61 years ago, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai wrote the letter to the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in which he referred to the LAC, which is still between India and China. Where is the valid range?
This is the same old raga, which China has been repeatedly lamenting and India has been opposing all the time. The 1959 position of the LAC has once again come to the center in the Sino-Indian Talks between India and China for the restoration of peace following the ongoing Border Tension in Ladakh.
China has been raising controversies on the basis of letters written to Jawaharlal Nehru during the 1950s of his former Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. After the 1962 war, China claimed that it had gone 20 km behind the LAC in 1959. At the time of the Doklam dispute in 2017, China insisted on retaining the LAC status of 1959, keeping the same argument before India.
What was the position of LAC written in Enlai's letter in 1959, which China has again cited and which India has again refused to accept? Before knowing about it, you should know what kind of correspondence between Nehru and Enlai had happened about it.
In a letter dated 7 November 1959, Enlai wrote to Nehru that the LAC should be considered as the McMahon line in the east and the two countries in the west where actual control is practiced. During the war in 1962, Nehru rejected this claim and again said that it is useless to accept LAC according to the claims of China and retreat 20 km accordingly.
Nehru had clearly said that China has tried to define LAC on the basis of aggression and violence. First, you enter the range of 40 to 60 kilometers and then say that both countries will retreat 20 kilometers and it will be considered LAC, then it is not a logical thing but a conspiracy to fool. In spite of this, Enlai kept repeating on 7 November 1959, according to the situation of the forces, to accept LAC.
Enlai, who first used the term Line of Actual Control, came on a historic tour of New Delhi in 1960. He had made a six-point proposal here, saying peace on the border, in which he had repeated the 1959 letter and said that the border should be recognized in the same situation. Then in 1962, when Nehru refused to accept Enlai's claim, Enlai replied -
This statement simply meant that China was still at its own arbitration. As experts have been saying about China's expansionist thinking that China first presents a claim on a border, then it keeps repeating it in many international and mutual forums. Read More: https://yourviews.mindstick.com/view/81960/china-s-1956-lac-theory-which-india-never-accepted