entering the Kashmir maharaja's service? By greatly enlarging the size of the maharaja's domain by incorporating Aksai Chin, Johnson caught the Maharaja Ranbir Singh’s eye.
On March 16, 1846, the British ceded to Gulab Singh, the Sikh state’s feudatory, as reward for his treachery towards his masters in Lahore, the lands they had thus acquired — the territories of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh “for the sum of Rs 75 lakhs”. He in turn acknowledged the supremacy of the British government. Article 4 of the Treaty of Amritsar stated: “The limits of the territories of Maharaja Gulab Singh shall not at any time be changed without concurrence of the British government.” This is exactly what the Maharaja did and saddled posterity with the Aksai Chin problem.
Johnson's survey is not without some controversy. To have completed the journey to Khotan, which lay well beyond the forbidding Kuen Lun range, and to return to Leh in the time he did, he would have had to be covering over 30 kilometres a day. Even if that frenetic pace were possible, it is doubtful any serious survey effort would have been possible. Apart from this, there was the question of the disappearance of a consignment of silver ingots the Khan of Khotan had sent with him as a gift to the 'Lord Sahib' in India. Having thus become somewhat of an embarrassment, he was passed over for promotion. Before long, he resigned from the Survey of India and entered the maharaja's service. He did well here and rose to become the governor of Ladakh. Not a bad reward at all for 'giving' the maharaja an uninhabited 18,000 square kilometres!
That the British were undecided about Johnson's line is evident by the recommendation in 1889 by Ney Elias, joint commissioner of Leh. Elias, who was an authority on trans-Karakoram territories, advised against any implicit endorsement of the Johnson line by a claim on Shahidulla in the far off Karakash valley about 400 kilometres from Leh and just short of Khotan in Xinjiang, as it could not be defended. On the other hand, responding to Captain Younghusband's report on his meeting with the Russian explorer, Colonel Grombchevsky near Yarkand, Major General Sir John Ardagh, director of military intelligence at the war office in London, recommended claiming the areas 'up to the crests of the Kuen Lun range.' Before Whitehall could make up its mind, the Chinese occupied Shahidulla in 1890. To this, the opinion of the secretary of state for India in Whitehall was: 'We are inclined to think that the wisest course would be to leave them in possession as its is evidently to our advantage that the tract of territory between the Karakorum and Kuen Lun mountains be held by a friendly power like China.'
The Indian case for ownership of the Aksai Chin or the white desert rests essentially on the cartographic exertions of a man such as Johnson and we must begin to think about its validity. It's also not without some irony that another Kashmir maharaja, Hari Singh’s (Ranbir’s grandson), grandiose dreams of an independent state resulted in India's other major problem with another neighbour.
Though Jammu and Kashmir was an independent kingdom, the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar gave the British the responsibility of its security. This made the British responsible for Kashmir's northern and eastern borders with Sinkiang and Tibet. The British, however, never really got around to fixing the border along this line. In 1899, another line was suggested. This was the MacCartney-Macdonald line that excluded most of the Aksai Chin. The British tried to get the Chinese to sign an agreement to this effect. The Chinese did not respond to these moves and Lord Curzon concluded their silence could be taken as acquiescence and decided that, henceforth, this should be considered the border, and so it was. Interestingly this line, by and large, corresponds with the Chinese claim line, which in turn, by and large, coincides with the Line of Actual Control.
But in 1940-1941, things began to change again. British intelligence learnt that Russian experts were conducting a survey of the Aksai Chin for the pro-Soviet Sinkiang government of the warlord Sheng Shih-tsai. It was obviously time for the Great Game again. Once again, the British went back to the Johnson claim line. But nothing else was done to clearly demarcate the border. No posts were established in Aksai Chin and neither were any expeditions sent there to show the flag, as is normal in such situations. For all practical purposes the Raj ceased at the Karakoram range, but by the rules of the Great Game it went further beyond just in case the Russians showed up. The irony is that the Russians gave Xinjiang to the Communist Chinese in 1949 and left.
Mohan Guruswamy
Email: mohanguru@gmail.com
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