PTI reports from Washington:

The declassified CIA paper said Nehru was consistently “taken for a ride” by the Chinese in the months and years prior to the 1962 war.

The top secret documents of March 1963 were approved for release only in May 2007.

One of the major points of contention by the CIA is that Zhou Enlai (then Chou En-lai) consistently impressed upon Nehru that Peking (Beijing) had no territorial ambitions and that the maps the Chinese were using to portray vast tracts of Indian territory as theirs were “old” maps from the Kuomintang era which had not been revised.

According to the CIA analysis, the developments between 1950 and late 1959 were marked by Chinese military superiority which, combined with “cunning diplomatic deceit,” contributed for nine years to New Delhi’s reluctance to change its policy from friendship to open hostility toward the Peking regime.

“It emerges that above all others Nehru himself — with his view that the Chinese Communist leaders were amenable to gentlemanly persuasion — refused to change this policy until long after Peking’s basic hostility [made him] re-think his China policy. Nehru continued to see a border war futile and reckless course for India,” the CIA analysis said.

“His answer to Peking was to call for a strengthening of the Indian economy to provide a national power base of effectively resisting an eventual Chinese military attack.

“In the context of the immediate situation on the border, where Chinese troops had occupied the Aksai Plain in Ladakh, this was not an answer at all but rather an implicit affirmation that India did not have the military capability to dislodge the Chinese,” the CIA maintained.

“Chou En-lai, in talks with Nehru in 1954 and 1956, treated the Chinese old maps as representing Peking’s “claim” but, on the contrary, as old maps handed down from the previous mainland regime which had ‘not yet’ been corrected” the analysis said.

“This provided the Chinese Premier with a means for concealing Peking’s long-range intention of surfacing Chinese claims at some time in the future [when there would no longer be any necessity to be deceptive about them] while avoiding a dispute with the Indian Prime Minister at the present,” the CIA reasoned. — PTI

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