India's China war
NEVILLE MAXWELLSuch, then, was the thinking that lay behind the Chinese warning as the Indians determinedly pressed forward in the western sector of the Sino-Indian border in September, 1962: 'If the Indian side should insist on threatening by armed force the Chinese defence forces who are duty-bound to defend their territory, and thereby arouse their resistance, it must bear the responsibility for all the consequences arising therefrom.'
It is queer that lines drawn by British officials should have been consecrated as precious national assets of the British Indian Empire's non-British successor states. At the time when those lines were drawn the transaction produced no stir among the ... Indian ... subjects, as they then were, of the British crown. If any of them paid any attention to what Durand and McMahon were doing, they will have written it otf as just another move in the immoral game of power politics that the British Imperialists were playing at the Indian tax-payers' expense.The present consecration of these British-made lines as heirlooms in the successor states' national heritages is an unexpected and unfortunate turn of History's wheel.
Arnold Toynbee