Panikkar and the Making of Modern Asia

And thus, in 1929, the Panikkar family — which now included wife Gowri and three children, Parvathy, Madhusudan, and Devaki — arrived from the deep south to the geographically breathtaking but politically volatile strategic frontier of Jammu & Kashmir. The vast majority of the Kashmiri Muslims resented the dominance of the Dogras, Kashmiri Brahmins, and the Punjabi Hindus, who were monopolising government jobs. Apart from Haksar, his colleagues included Sir Albion Banerji, P. K. Vattal, and George Wakefield from the ICS. His specific task was to prepare a report on the Maharaja’s constitutional rights — for after 1857, the British desired to incorporate ‘the princely states into the imperial scheme of things, so as to consolidate colonial control’. They had to be ‘cultivated as allies, while being kept as subordinates’. But Panikkar argued that ‘princes retained all the powers that had not been specifically alienated in each of the individual treaties signed between the representatives of the Crown and the 570-odd states — many of which, like J&K, Hyderabad, Mysore, Baroda, and Hyderabad, had territories, populations, and incomes comparable to a mid-sized European country’. All this was brought out in his monograph The British Crown and the Indian States. He was also busy with drafts of two more books — Malabar and the Portuguese in English, and a Malayalam fiction work based on the same theme.

However, even as the princes were obsessed with their status and gun salutes, India was changing very rapidly, and Congress was emerging as the major force in British India. A parallel organisation, the All-India State Peoples Conference, was making its presence felt in the princely states. Incidentally, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, a graduate from AMU, became the President of this Congress affiliate in 1937–38. The attempts of the Round Table Conferences to reconcile the conflicting interests and opinions in India came to nought — especially as the views of the Congress, the princes, the Muslim League, and the Depressed Classes, represented by Dr Ambedkar, were at complete variance.

The Second World War ended Pax Britannica, and its erstwhile colony across the Atlantic now rose to be a power to reckon with. The princely order did not realise that the ground had slipped from under their feet — and in their haste to finally quit India, which they found to be ungovernable on account of the mass movement of the Congress, the intransigence of the ML, revolts in the Indian Navy, and the return of the INA soldiers, the British abandoned their ‘loyal allies’.

The princely order ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper — but Nehru offered Panikkar the ambassadorship to China. When he joined in 1948, the KMT’s (Nationalists) Chiang Kai-shek was still in power in Nanking (the then capital), but by then almost all of northern China, with the exception of the Peking–Tientsin corridor and some areas in Manchuria, had fallen under Communist control.

Let us now come to the Tibet issue — on which Indian and Chinese perceptions were polar opposites. Whatever the internal differences between the KMT and CPC, both refused to accept the 1914 Simla Convention and the McMahon Line, and had always questioned the ‘competence and legality’ of Tibetans to sign the border agreement. From 1945, the area adjacent to J&K was shown as an ‘undefined border’ and was represented with a coloured band that included the extensive (and yet uninhabited) Aksai Chin territory. When Panikkar received a note from the KMT regime that ‘the Chinese government wished to renegotiate the treaty of commerce and amity, including the borders between the countries’, Panikkar held his ground and said that the trade arrangements previously concluded by the British Indian government with Tibet could not be arbitrarily abrogated without consulting the Tibetans themselves. By 1949, the Nationalists were on the run, and the Communists were encircling the cities. In a memo to Nehru, Panikkar had surmised: ‘It can be assumed with practical certainty that the policy of a Communist China will be intensely nationalist. As the Soviet policy is the inheritor of the dreams of Peter the Great, the ambitions of Catherine, and the conquest of the later Czars, the policy of Mao Tse Tung will combine the claims of all the previous dynasties from the Hans to the Manchus and will not voluntarily accept any diminution of territory, claims, or interests which China inherited.’ He wrote of his experiences in the book In Two Chinas (1955), in which he compared the changes that took place from the KMT to the CPC.

Back home, India’s policy towards Tibet and China was caught in a quagmire: Patel voiced his differences with Nehru on the likely abandonment of Tibet and dependence on Communist China, and the foreign office under Bajpai and KMP also did not see eye to eye, while Nehru’s instructions were rather ambivalent. He was assuring Lhasa (Tibet) that he would take up their case with China when he had no real intention of doing so. By 1950, TN Kaul, a professional diplomat, was sent as his deputy to ‘keep an eye on the ambassador in Peking, who allegedly has a tendency to be excessively pro-Chinese’.

Panikkar’s next diplomatic assignment was to Cairo, where he presented his papers to Farouk I, the king of Egypt and Sudan. This was the period when tensions over the Suez Canal were running high, but Gamal Abdul Nasser had not yet taken over as the helmsman of Egypt. Later, Nasser became very close to Nehru and was one of the main pillars of the Non-Aligned Movement. While in Cairo, he wrote his important tract Asia and the Western Dominance — an ambitious book that threaded together his belief in an Asian sense of unity and common history. However, this marked a shift from his Greater India discourse. For Panikkar, however, the best accolade came from Nehru, who told him to return to India to help with the reorganisation of states.

It must be mentioned that in the aftermath of Independence, Panikkar had been opposed to the linguistic reorganisation of states. Writing under the pseudonym Chanakya, he said: ‘Provinces organised on an ethnic and linguistic basis will inevitably develop regional patriotism and undermine the hard-won unity of India… it will give political expression to that feeling of local patriotism which will obscure the wider patriotism that India wants to develop.’

However, after the SRC — which had Justice Fazl Ali as the Chair and parliamentarian H. M. Kunzru as another member — toured the entire country and received over 1.5 lakh memoranda, he realised the groundswell of support for linguistic states. Even though the committee was reticent about the creation of smaller states in provinces bordering Pakistan (Punjab, Bombay, and Assam), the major restructuring was accomplished. In fact, Panikkar also gave a dissenting note on the asymmetry between UP and all the other states of the country.

Later, as a member of the Rajya Sabha, when India–China relations had touched their lowest point, his Tibet–China policy was defended by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But the bitter criticism stung him, and he realised that the Chinese had played their games and that the border had impacted the geopolitics of the region, especially after the debacle of 1962. A year later, he breathed his last, and the next day, on the cold grey morning of 11 December 1963, both Houses of Parliament rose to their feet in New Delhi, standing in silence for some time to pay their respects to a man who had been a giant of his time — and in whose shadow generations would walk for years to come.