The Dragon's Breath

As the winter snow began drifting down on the Chinese troops camped arrogantly on the bleak slopes of Indian Kashmir, all India suddenly became aware that Red China was not simply guilty of "overenthusiastic pursuit of Tibetan refugees" (as one Indian official had first surmised), but was embarked on a systematic quarrel with India, and not particularly keen for negotiation. The prospect loomed that Red China wanted a test of strength with its No. 1 rival in Asia.

Noisy Uproar. Indians, who had long dismissed such notions as cold war fantasies, were alarmed, and never had they been so outspoken over the see-no-evil policies of Jawaharlal Nehru. Socialists marched on the Prime Minister's residence to demand stronger action, and the All-India Students' Congress called for mass demonstrations this week to mark "Throw Back the Aggressors Day"; other youths sought volunteers to man a "Himalayan Border Defense Organization." In London, Indian students inquired about returning home for military conscription. Even many Indian Communists were openly criticizing China's troublemaking.

As Nehru's 70th birthday neared, the Prime Minister found his own tame neutralist policies blamed for much of the trouble, and for India's unpreparedness to meet it. NEW WAVE or ANGER WITH MR. NEHRU, headlined the Ambala Tribune. "The Prime Minister is on trial," reported Bombay's Free Press Journal, as angry readers' letters piled high on editors' desks. Millions now knew that the Prime Minister had for years shrugged off Chinese incursions into faraway Ladakh, Kashmir's northeast tip, had even let China cut a road through the district in 1957 without a challenge. Not until last week, when a trickle of troops moved in by air, did India even maintain army forces in the frontier area--and then only after the Chinese had shot up an Indian police patrol.

Chinese forces, heavily armed and with communication lines back into China, sat last week 40 miles inside territory that India has always considered its own, although Chinese maps have long claimed it for Peking. It seemed clear that Red China was out to formalize this "cartographic aggression" by annexing a 6,000-square-mile piece of mountainous Ladakh.

Something for Nothing. To New Delhi's notes of protest, Red China filed counterblasts charging India itself with "provocations" and "border violations," asserting: "Frontier guards of the Chinese People's Liberation Army have all along been stationed in this entire area." Otherwise, asked Peking righteously, "How is it thinkable that China could have built a highway through this region?" The fact that the Chinese suffered few casualties in the latest skirmishes, said Peking, "exactly proves that the Chinese side was on the defensive. Anybody with a little knowledge of military affairs knows that."

Then, with bland audacity, Red China's latest note hinted at a weird bargain: if India would give up a portion of Kashmir around Ladakh, China might stop its border pressure in India's Northeast Frontier Agency, a region lying 850 miles farther to the east between India and Tibet, whose frontier was settled 45 years ago when the so-called McMahon Line was defined. "If Indian troops may cross at will the traditional and customary Sino-Indian boundary in [Ladakh] for so-called patrolling, then Chinese troops would have all the more reason to come to the area south of the so-called McMahon Line for patrolling,"warned Peking.

The pattern was becoming too clear: a nibble here, a nibble there--with occasional blandishments to confuse and perhaps mollify the Indians.

Seeking Trouble? What was Red China up to? Western specialists in Hong Kong had originally conjectured the continuing Chinese difficulties in Tibet explained its action. The rebellion could not be crushed until Tibetan hope for outside help was extinguished. Ergo, India, which had given asylum to the Dalai Lama and to 13,000 Tibetan refugees, must be shown up as unwilling or unable to help.

But this hypothesis seemed inadequate to explain Peking's increasingly reckless disregard for Indian opinion, Asian good will, or Khrushchev's caution. Red China seemed spoiling for a fight--almost as if determined to convict Nehru's India as pliable and easily frightened, or else compel it to abandon its prestigious posture as the great uncommitted neutralist power in Asia.

Would India fight to protect its northern borders? For the first time, the word "war" was on many lips. Some Indian editors were urging a military defense pact with Pakistan, and there were even suggestions that it was time to accept help from other non-Communist countries. On the northern borders, all frontier posts were transferred from the police to the Indian army, now commanded by Lieut. General K. S. Thimayya, who won the world's admiration in the days of the Korean armistice, when, despite Nehru's displeasure, he scrupulously directed the screening of captured Chinese and North Korean Communist soldiers, during which 21,814 of them refused to go home.

At week's end Nehru himself was beginning to talk tougher. Thousands cheered as he told a Congress Party rally that, though Red China is full of "the arrogance of might," India will not be intimidated. "China may be a big country, but India is not small," said Nehru. "We are not afraid. We are not weak."

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