One Life is Not Enough

by K. Natwar Singh

Nehru told the Chinese PM that some of his senior Cabinet ministers would call on him. Being the shrewd man that he was, Chou insisted that he would call on them instead. I accompanied Chou when he met Vice President S. Radhakrishnan, Home Minister Gobind Ballabh Pant and Finance Minister Morarji Desai. Though not one of them was familiar with the complexities of the Sino-Indian border, they chose to go into the specifics. The Vice President and the Finance Minister thus succeeded in irritating the Chinese Prime Minister. The Vice President began by saying that the Sino-Indian border problem should be settled during Prime Minister Nehru’s lifetime. The Chinese leaders found this incomprehensible. The Vice President said that the two countries had no conflict in two thousand years and war would be no solution. To this the Foreign Minister of China, Marshal Chen Yi, replied that China did not want war. He had first-hand knowledge of war. For thirty years the Communist Party of China had fought against the Chiang Kai-shek government and the Japanese imperialists. He himself had seen his wife and son being executed across a river. The Vice President then asked what 400 square miles of territory was compared to the friendship of 400 million Indians. Premier Chou En-lai replied what were a few thousand acres of land compared to the friendship of 600 million Chinese. The Vice President was no match for Chou En-lai. The Vice President was somewhat condescending and his generalizat...