NEHRU - No Day Goes Without Cursing This LOVEDAY.
I’m sure once you finish reading this, you will take a slipper, for spoiling the lives of Tibetans in particular & the Bharat in general.
#ClaudeArpi is an authority on Tibet & even hardcore Leftists won’t dispute the fact.

He’s coming out with a book “End of an Era, India Exits Tibet” which is the 5th & Final Volume in the Indo-Tibet Series, I will attach images of other 4 at the end of the thread.
@rwac48 @harpreet @nitingokhale
In this book, Arpi comes out with new findings based on

Nehru Memorial Library papers, de-classified Indian and Chinese documents and personal interviews about the ominous consolidation of China’s occupation of Tibet.
The theme of the book is about India losing all its influence in Tibet, helping China press aggressive claims along

the border with India. This came at the cost of letting down opinion in Tibet that looked up to “Chogyal Nehru” and felt India could come to their aid in preventing “Sinofication” of their culture and ways.
In early 1957, an audacious secret mission into Aksai Chin that saw an

Indian Army officer and a havildar join a group of yak grazers in disguise actually provided first-hand evidence that China had illegally built a road in territory claimed by India.
Unfortunately, the efforts of Lt Col R S Basera of Kumaon Regiment and Havaldar Diwan Singh of

the Corps of Engineers went downroad despite the immense risks and hardships they undertook as then V K Krishna Menon and the then PM Nehru remained skeptical about the road’s exact location. It would be a full two year later before the Nehru Government admitted in Parliament

that the road had indeed been built.
@adgpi Lt Col Basera’s trip actually reached the road and took its measurements. But on return, Menon and Nehru asked the director of military intelligence if the road could be confirmed by a map. The secret patrol had, however, carried no

maps for security reasons.

This was not the only evidence of the road. Even earlier, British mountaineer Sidney Wignall went to Tibet with the knowledge of the Indian military. He was captured but released at a high pass and reached India after an incredible journey. His report

of the Aksai Chin road was dismissed by Menon in Nehru’s presence as CIA propaganda.

Arpi’s research however, indicates that India did have options. At the time, the Indian Air Force @IAF_MCC
was clearly superior to China’s military air arm and could have aided in helping

Tibetan resistance, which was significant. The diplomacy itself, given India’s strong presence through trading centres, could have been forceful.
Indian reports from Tibet spoke of the speed with which motorable roads were being built but failed to stir New Delhi. The roads

enabled Chinese troops to reach India’s borders quickly. The long preparation saw Mao Zedong, annoyed by the asylum to Dalai Lama and Nehru’s attempts to “undermine” China’s leadership in the Third World, to order attacks on Indian positions on October 1962.

How China developed

its Tibet playbook that includes encroachment, occupation, and the spinning of a narrative of false claims is examined in rich detail by Claude Arpi in his four volumes on Tibet’s relations with India. Digging deep into the material at the National Archives, the Nehru Memorial

Museum and Library, Claude Arpi’s latest offering focuses on his findings on the last five years of India’s diplomatic presence in Tibet.
As he writes in his first volume, the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 presented newly independent India with a policy choice: was new China

a friend or foe? In this debate, the friend camp led by Nehru wanted deeper cooperation with its new neighbour. The foe camp wanted India to treat China, now at its door step, as harbouring malign intent and recommended that the country beef up border security from Ladakh in the

west to North-Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, in the east. In the policy choice India made, the China-as-a-friend camp carried the day. India handed all its extraterritorial rights including the trade agencies in Gyantse, Dromo (Yatung) and Gartok in Tibet

to its new rulers, China.

In 1954, India signed the Panch Sheel agreement with China that formally recognized Tibet as a part of the People’s Republic.
One of the important documents Arpi has dug out and commented on is a report filed by Apa Pant to the Indian foreign ministry

of his observations in Tibet. Pant was the Political Officer (PO) based in Gangtok. Since the days of the British Raj, the PO had looked after the affairs of Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Apa Pant travelled to Tibet from November 1956 to February 1957 and met with the Dalai and

Panchen Lamas, members of the Tibetan ruling elite and leaders of the Tibetan resistance. The observations Apa Pant made in his report was, in the words of Claude Arpi, “an eye-opener” for New Delhi.
Pant’s observations about the sentiments of the Tibetan people under their new

rulers and his predictions about China’s plans for Tibet in the future are sharp and prophetic. Regarding the true feelings of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule, Apa Pant observed, “Due to fear and the realization of their military, (as well as) the weakness of the Tibetans

(they) are keeping quiet but have neither mentally or emotionally submitted themselves to the Chinese rule nor accepted it as the final dispensation.”
About China’s future plans for Tibet, Pant wrote: “Only when roads, aerodromes and perhaps a railway line are completed millions

of Chinese will start flooding into Tibet and settling there permanently.” Claude Arpi adds that this “has come true 60 years later.”
Claude Arpi’s fourth and final volume in his examination of Tibet’s relations with India from 1947 to 1962 ends with the closure of the Indian

Consular General in Lhasa. New Delhi cited the severe restrictions imposed on the consulate for its closure. In hindsight one wonders whether the closure of the Lhasa consulate was a wise thing to do. If it had remained open, weathering Chinese restrictions and the chaos of the

Cultural Revolution, New Delhi would have had a keener sense of what was happening behind the Himalayas.
For scholars and researchers interested in this phase of Tibet’s relations with India, Claude Arpi’s books will remain essential reading. These four volumes are a

seminal contribution to our understanding of Tibet’s interaction with both India and China and India’s interaction with China on Tibet at a critical period in history.
Source for thread
@EconomicTimes @htTweets & Thubten Samphel, scholar who wrote for HT.

#VandeMataram