“India, step by step, renounced the hard-won special position in Tibet which Britain had bequeathed to her, and she accepted Chinese suzerainty in principle and Chinese sovereignty in fact. Nehru dismissed the notion of Tibet as a buffer state—‘A buffer between whom?’—and described India’s previous special position there as an outmoded relic of imperialism. India’s renunciation was sealed in a series of Sino-Indian agreements, the most important being the Agreement on Trade and… signed in 1954 [Panchsheel]…”{Croc/74-75}
