Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier

370 Pages·2015·3.41 MB·English

by  Bertil Lintner

G G E
REAT AME AST
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G G E
REAT AME AST
India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s
Most Volatile Frontier
Bertil Lintner
New Haven & London
First published in the United States in 2015 by Yale University Press.
Great Game East copyright © 2012,2015 by Bertil Lintner. First published in India in
2012 by HarperCollins Publishers India.
This edition published by agreement with HarperCollins Publishers India.
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa
Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any
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Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business,
or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or
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Set in Electra type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lintner, Bertil, author.
Great game east: India, China, and the struggle for Asia’s most volatile
frontier / Bertil Lintner.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978–0–300–19567–5 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. India—Foreign relations—China.
2. China—Foreign relations—India. 3. Geopolitics—Asia. 4. India—Foreign
relations—Asia.5. Asia—Foreign relations—India. 6. China—Foreign relations—Asia.
7. Asia—Foreign relations—China. I. Title.
DS450.C6L5622015
327.54051—dc23
2014034298
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992
(Permanence of Paper).
1098765 4321
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
one War and Spookery in the Himalayas 13
two The Nagas: Challenging the Idea of India 40
three The Mizos: From Famine to Statehood 80
four Manipur: The Eternal Imbroglio 109
five Assam and Bangladesh: Foreigners? What
Foreigners? 144
six Burma: A State of Revolt 171
seven The Indian Ocean: A Tale of Two Islands 204
Postscript 233
appendix 1: Chronology of Events 241
appendix 2: Major Armed Non-State Actors in Northeastern India,
the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and Northern Burma 255
appendix 3: Rebel Missions to China 262
appendix 4: The Chittagong Arms Haul 268
vi Contents
Notes 271
Annotated Bibliography 298
Acknowledgments 320
Index 323
Illustrations follow page 170
INTRODUCTION
In the late nineteenth century, Arthur Conolly, an intelligence officer of the
British East India Company’s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, coined the expres-
sion “the Great Game” to describe the strategic rivalry between the British and
Russian empires for supremacy in Central Asia. More than any other objective,
the Russians also sought access to the Indian Ocean. The idea of “the Great
Game” was popularized and entered public consciousness by Rudyard Kipling,
the grand guru of British imperialism, in his 1901 novel Kim. The story about
the young Anglo-Irish orphan—who was recruited by the secret service of
British India and traveled undercover along the Grand Trunk Road to India’s
remotest western frontiers during the heyday of the Western colonial empires—
has captivated the imagination of generations in Asia and the West alike. But
behind Kipling’s highly romanticized version of the great spying game lay what
undoubtedly was at the time the main superpower conflict in Asia.
In recent years, the term “the Great Game,” or more often “the new Great
Game,” has come to signify the conflict between the United States and other
Western powers on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other, over
Central Asia’s oil and other natural resources. By direct intervention, or acting
through proxies, this conflict is now evident to everyone in the Central Asian
republics of the former Soviet Union, and in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.
But there is also another Great Game being played out in Asia: in the east,
at the crossroads of the Indian Subcontinent, China, and Southeast Asia. The
rivalry between India and China goes back to the 1950s. Spies and agents from
both sides have been active in each other’s volatile—and disputed—frontier
areas for decades. Intelligence operatives from various other countries have also
wanted to keep an eye on the local insurgencies inside the “forbidden” tribal
areas in India’s northeast, long out of bounds for foreigners and hotbeds of
1
2 Introduction
intrigue and meddling by China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Likewise, towns in
northern India have been used as staging points for clandestine forays across the
Himalayas and into Chinese-occupied Tibet.
In the 1950s, the friendship between India and China seemed to blossom
under the Hindi slogan Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai, or “Indians and Chinese are
brothers.” Both countries viewed themselves as champions of the Third World,
which was emerging as old colonial empires, ruled by the British, the French,
and other Western powers, crumbled. But Chinese machinations in Tibet, which
it had occupied in 1950, and uprising in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in 1959 changed
all that. Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India and set up a govern-
ment in exile in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. Disputes also arose over the
border between India and China, which had been settled in 1914 by the British
colonial power and Tibetan representatives, but never ratified by Beijing. In 1962,
Chinese troops stormed across the de facto border and dealt India a crushing and
humiliating defeat from which it has yet to recover, at least psychologically.
In the midst of this crisis, in the 1950s and 1960s, ethnic insurgencies broke
out among the Nagas, the Mizos, and other tribes in northeastern India, who
are more ethnically akin to Southeast Asian than South Asian peoples but are
predominantly Christian. At first, India’s bitter enemy Pakistan supported those
rebels, providing them with weapons and sanctuaries in erstwhile East Pakistan,
now Bangladesh. But it was China that became the main provider of munitions
for the ethnic insurgents. Many were also trained in China. Today, the Chinese
government does not openly support those groups, but they have had access to
the so-called black—in reality more gray—arms market in China. Bangladesh,
which the Indian Army helped break away from Pakistan in 1971, became
involved too as suspicions grew between the new country and its liberator.
Militants from the United Liberation Front of Asom (Assam), or ULFA, were
allowed to set up camps in Bangladesh. In April 2004, a huge consignment of
Chinese weapons was seized in the Bangladeshi port city of Chittagong, and the
munitions were destined for Assamese and other insurgents in India’s northeast.
It is important to remember that China—or Pakistan or Bangladesh—did
not invent the rebellions in Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, and Assam but
simply took advantage of decades-old, and even centuries-old, ethnic conflicts.
British colonialism brought with it a semblance of artificial peace, Pax
Britannica, which froze the problems but did not solve them. After India’s inde-
pendence in 1947, many of these old conflicts flared anew, and without a proper
understanding of the complex histories of the northeastern peoples—which
differ in many respects from the evolution in the rest of India—and a sober
analysis of their fractious rebel movements and fragile alliances, little headway
Introduction 3
can be made toward achieving peace in one of Asia’s most volatile regions. The
Great Game in the East is also about India’s struggle to keep these ethnically
diverse states within the Union. Many Nagas, Mizos, and Manipuris, and even
Assamese, do not consider themselves Indians, and it is necessary to understand
why they feel that way.
The rebels, isolated in the remote mountains between India and Burma,
have always tried to get support or sympathy from the international community,
and many people from outside the region have all along taken an interest in the
insurgencies among the Nagas and the Mizos especially, for a variety of reasons.
Some felt genuine sympathy for the “tribal underdog” facing the might of the
Indian military; others were fascinated by exotic tales of the Naga headhunters
who had become “Christian soldiers.” Such romanticism aside, it is still impor-
tant to have a better understanding of the influence Western missionaries had
on Naga and Mizo societies, and why a newborn nationalism among them,
thanks to Christianity, eventually led to open revolt against the Indian state.
And then there is Tibet, a mystical, ancient theocracy now led by an exiled
modern-day saint. Tibet has captured the imagination of millions of Westerners
from the earliest European explorers to people as disparate as a group of
German Nazis who, in the 1930s, thought the high plateau in the Himalayas
was the cradle of Aryan civilization, the Hollywood stars Richard Gere and
Pierce Brosnan, and other present-day celebrities and human rights activists.
There is no doubt that the Tibetans have suffered tremendously under Chinese
rule and the Dalai Lama may appear godlike, but his men have also been
working closely with the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, as part of a
broader scheme to encircle China.
Like the movements in India’s northeast, the Tibetan resistance also had its
many foreign players and actors with their own agendas. Moreover, the fact that
the Tibetan government in exile in based in India is deeply resented by China,
where the question of Tibet’s status is seen as the main threat to the future unity
of Asia’s most populous country. China is determined to maintain its supremacy
over Tibet, whose people definitely do not think they are Chinese.
At the same time, an increasingly economically stronger and politically and
diplomatically more self-confident India is beginning to challenge China’s
near supremacy in the region; the Great Game in the East may well become in
the twenty-first century Asia’s most serious superpower rivalry. And although
Tibet and northeastern India will remain important in a strategic sense, it is in
the Indian Ocean, not in the heights of the Himalayas, as in 1962 when China
and India fought a bitter war over a disputed area in the northeastern border
mountains, that the main conflict of interests will be played out.