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Important newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party says”Nehru backed free Tibet”
An important newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party has added a discordant note to the general atmosphere of bonhomie between India and China created by President Hu Jintao’s visit.when Hu was in New Delhi, the Chinese language Huanqiu Shibao, or Global Times, published a ‘historical document review’ to show that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, misled Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai about his objective, which was to support the independence of Tibet.Nehru was concerned with inheriting the British colonial approach and supporting US plans to create an independent Tibet, the newspaper said in the article, quoting recently released official documents on Zhou’s four visits to India between 1954 and 1960. Indian leaders felt that the country had much to gain by Tibetan independence, it said.According to the paper, India made two aggressions on the Chinese border timing them with an uprising in Tibet in 1959. This is when the relationship between the two countries reached a freezing point and Zhou went on to assure India that China would not take one inch of Indian soil and would not allow India to do so, either, it said.
Nehru had assured Zhou that New Delhi respected China’s sovereignty over Tibet and then encouraged the Dalai Lama to work for Tibet’s independence, the paper said. The narration of events as given in the newspaper suggests that Nehru had broken faith with China and even misled it on the Tibetan issue.The paper said the Dalai Lama had told Nehru in November 1956 that Tibet has agreed to be part of China, but Nehru suggested that he would extend help and support if Tibet faced any difficulties. The paper said Nehru’s offer caused the Dalai Lama to rethink his plans to return to Tibet.The paper said the friendship between the two countries began in 1951 when China sent out a total of 660,000 tonnes of food to help India tide over a serious famine, and that Zhou made one last attempt to reconcile the differences between the two countries when he visited New Delhi for the fourth time on April 19, 1960, but his attempts to find a solution to the problems between the two countries met with a cold reception in New Delhi.