Vikram Mehta: Why Jagat Mehta would have seen Xi in the Mao, not Deng
NB: This is a very interesting article, not only for its inherent merit, but for me personally, as Jagat S Mehta was a close friend of my parents and I have been friends with his children since childhood. Mr Mehta was the first speaker at my father's memorial service in May 2007 - they were fellow-students at Government College Allahabad in the late 1930's. I have mentioned this in this post. Of direct, if frivolous, relevance to this article are the comments my parents would make upon reading the news of India's Charge-affaire's walking out of yet another official luncheon in Peking. (The author mentions this below). "Poor old Jagat is having a thin time of it", mother would say, "no lunch yet again!". Mr Mehta was a brilliant and accomplished diplomat and a warm and sensitive human being. And how could I fail to mention his wife, the celebrated writer Rama Mehta.
I enjoyed reading this. Thanks to Vikram for writing it. DS
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I enjoyed reading this. Thanks to Vikram for writing it. DS
I am no China expert.
And I certainly cannot add to the wisdom already expressed in these pages on
the current Sino-India border crisis. But I have had, in a very narrow sense, a
ringside view of this conundrum. It has been a staple of our family’s dinner
table conversations for decades. So driven by the reflection that the past can
offer some, albeit imperfect, guideposts for the future and “one should read
nothing but biography for that is history without theory”, I would like to
share a few personal vignettes.
My father, Jagat Singh
Mehta was a diplomat and to the extent, our foreign service acknowledges
specialisation, he was considered a Sinologist. Directly or indirectly, he was
engaged with China for most of his working life. Directly, he was part
of the Indian delegation in 1960 that sat across the table from their Chinese
counterparts for six continuous months to gather and compile historical data in
support of the border claims of the respective governments. The Indian report,
which ran into 600 pages, was presented to Parliament in 1961. Clearly these
discussions did not have the impact everyone had hoped for as the two countries
went to war in October 1962.
Almost immediately thereafter, in 1963, my father
was posted to the Indian mission in Peking. I remember we lived in a large ugly
block of a house. There must have been at least 25 rooms in the house, but we
were advised to limit our family conversation to only three rooms. The rest of
the house was reportedly bugged. We had eight Chinese “domestics” - they were
all spies and made no pretence of being anything but that. Our movement was
restricted and we were followed everywhere. It was exciting for us “kids” to
live amongst spooks and in the knowledge that perhaps much of what we said was
being recorded by someone in the recesses of the Chinese government.... read more:see also
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