Articles by G P D

Sino-Indian Talks: Edging Closer?
G P D THERE was never any doubt that the border was the main problem between India and China. The shap decline in the relations between the two states durng 1959-62 war, in the main due to India's insistence that it would defend the farthest possible frontier that British India ever claimed. China did not understand the view to begin with and later did not accept it. We have since been clear in our minds where our frontiers lie. (We have not been so clear on the ground, however. But that's another matter), The Chinese have been clear on the ground where their frontiers lie. A good old problem of contradiction between objective reality and subjective' appreciation of history, shall we say?

Resurrecting the Monster View of China NEW DELHI seems to be full of Indochina, First there was the inauguration of the Centre for the Studies on Indochina at the India International Centre. T N Kaul is to be its Chairman. What studies the Centre would do on Indochina no body can say. It is not known if there is anybody on its council with any expertise on Indochina. But the fact that T N Kaul will preside over the Centre makes one tithing certain. Its studies will be in impeccable English and whenever its research becomes audible it would be even more of a pleasure. There are not many in India now who can use the English language so well as T N Kaul, But then the difficulty is Kaul actually speaks two languages. One is his old-fashioned, suave and rather diplomatic English, the other is his political language. We cannot say we fully like or even understand the latter. Kaul in his remarkable speech during the inauguration went hammer and tongs at China and the US, one felt, in that order. The overriding problem in Indochina is China and unless those misbehaving urchins in Beijing are made to behave there shall be no peace in Indochina! Sceptics like us have the impression that it is quite customary with the section of an elite in India not to attack the United States either in isolation or as the principal enemy. If you combined your attack on the US with China or Pakistan or both, it is so much safer. More particularly, if you attack China as much or even more than you attack the United States, everybody is happy. Reagan

In its last years the military regime stood on a stilt on four and a half pillars: the military, the bureaucracy, the land-owning rich, the business-cum- industrial houses and the fragile constitutional facade hewn out of the highly perishable quarries of basic democracy and the 1962 constitution. The 'retired military officers' became a visible segment of the ruling elite1 further strengthening the principal pillar of the regime; the military. Rizvi shows how the Ayub Khan military regime collapsed as a result of its weaknesses and contradictions. It was felled by the people and not by the organised political forces, that is, the political parties. They could not restore representative civil government. Ayub handed over power to the Commander-in-Chief of the army. Some Pakistanis realised during the crisis of 1968 that a decisive military defeat alone could bring an end to military rule in Pakistan. Rizv's study of Bhutto frames the man in his tragic and almost inevitable failure to build a strong civilian regime in Pakistan in five years. Had Bhutto continued for another five years he might have succeeded in breaking the political back of the military. In his last two years, however, he succeeded only in strengthening the military's political clout. The military realised that it had to remove Bhutto from the political scene if it were to return to power in Pakistan. Hence the coup of July 1977 and hence the hanging of Bhutto.

Battle Won, But the War?
G P D GENERAL JARUZELSKY and his comrades seem to have won the first battle in Poland. Everybody in the world from Reagan in Washington to Deng Xiaoping in Beijing was talking of the imminent Soviet intervention in Poland. There was in fact an attractive theory floated. The theory was that the Soviets intervene once every 12 years: Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the expected intervention in Poland in 1980-81. It all looked very attractive, except that it did not happen. In the meanwhile the Polish communist party planned its counter- offensive against Solidarity. The General seems to have pulled it through.

India-China Talks G P D THE Gonsalves mission to Beijing seems to have been a tame affair. It has teen said by many that the fact that there were 'cordial' and 'friendly' talks between India and China after nearly two decides is in itself quite an achievement and progress. This is, of course, true. One must remember also that the Sino-Indian talks of 1961 were a miserable failure. They had provided a fat officials' report on the border question find had, in a sense, directly led to the military confrontation of 1962. The officials' report was an exercise in futility. It was a major factor which made a Sino-Indian settlement an impossibility. Both India and China demonstrated through the report how questions of territory can in fact be the most insurmountable obstacles to normal relations between states. To accuse one side of unreasonableness and of taking the road of confrontation as Robert Maxwell does is to ignore altogether the remnants of history and the territorial imperative that survive in the foreign policies of modern states, whether socialist or non-socialist. China and Soviet Union have given us enough evidence since the days of the Himalayan war that their leaderships are no less capable of pushing their very traditional, historical and at times irredentist claims to territory at the cost of everything else. To be sure, Nehru was no less guilty of that. But then this must now be taken as an inevitable part of world politics. Territory' is one problem which seems to defy proletarian internationalism and Afro- Asian solidarity. Our problems with China are but one example of what has become a constant feature of world politics.