THE HIMALAYAS

Struggle for the Roof of the World

Violence marked most of the world's trouble spots last week: bloodletting in Algeria, upheaval in Argentina, a shadow war in South Viet Nam, a coup d'etat in Syria. Almost unnoticed was an event of moment among the towering peaks of the Himalaya Mountains (see color pages), where India is struggling to hold back Red China's hordes. The event was the spring thaw.

With the melting snows, man once again can emerge from shelter, and the weird,

bloodless battle on the heights can resume along the obscure, 2,500-mile frontier between the two giant lands of Asia. From April to October, Chinese mountain troops will prowl the lofty boundary, seeking new undefended peaks or valleys on which to plant the flag of Peking. Near by, Gurkhas and turbaned Sikhs will try to head them off. But since it is essentially a struggle of nerves, each side is more likely to stare than to shoot.

Shattered Illusion. China's push into the Himalayas is of great importance in Asia; at stake is India's prestige, indeed its political security, for no one doubts that the reason for Mao Tse-tung's mountain grabbing is to open the route for further southern penetration.

The dispute has shattered India's comfortable illusion that the Himalayas are an impenetrable line of defense. Since 1954, Red China has occupied 14,000 sq. mi. of Indian territory in the Ladakh area of Kashmir, clamored for an additional 32,500 sq. mi. in the North East Frontier Agency near Burma's border. Other smaller chunks claimed by the Chinese brought the total to some 52,000 sq. mi.

The reaction of India to all of this has been curiously torpid. In his on-again, off-again role as man of peace, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru has belittled the Chinese land grab. In the past, he and Defense Minister Krishna Menon have described the aggressions as "minor and petty," called the area occupied by the Chinese only "barren mountaintops where not even a blade of grass grows." Such remarks have brought angry charges against the government in New Delhi's Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), where one opposition critic has accused Nehru and Menon of ordering India's border guards not to fire on the Chinese invaders. When, at last, Menon was forced to acknowledge the extent of the Chinese aggressions ("a stab in the back"), he nevertheless continued to pussyfoot when it came to finding a way of forcing the Chinese to "vacate their aggression." Explains Nehru, ever fearful of a war he might not win: "You have to think of the next step."

Making Friends. The shadow of China for centuries has loomed over the Himalayas as a threat to its southern neighbors. But not until Red China's "peaceful liberation" of Tibet in 1950 did India worry much about Chinese designs on Indian territory. Said Nehru: "A border that had been dead has now become a live border." India tried to buy Red China off by championing its admission to the United Nations, opposed all U.N. attempts to condemn the Chinese for their conquest of Tibet. The feeble Indian good-neighbor policy only encouraged the Chinese to look southward with greater interest. "Tibet is the palm of the hand, and the Chinese have it," says one Indian. "Now they want the five fingers without which the palm is useless." The five fingers (see color map) are Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the North East Frontier Agency. To the Chinese, all five stick out like sore thumbs.

LADAKH (pop. 80,000), Kashmir's northeast bulge, is the sorest of all. A high, arid plateau with a jungle of peaks rising out of it, Ladakh is claimed by both India and Pakistan in their acrid dispute over the control of Kashmir. Indian defence forces must thus be on the lookout for both the Chinese and the Pakistanis. Polyandry is the most widespread feature of Ladakh society; when a woman marries a man, she often marries his younger brothers also. When the eldest brother dies, the widow can divorce the younger husbands by tying her finger to a finger of the corpse, then snapping the string.

NEPAL (pop. 9,500,000) is an independent kingdom that economically and militarily is virtually dependent on India.

But repeated sorties by Indian-backed and -based rebels against the Nepalese government have strained relations with India so severely that King Mahendra for the first time was making overtures to Red China. Already the Chinese have agreed to build a road between Nepal's capital city of Katmandu and Lhasa in Tibet. Backbone of the Nepalese economy is the employment in the British and Indian armies of the 20,000 tough little Nepalese Gurkha soldiers; from their annual pay they send home $5,000,000--equal to a fourth or more of Nepal's yearly budget.

BHUTAN (pop. 700,000) is an autonomous Indian kingdom whose foreign affairs are administered by India. Red China chooses to ignore this arrangement, has offered economic aid to the Bhutanese directly. Primitive and virtually roadless, Bhutan was first opened up to the outside world in 1959; the country has only two doctors and about 20 pharmacists. India has sent a small military training mission into Bhutan to modernize its ragtag 10,000-man army.

SIKKIM (pop. 140,000) is an Indian protectorate, but it, too, has been offered aid directly by the Chinese, who bypassed New Delhi. A dollhouse country with 4,000 species of rhododendrons, it rests beneath the world's third highest mountain, 28,216-ft. Kanchenjunga, Sikkim's "protecting deity of the snowy ranges." The country has no newspapers and permits no lawyers to practice because the government thinks that lawyers are far more trouble than they are worth. Sikkim's heir apparent, Maharaj Kumar Palden Thondup Namgyal, 38, is engaged to 21-year-old U.S. Socialite Hope Cooke, but he will not marry her until 1963 because all 1962 has been judged as astrologically unfortunate.

THE NORTH EAST FRONTIER AGENCY (pop. 450,000) is almost completely isolated from the rest of India. Though nominally part of the state of Assam, the rambling (31,000 sq. mi.) region is administered directly by the central government because Prime Minister Nehru wants to preserve its primeval aboriginal character. In some of N.E.F.A's valleys are nightmarish rain forests where animist tribesmen invoke among their deities a Dysentery God who, when angry, racks their guts with a quick but painful death.

Imperialist Product. Red China's first attempt to bite off an Indian finger came after its subjugation of Tibet, when it repudiated the so-called McMahon Line, the border arranged between British India and Tibet in 1914, and named after the head British negotiator. Running across N.E.F.A. from Bhutan to Burma, the line set the border at the watershed at the crest of the highest mountains. But the Red Chinese declared the McMahon Line an "illegal, null and void" product of "British imperialism," claimed that the actual border ran along the southern foot of the mountains.

Suddenly, new Chinese maps began falling like snow, extending the land grab all along the Himalayan frontier. China now claimed the southern slopes of most of the major trans-Himalayan passes so as to be able to control absolutely access routes to the North. To India's protests, Red China's Chou En-lai replied that the maps were really "old" ones that his young nation had not got around to revising. India had also been lulled in 1954 when it concluded a trade treaty with the Chinese based on the ancient Buddhist code of Panch Shila, or principles of coexistence, which guaranteed, among other things, mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity.

As it turned out, all the respect came from India. Less than a year after the Panch Shila agreement, the Chinese began building a military road between Western China and Tibet that cut 112 miles across Ladakh. So casually did India patrol the area that the road was not discovered until 1958--though it had been shown on available Chinese maps for more than a year. But only after squashing the Tibetan revolt in 1959 did the Chinese go out of their way to provoke India.

Moving into Ladakh in force, the Chinese waylaid an Indian patrol near Kongka Pass in October 1959, killed nine men.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles across India in N.E.F.A., a party of 38 Indian soldiers in Longju beat off an ambush by 300 Chinese.

China's blatant resort to force finally woke India up. Slowly Menon began to build up India's defenses in the Himalayas. Krishna Menon's troop units were strengthened with thousands of additional soldiers in N.E.F.A., Sikkim and Ladakh and issued new mountain fighting equipment. Some 4,000 miles of new military roads are being laid through the slopes to ease the problem of supply; bulldozers are shaving away hillsides to straighten out the hairpin turns in old roads. Most of the mountain roads, however, are still little better than mountain-goat paths on which, says one survivor, "you lean to the inside, put your hand out toward space, and don't look."

The government has started state farms in the mountains of Ladakh to furnish the Himalayan defense forces with food supplies, all of which must now be flown in. Outposts as high as 18,000 ft. that were formerly shut down in the winter are now occupied all year round. Guarding against the health hazard of prolonged service in the mountains, Indian defense officials now rotate troops in the forward Ladakh outposts every three months. Says an Indian officer of the military buildup: "Looking five years ahead, we hope to be in a better position than the Chinese."

But five years may well be too long. Nehru knows that he cannot push the Communist Chinese out of the territory they occupy without triggering a conflict that would force him to call in the Western allies to bail him out. But Nehru can no longer afford to let China gobble up any more Indian territory. If India cannot throw the Chinese out, it must hasten its defense buildup to deter Red China from any more land grabbing. If it does not, India may find itself in the grip of a five-finger vise.

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