India-China Talks

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.