Born in Sin: The Panchsheel Agreement : The Sacrifice of Tibet

A hundred years ago a young British Colonel, Francis Young husband entered the Holy City of Lhasa and forced upon the Tibetans their first Agreement with the mighty British Empire. In signing this treaty with the crown, Tibet was ‘acknowledged’ as a separate nation by the British. Ten years later, London called for a tripartite conference in Simla to settle the issue: British India, Tibet and China sat together at a negotiation table for the first time. The Simla Convention, born out of the conference was still in force when India became independent in August 1947. However, an event changed the destiny of the land of snows. In October 1950, Mao Zedong’s troops invaded Tibet. With this background, the present research looks at the genesis of the Panchsheel Agreement between India and China which converted the land of snows into merely ‘Tibet’s region of China’. A natural and cultural buffer zone between India and China disappeared. The preamble of the agreement contained the five principles which formed the main pillar of India’s foreign policy for the next fifty years. It was the beginning of the Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai policy and India’s ‘non-aligned’ position. This policy still haunts an India unable to sort out her border tangle with China. The study concludes with some tentative but constructive proposals to come out of the current impasse.