latter instance China breached the principle In the Nehruist approach,India's exact laid down by Zhou and used a trivial border boundaries with China needed only to be dispute as the excuse to exert military force, "discovered"by its officials through histori- unsuccessfully,to cow its small neighbor.So cal and archival research.That achieved, now it is with India alone that China still they could be published in maps and made has an unnegotiated border dispute,one that good on the ground.Should China raise led to war in 1962 and leaves sovereignty questions or objections,Beijing would be over tens of thousands of square miles of told that,as Nehru was to put it to Zhou territory still in question. Enlai,"There can be no question of these large parts of India [long shown as Chinese The Task Facing India on China's maps]being anything but India In comparison to the magnitude of China's and there is no dispute about them."That border problem,the task facing India when approach somehow appeared entirely reason- it became independent in 1947 was minor. able to Nehru and his officials,and was India's limits are mostly set by the sea,and warmly approved by India's political class, extensive sectors of its land borders had al- as it is today.That it would lead ineluctably ready been defined into boundaries by the to conflict on the borders,perhaps to war, British before they relinquished their em- seems not to have occurred to them until pire.But the British had failed in their at- the very last-and has perhaps now been for- tempts to reach boundary agreements with gotten again. China.They bequeathed undefined northern The obverse of the Indian approach,as borders,which is to say frontiers,to their seen from Beijing,was that the Indian gov- several successor governments on the subcon- ernment was claiming the right to define tinent.Burma,Pakistan,and Nepal all rec- China's boundaries unilaterally.An author- ognized that the only path to border defini- ity on the legalities of boundary settlement tion and settlement lay through negotiations lends strength to the Chinese view that In- with China and in due course emerged with dia's approach is inadmissible: mutually satisfactory and confirmed bound- aries.India chose a very different approach. An international boundary cannot be In the first years after independence, fixed solely by the administrative act of Jawaharlal Nehru,India's first prime minis- one of the adjoining States.At least two ter and foreign minister,and his officials parties must be involved and their joint conceived the idea that their country already efforts are necessary in order to effectu- had fixed and final boundaries with China. ate an acceptable division between their Those,they argued,had evolved over millen- territories.Therefore,if a State proceeds nia,achieving,through human practice and alone to survey and delimit its border ar- the actions of ancient Indian states,a degree eas,no juridical principle will apply the of linear definition that rendered further dip- effects of such unilateral action to an- lomatic process unnecessary.Delimitation other State which,being directly inter- had been achieved by "historical process"; ested,has not cooperated in any way in boundaries had crystallized spontaneously its execution or consented to accept its and no further formalization was required consequences.From the point of view of Therefore to submit them to negotiation the non-participating State,the interna- was seen as not only otiose but as inviting tional boundary remains undefined. China to question or impugn India's territo- rial integrity,even its national identity.In- Since by his own account Nehru was stead,India would define its own territorial aware from the "very first day"of inde- limits with China. pendence that the British had left major China's"Aggression in 1962"and the"Hindu Bomb" 113 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.Further reproduction prohibited without permission.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission