Why do we keep surrendering to China?

It has been snowing since Wednesday at Bomdila, this picturesque town perched at an altitude of a little over 8000 ft on the Eastern Himalayas in Arunachal Pradesh. Warming himself at a portable chizi (local brazier), 60-year-old Rinchin Dorjee, a retired government officer, recalls the winter of 1962, when the Chinese troops had occupied Tawang and closed in on Bomdila. "I was just a student of Class V at the government high school, when the war broke out. I was in the hostel along with 50 other boys from different parts of the Kameng region. While people in the town fled to the Assam plains, we were all huddled into a one-tonner army vehicle and driven down to Tezpur, from where we were sent off to Guwahati in a train," Dorjee recalls, as his 21-year old son Pasang, a graduate who helps his father run the family handicrafts shop, listens with rapt attention. After about a month when Dorjee returned, thanks to the unilateral withdrawal of the Chinese, Bomdila looked like a ghost town. "There were very few people left. The stench of rotten remains of human bodies was still in the air. The dogs probably had tasted human flesh and had become ferocious," he says, recounting how he wondered what had happened to his parents at Lish—a small hamlet about six hours walk from the present-day township of Dirang. Luckily, the Chinese did not do much harm to the local people. "But it took a long time for government officials, especially those from outside NEFA (North East Frontier Agency, as Arunachal Pradesh was known till 1972) to come back." Photographer Subhamoy Bhattacharjee and I took off from Guwahati on Wednesday for Tawang, the district that is the focus of the border talks between India and China, the latest turn of which took place during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Beijing last week. During his trip to Arunachal next week, the PM will not go to Tawang. We put up for the night at the Four Corps HQ of the army at Tezpur, and started driving even before the sun was up on Thursday. But when we stopped at Tenga for breakfast, the manager of Hotel Aphet told us the road to Tawang was blocked due to heavy snowfall. "Not a single vehicle has come down from Tawang since the morning. The telephones are also down. So is the mobile network," he said. Bomdila, about 160 km from Tezpur and high at 8,000 ft, was all white when we reach there. The road had become dangerously slippery. "Kabhi brake mat lagao," said a labourer of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) who was clearing the snow on the road. It is just about 25 km from Tenga to Bomdila, but it is a 4,000 ft ascent. Children, and even adults, were happy playing in groups, throwing balls of snow at one another, and occasionally hurling one at vehicles managing to climb up the slippery road. This is the road that the Chinese had used in 1962, Tezpur in the Assam plains their next target after the Indian troops had withdrawn from Tawang, Sela and Bomdila. This is the Kameng frontier, through which His Holiness Dalai Lama too had made his great escape from Tibet back in 1959. We call up His Eminence, the 13th Tsona Gontse Rinpoche, a spiritual leader of the Tsonawa lineage of the Mahayana Buddhism prevalent in Tibet as well as the Tawang-Kameng region. He is also the MLA from Lumla, a constituency bound by China on the north and Bhutan on the west, and we were supposed to follow his vehicle to Tawang later in the day. "I don't think you will be able to go up to Tawang. There is 6 ft of snow at Sela Pass. Anyway, come up to my monastery. Let us see what can be done," he said. In the next 20 minutes, our Bolero crawled up to the Upper Gompa Monastery, though not after we had to get down twice and push the vehicle along with some passers-by. "You can't go up. The road is just closed. The army has barred vehicles from even approaching Sela," said Padma Jaiswal, deputy commissioner, West Kameng district. Sela, at an elevation of 13,700 ft, is the world's second highest pass. "Stay back and be witness to the national flag being hoisted here on Republic Day," she added. 9 A.M. Friday, January 25. R.K. Lal, principal of the Bomdila Government Higher Secondary School, is holding the school assembly. "So, my dear students, the flag must be up in both the hostels exactly at 7 a.m. tomorrow. At 7:30, we must be here to hoist the flag in the school. And then, by 8:30, you must all be in the stadium for the official function," he tells his students. The Bomdila Government Higher Secondary School was established in 1952. (It was a high school in the beginning, the same school that Rinchin Dorjee went to in 1962, during the Chinese aggression.). "We have around 1,000 students today. And I am proud to tell you, we have produced a number of IAS, IPS and other officers from here," says the principal. Kartar Bassar, a Class IX student, is angry with the weather god. "Why did it have to snow during Republic Day?" she asks, asserting that she had never missed even one Republic Day or Independence Day function since she joined the high school seven years ago. "I am proud to be an Indian. I keep hearing on television that China is claiming Arunachal Pradesh. What is their problem? Don't the Chinese know that India is an independent country?" she asks. "Yes, she is right. It is not that we hate China. But why can't China just stay on as a good neighbour with us?" asks Leiki Wangda (24), secretary of the All West Kameng Students' Union. Wangda, however, is angry with the government, both at Itanagar and in New Delhi. "The government does not bother to look into our problems. Just take my village Lubrang. This is the 21st century, and we still have to walk three hours or more to reach it from the nearest road head," he says. The nearest primary health centre is 10 km away from this road head, he adds. Lumla, Bhutan on the west and China on the north, too is a case of underdevelopment. "People from Bleting, a village inside India, for instance, prefer to walk to Bhutan and avail healthcare facilities at Gyangpo just because they would have to walk several kilometres to reach the government hospital in our own territory. But these issues are hardly addressed by the government," says Longli Chongroju, a student from that area who is a college student in Bomdila. The local cooperative store in the Bomdila bazaar has sold 30 national flags till 2 p.m. on Friday. "This time less people have turned up because of the heavy snowfall," said Sonam, a young woman at the counter. Passang Dingla, assistant general secretary of the All Arunachal Pradesh Students' Union (AAPSU), has bought two flags, one for his home, another for his motorbike. Passang, along with Sonam Tenzing, a student leader at Tawang, has been toying with the idea of putting up a people's memorial in honour of the civilians—Monpa, Sherdukpen, Mizi and other tribals—who had died during the Chinese aggression. "While the army has put up a wonderful memorial in the heart of Tawang for its brave soldiers and officers, we are planning to construct one for the civilians who too played their role as responsible and patriotic citizens during the winter of 1962," said Passang. The Tawang region has a good number of boys in the Indian Army. "At least three of them had laid down their lives fighting the Pakistanis in Kargil," says Tenzing Briangju, a student from Nafra, a village that still has a couple of foxholes that the Army had used during 1962. Tenzing dreams of joining the army. "More boys from our area must be recruited so that we can defend our motherland more effectively," says Tenzing. Home to the Monpas, Tawang at a height of 10,000 ft is the headquarters of the district by the same name. It is not just the epicentre of Buddhist learning in the Eastern Himalayan region and north-east India, but has for long remained in focus thanks to the refusal of China to give up its claim to it. The well-known 400-year old Tawang Monastery—one of the largest monasteries in India—was badly damaged during the Chinese aggression, with priceless murals and tankhas being destroyed or taken away by the invaders. The road is snowed in but on October 1 last year, both Subhamoy and I walked half a kilometre into China after a contingent of Indian army officials were invited to the Chinese National Day function on their side of the boundary. The most interesting spot on the road to Tawang is Jaswantgarh. There is a memorial—if not a temple—there in honour of Jaswant Singh Rawat, a jawan who almost single-handedly held back the Chinese for three days with the help of two local Monpa girls, Nura and Sela, at an altitude of 10,000 ft. His heroic feat came to an end when the Chinese found out that it was a fight put up by a lone jawan. And so furious were the invaders that they chopped off his head and took it away to China, to return it only after the ceasefire. At the memorial today, it is almost mandatory for every army vehicle to stop and pay homage to the hero subsequently decorated with a Mahavir Chakra. In the heart of Tawang is the magnificent Tawang War Memorial, inaugurated by the then Eastern Army Commander Lt Gen H R S Kalkat in November 1999, with a 40-ft high stupa standing proudly as its centrepiece. Around it is inscribed the names of 2,420 soldiers and officers of the Indian army who laid down their lives 45 years ago. The plaque at the entrance says, "A nation that does not honour its dead warriors will perish." Beyond Tawang, in the snow-clad mountains is located the Parvat Ghatak School or the High Altitude Commando School, barely 2 km from the Chinese border, a place where only the toughest can survive. I remember struggling with my breath in the minus 20 degrees Celsius temperature and 15,000 ft height. The Parvat Ghatak School, set up after the Kargil war, is managed by the Tawang-based Korea brigade under the Tezpur-headquartered IV Corps, and is one of the highest located such school in the world. Flipping through my old clippings, I find Lt Gen D B Shekatkar, then commander of IV Corps saying, "This school is a combination of what they teach in the Belgaum Commando School and as well as the High Altitude Warfare School at Sonamarg." Bomdila, and for that matter Tawang, have come a long way since the winter of 1962. Tawang, in fact, is fast emerging as a tourist hotspot, especially after Rakesh Roshan shot Koyla here, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit about a decade ago. And such has been the impact of that film shoot up beyond Tawang that the Sangetsar lake has come to be known popularly as "Madhuri ki Jheel"! Ten years ago, there was just the government tourist lodge and the circuit house with only visitors having some kind of official connection being able to find accommodation there. But today, both Tawang as well as Bomdila, have hotels and lodges to host at least 200 visitors at any given time. The handloom and handicrafts sector has also received a much-needed boost. "We are trying to build better marketing linkages to the weavers and artisans here. An NGO from Rajasthan has come forward to help the carpet weavers, while the state Handloom And Handicrafts Department has been taking the artisans to different parts of the country to sell their products," said Bomdila Deputy Commissioner Padma Jaiswal. But, ironically, though nobody here in this part of India wants India to compromise on any account with China, it is a fact that one can easily buy all kinds of Chinese goods in Bomdila, as well as in Tawang. Shopkeepers here claim that these goods find their way to Bomdila or Tawang from Myanmar through Manipur and Nagaland. "These items come from Dimapur and Imphal," said Chudup Tsonawa, who sells jackets, shoes and an assortment of winter garments all marked 'Made in China'. "Selling Chinese goods is just to make a living. We are all Indians, heart and soul," quipped Tashi Tsering, as a tourist from Kolkata tries to bargain with him for a beautiful set of Chinese soup bowls.

By Friday afternoon, the snow begins to melt. We once again try to make an attempt to proceed to Tawang. "But Sela Pass is still under 6 ft of snow," says the deputy commissioner when we call her up on her mobile to find out if the army had managed to clear the road. Frustrated on being unable to make it to Tawang, we decide to stay back at Bomdila for the Republic Day celebrations. The National flag promises a splash of colour across the snowy whiteness of the Eastern Himalayan region.

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👏 for people of Arunachal Pradesh 👏