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Arunachal legislator remembers 1962 as Hu arrives in India
By Syed Zarir Hussain, Indo-Asian News Service,
Nov 20, 2006 - 6:36:09 PM
Itanagar, Nov 20 (IANS) As a five-year-old boy in 1962, Tsewang Dhondup remembers being initially excited hearing the staccato gunshots fired by the rampaging Chinese army in the dizzy heights of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. But that excitement soon turned into fear, recalls Dhondup, now a ruling Congress legislator.
'I was first happy hearing gunshots, but then we realised that all was not well. I remember crying loudly out of fear,' Dhondup told IANS with a hint of anger in his face.
Tawang, perched at an altitude of about 10,200 feet, literally turned into a battlefront with Chinese soldiers overrunning Indian border posts by surprise. The Chinese managed to reach Bhalukpong, just 50 km from the garrison town of Tezpur in Assam.
'Our family fled our home riding on pony backs and reached Bhutan. We then came to Udalguri in Assam and stayed there for about two months,' Dhondhup recalls. And when on Nov 20, 1962, the Chinese called a unilateral ceasefire, people like Dhondhup trudged back home.
'We went on foot from Udalguri back to our village and found there was nothing left -- our homes were destroyed, belongings taken away by the Chinese,' Dhondhup, now the MLA from Tawang in the Arunachal Pradesh legislature, said.
Forty-four-years after the Chinese left the Indian soil Dhondhup is today again a worried man with claims by Beijing that Arunachal Pradesh belongs to them.
Chinese Ambassador to India Sun Yuxi told the CNN-IBN news channel last week that 'the whole of what you call the state of Arunachal Pradesh is the Chinese territory. ... We are claiming the whole of that'.
'We are more secured now then 1962, but we want that New Delhi should make it explicitly clear that Arunachal Pradesh is not a disputed area and that it belongs very much to India,' the 49-year-old Buddhist legislator said.
The controversy has put Arunachal Pradesh in the spotlight as Chinese President Hu Jintao arrives in New Delhi Monday evening for a four-day visit.
A team of about eight legislators representing constituencies close to China's Tibet region is camping in New Delhi to pressurise the Indian government to take up the issue with the Chinese president.
'It is in the greater interest of India that New Delhi should raise the issue and tell Hu that Arunachal Pradesh was never a part of China and such statements should never be made in future,' Congress MP from the state Nabam Rebia told IANS.
Lawmakers cutting across party lines have protested the Chinese claims.
'If need be we are ready to shed blood,' a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader said.
The mountainous state of Arunachal Pradesh shares a 1,030 km unfenced border with China.
The India-China border along Arunachal Pradesh is separated by the McMohan Line, an imaginary border now known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
The border dispute with China was inherited by India from British colonial rulers, who hosted a 1914 conference with the Tibetan and Chinese governments that set the border in what is now Arunachal Pradesh. China has never recognised the 1914 boundary, known as the McMahon Line, and claims 90,000 sq km -- nearly all of Arunachal Pradesh.
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