India - China: Relations And Developments

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<b>New book says Mao-USSR deal on India </b>
For Beijing backing on Cuba crisis, Moscow promised silence on China’s India attack
ASHOK MALIK
Posted online: Tuesday, July 12, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

NEW DELHI, JULY 11: In a season when Cold War secrets are tumbling out with astonishing regularity, a new book has just revealed details of a Beijing-Moscow deal on the eve of China’s 1962 invasion of India.

Co-written by China-born author Jung Chang — best known for Wild Swan — and her husband, British historian Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape) is rated the ‘‘most authoritative’’ biography of the late Communist leader. It is an indictment of his domestic and foreign policies, one of the victims of which, the book says, was India.

In the chapter ‘‘Maoism Goes Global (1959-64)’’, the authors outline Mao’s war preparations in 1962. He ended up promising to back the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles at America’s doorstep — the Cuban Missile Crisis, as it came to be called — if Moscow supported his adventure in India.

‘‘This was a hefty horse-trade,’’ Jung Chang and Halliday write, ‘‘one well concealed from the world. On the morning of 20 October, just as the Cuba crisis was about to break, Mao gave the go-ahead for crack troops to storm Indian positions...Five days later, with the Cuba crisis at fever pitch, Khrushchev came through with his support for Mao in the form of a statement in Pravda that mortified Nehru.’’

The book describes the build-up to war in ‘‘May-June 1962’’: ‘‘Chou (Chou Enlai) later told the Americans that ‘Nehru was getting very cocky...and we tried to keep down his cockiness’.’’

It was a time of three simultaneous aggressive movements. In Taiwan, ‘‘Chiang Kai-shek was making his most active preparations since 1949 to invade the Mainland’’. Mao had to first ascertain the Americans wouldn’t help Chiang.

Then came the double deal: ‘‘In October 1962, Khrushchev was secretly deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba... Given the danger of a confrontation with the USA, he wanted to ensure that Mao would not stab him in the back. He decided to throw him a bone, a big one: the Kremlin’s blessing for China to attack India.’’

Khrushchev had just signed an agreement to sell India MiG-21 fighter aircraft. ‘‘Mao,’’ says the book, ‘‘sent out a feeler to the Russian ambassador about how Moscow would react if China attacked India. Khrushchev seized this chance to make a startling demarche. On the 14th (of October) he laid out a four-hour farewell banquet for the outgoing Chinese ambassador, at which the Soviet leader pledged that Moscow would stand by Peking if China got into a border war with India, and would delay the sale of MiG-21s.’’ At the banquet, Khrushchev also revealed his plans for Cuba.

As it turned out, both Mao and Khrushchev betrayed each other. ‘‘On 28 October, after Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in return for a promise by US president John F. Kennedy not to invade Cuba...gigantic ‘pro-Cuba’ demonstrations were staged in China, accompanied by bellicose statements... against Moscow for ‘selling out’.’’

The rejoinder came a week later: ‘‘Khrushchev ... backtracked from his previous support for China even while fighting was still going on inside India. A Pravda editorial on 5 November conspicuously contained not one word endorsing Peking’s position. For him, as for Mao, the collaboration had been completely opportunistic.’’

Mao: The Unknown Story has been rated highly by critics for its decade-long research and its meticulous footnotes. Jung Chang and Halliday interviewed sources from 40 countries, including friends and family of Mao. They also accessed Russian government archives.

Among their interviewees was V.V. Paranjpe, former diplomat — he retired in 1982, as ambassador to South Korea — and doyen of Indian Sinologists. Paranjpe — described in the book as an ‘‘interpreter for Nehru-Mao talks’’ who ‘‘met Mao in a substantial way’’ — remembers Halliday and Jung Chang visiting Delhi in the early 1990s.

‘‘We had no idea,’’ he adds, ‘‘about the 1962 deal. This is new material. I spoke to my former colleagues in the Foreign Service, as well as to the foreign secretary, Shyam Saran. There is nothing in our records about the Khrushchev-Mao negotiations.’’