Vijay Gokhale

“The Government of India also made another presumption, which was erroneous and would prove disadvantageous to India in the negotiations. India assumed that its official declaration recognizing the People’s Republic of China would automatically mean that both sides had also established formal diplomatic relations. This led the Government of India to believe that there would still be time and opportunities after the recognition of the new regime, to raise matters of concern or pursue national security objectives through diplomatic channels. In other words, whereas the Chinese saw the process of recognition as a matter of substantive negotiation, India considered it simply a matter of protocol. The idea was to win Chinese goodwill as soon as possible.”
― Vijay Gokhale, The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India

“In October 1947, the Nationalist government in Nanking informed the Indian Embassy of its wish to modify such agreements as were entered into between Great Britain and Tibet, including the Simla Agreement, 1914, that defined India’s frontier with Tibet. In the same month, the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had also addressed a letter to India’s Prime Minister seeking the return of ‘all our indisputable Tibetan territories gradually included into India’, which included parts of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan.”
― Vijay Gokhale, The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India