here is an old review i wrote of claude arpi's superb book on tibet (he's probably india's leading expert on tibet. he has set up at the tibetan pavilion at auroville, pondicherry. i have gone there once on a new year's day when they have a tibetan kalachakra set up).
this review was too long for rediff, and i ended up not publishing it anywhere. it is timely and appropriate now.
The Sacrifice of Tibet: Extraordinary delusions and temporary insanity
Rajeev Srinivasan on how the Congress lost Tibet
On November 18th every year, I silently salute the brave souls of C Company, 13th Kumaon Regiment, who in 1962 died practically to the last man and the last bullet defending Ladakh against the invading Chinese Army. These brave one hundred and fourteen inflicted heavy casualties and prevented the Chinese from overrunning Leh, much like Spartans at Thermopylae held the line against the invading Persians many moons ago.
But have you ever wondered why these brave men had to sacrifice themselves? One answer seems to be that is because of the extraordinary delusions that affected a number of the dramatis personae on the Indian side: notably Jawaharlal Nehru, KM Panikkar and VK Krishna Menon.
A deadly combination of blind faith, gross megalomania, and groupthink led to the debacle in the war in1962; but its genesis lay in the unbelievable naivete that led these worthies to simply sacrifice a defenseless sister civilization to brutal barbarians. Furthermore they were far more concerned about China's interests than about India's! Generations to come will scarcely believe that such criminal negligence was tolerated in the foreign policy of a major nation.
In a well-researched book, timed for the one hundredth anniversary of the opening of Tibet by the British, Claude Arpi, born in France but a long-term resident of India, and one of India's leading Tibet and China experts, argues that India's acquiescence to the enslavement of Tibet has had disastrous consequences. The book is Born in Sin: The Panchsheel Agreement subtitled The Sacrifice of Tibet, published by Mittal Publications, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 241, Rs. 495, ISBN 81-7099-974-X. Unless otherwise noted, all of the quotations here are from this book.
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http://rajeev2007.wordpress.com/2006/11/21/the-sacrifice-of-tibet-extraordinary-delusions-and-temporary-insanity/
4 comments:
Great post Rajeev. Makes sad reading though.
in the context of what u have written a reading of "Discovery of India" and "Glimpses of World History" gives an interesting insight into Nehru's mindset.
His fascination & admiration for China is very obvious and -- equally obvious - is his somewhat ho-hum / condescending attitude towards Indian (i mean Hindu) culture in contrast. Even when he does write about pre-Islamic India it is through the (prejudiced) eyes of a Hiuen Tsang or Alberuni. In fact throught out these books he has very little to say about Hindu civilzation as such.
Nehru had this knack of allowing himself to be mislead by people prejudiced to Hindu / Indian interests. For instance Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir or KM Panikkar.
my general feeling about these books after reading them (and comparing them to history written by real historians) are that they are trash, pop history. they are in the same class as amartya sen's history. dumb and ideologically addled.
they are not good for anything much. if they were written by jawaharlal, they show he was severely ill-informed. if they were ghost-written for him (it is rumored by irfan habib's father or something) then they obviously have the ghost-writer's prejudices, such as being pro-mohammedand and pro-communist.
your article is an eye opener rajeev. India is making blunder of foreign policies. These attitude shows to the our side world we are spineless to say the least
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