The border confrontations of August and October 1959 were ultimately caused by the growing tension between China and India around boundary issues and Kalimpong.
In 1954, the friendship between India and China was formally established due to economic agreements between India and the Tibetan area. Since the early 1950s, the Chinese have placed a great deal of importance on the disputed Aksai Chin area in the Galwan Valley because it provides access to Tibet from mainland China. Sino-Indian relations then began to deteriorate in 1958 over Tibet's ancient borders with India, which are mostly undefined and relatively hazy and extend from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh, as well as reports of Tibetan insurgent activity on Indian territory.
Kalimpong, a charming hill station in West Bengal next to Darjeeling, was important in the early stages of the deterioration of India-China relations.
China claimed in January that Tibetan rebels were using Kalimpong as a base for anti-China activities, and a map of China that showed Indian territories along the Tibet border as theirs was published in the July edition of the magazine China Pictorial. These two issues concerning Tibet were the first to cause tensions between the two countries in 1958. In the months that followed, China increased the stakes over Kalimpong while India continued to voice its worries about China's intentions to maintain the status quo along the border.
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Kalimpong and the struggle for freedom in Tibet
Tibet and Kalimpong were connected for millennia. The town, which borders Sikkim, is situated around 170 kilometres from Phuentsholing, the border town of Bhutan, and little over 100 kilometres from the borders with Tibet and Nepal, respectively, at Jelep La and Kakarvitta. There used to be a sizable Tibetan and Chinese community in the town, and some of those individuals still reside there. The 13th Dalai Lama fled to British India in 1910 when the Manchu commander Chao Erh-Feng of the Qing dynasty attacked Tibet. He then stayed in Kalimpong and Darjeeling on alternating occasions until returning to Lhasa in 1912 and proclamating Tibet's independence in 1913.
The fact that Kalimpong was also the place where the first significant and enduring Tibetan language newspaper was launched gives insight into the Tibetan community there. The Tibetan Mirror newspaper set off on its voyage to Lhasa in October of 1925. In his 1962 biography, "My Land, My People," the current Dalai Lama described how his Lhasa instructors informed him of the Second World War through the Tibetan Mirror.
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As the autonomous Tibetan government began to confront Communist China's aggressiveness in 1949, the Kashag (Tibetan cabinet) designated Khenchung Lobsang Tsewang and Surkhand Lhawang Topgyal as Tibet's delegates to the Indian government, with their headquarters to be in Kalimpong. In the first part of 1950, Tibetan commerce Mission, a commerce organisation, was established in Kalimpong. Born within the 10th Dalai Lama's family, Jigmie Dorji Yuthok wrote in 2016 about the trading expedition.
"The Tibetan government contacted me in 1950 to assist with the Tibetan Trade Mission as an English interpreter. When I was eighteen, I was a student at St. Joseph's North Point in Darjeeling. Nehru, the prime minister of India, met with us. This "Tibet Trade Mission" was actually a covert attempt to ask India for military hardware, a request that Prime Minister Nehru denied.
Tsepon Shakabpa, the finance minister of Tibet from 1939 to 1951, moved to Kalimpong in April or May of 1950, a few months before the Chinese troops invaded the region. Using Kalimpong as his headquarters, he was seeking to push the world community for an independent Tibet. On November 7, 1950, immediately following the PLA's conquest of Tibet, he wrote from Kalimpong to the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom and sent Tibet's petition to the UN. Lloyd Steere, the counsellor at the US embassy in New Delhi, wrote a cable to the US secretary of state on March 24, 1951, stating that he had just seen a Tibetan group at Kalimpong.
In addition, Gyalo Thondup, the 14th Dalai Lama's elder brother, has resided in Kalimpong since the 1950s and is thought to have served as the Dalai Lama's unofficial diplomatic liaison for matters pertaining to Tibet. He co-wrote "The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet," a book published in 2015 that included numerous previously unrecognised details about Kalimpong's significance as the starting point of Tibet's independence movement.
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Following the Chinese People's Liberation Army's entry into Lhasa in October 1950 and its declaration of Tibet's sovereignty, the number of Tibetans living in Kalimpong rose. After giving in, the Tibetan government signed the "Seventeen-Point Plan for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" on May 23, formalising China's takeover of Tibet, some seven months later. However, some Tibetan Buddhists refused to accept this understanding and carried on advocating for Tibet's independence while exiled.
The reaction from China
Kalimpong was on the Chinese government's radar from the start. As one of the three locations where China was to open trade bureaus under the 1954 India-China trade agreement, along with New Delhi and Kolkata, Kalimpong was selected. To the chagrin of the established Tibetan community in Kalimpong, the Chinese government assumed control of the Tibetan Trade Mission.
The Dalai Lama's 1962 book sheds light on the Chinese concerns around Kalimpong. In it, he told how Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had warned him not to go to Kalimpong in December 1956 while he was in India with his religious retinue. Enlai, who was also in India at the time, had spoken with Nehru and conveyed his worries over Kalimpong. During their encounter, the Dalai Lama got the impression that Prime Minister Nehru shared Zhou Enlai's belief that "the people there (Kalimpong) might be troublesome" and would attempt to talk the Dalai Lama out of returning to Tibet. Nehru stated that the Indian government would make all the necessary preparations if he still want to visit Kalimpong. When the Dalai Lama visited Kalimpong, he did in fact meet a delegation from his own government pleading with him to forgo his trip back to Lhasa. However, he returned to Lhasa to make another effort to peacefully achieve the necessary autonomy.
Documents made public by the Indian government state that Zhou Enlai brought up the matter once more on January 12, 1958, in an interview with Indian Ambassador R. K. Nehru. Samples of a pamphlet dispatched to Tibet from Kalimpong were delivered by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Indian Embassy in China on January 22, 1958. "Stepped-up subversive and disruptive activities against China's Tibetan region carried out by the U.S. and the Chiang Kai-Shek clique in collusion with fugitive reactionaries from Tibet using India's Kalimpong as a base," the Foreign Office of China complained in writing to the Counsellor of India on July 10, 1958. The letter referred to Tibetan Mirror as “a reactionary newspaper hostile to the Chinese Government and people” and listed a few groups that were operating there.
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On August 2, the Indian government's external affairs ministry sent a note to the Chinese embassy in India, responding to China's complaints. The note stated that the statements made in the letter "must have been based on a complete misunderstanding of facts" and that the Indian government was "greatly surprised" to hear them.
In the letter dated August 2, India stated, "The Government of India has no evidence that the US Government and the Kuomintang regime are using Kalimpong as a base for disruptive activities against China's Tibetan region." India wrote about the Tibetan Mirror, stating that the local government was being asked to "administer a severe warning to this periodical" and that it had "noted with displeasure that some of the articles published in this periodical are objectionable and calculated to affect the friendly relations between India and China."
China sent India a second letter the very next day with further details, including recent meetings and actions related to a signature drive.
Kalimpong tensions between China and India reached a crescendo in 1959, particularly following the Lhasa uprising on March 10. In a 1959 report published in the People's Daily, the Communist Party of China's official newspaper, Kalimpong was referred to as a “spy centre” with a “stinking reputation,” according to Prem Poddar and Lisa Lindkvist Zhang's research study from 2014. In the same year, statements like "Kalimpong is at the centre of activities by the Tibetan armed rebels" and "Kalimpong is the big Indian capitalist's stronghold to feed on the Tibetans’ blood and sweat" were found in another article in People’s Daily. China officially designated Kalimpong as "the commanding centre of the rebellion" after the uprising on March 10. The Dalai Lama left Lhasa during this uprising, crossed into India on March 31 across the boundaries of Arunachal Pradesh, and established his permanent residence there.
In response to China's open accusations against India regarding Kalimpong, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and four other Members of Parliament (Hem Barua, B.C. Kamble, J.M. Muhammad Imam, and Braj Raj Singh) filed a motion on March 30 to adjourn the session in order to ask Nehru to clarify his position. The prime minister stated that the foreign affairs ministry had previously denied China's accusations and that Tibetans residing in India who had been disseminating anti-China pamphlets had stopped for the previous six months after being forewarned by the Indian government.
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The border confrontations of August and October 1959 were ultimately caused by the growing tension between China and India around boundary issues and Kalimpong.
Another five years were spent in tension over Kalimpong. As to the findings of "Kalimpong: The China Connection," the term "Kalimpong '' first appeared in headlines in the People's Daily between March 1955 and August 1963. With the 1962 conflict and the closing of Jelep La, the route between Kalimpong and Lhasa, the town has steadily lost significance.
The Sino-Indian border skirmishes at Nathu La in 1967 were the last Sino-Indian border clash to result in casualties before the most recent one at Galwan Valley. The tensions along the India-China border increased during 1965–1966 due to accusations and counter-allegations regarding Jelep La and Nathu La along the Sikkim–Tibet border. Trade via NathuLa reopened in 2006, but Jelep La, an all-weather pass that is frequently thought to be simpler than Nathu La, is still closed as of this writing, despite appeals to the Indian government made by the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration chairman Bimal Gurung in 2014, the Kalimpong Chamber of Commerce in 2004, and Darjeeling MP Dawa Narbula in 2007.
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