‘Madame Gandhi told me when I met her, just don’t harm me’

work hard, whereas some other countries we have helped do not have this quality. This brings me to the point: it is not the help that is provided a country that counts, it is whether the people of that country have the will to use this help. If they don’t have that, the money just goes down a rathole. A pretty good example is aid to India. (Chou laughs) We don’t regret having given it, apart from the fact that the more aid we have given, the less influence we have. The point is that India is not able to do much with aid because as compared with Japan, it does not have the drive, or the spirit of determination that the Japanese people have.

CHOU: Well, the quality of people is something, but people throughout the world have common qualities. The most important thing is that both Japan and Germany were defeated powers who wanted to restore their vitality. You could also say Italy, but it lacks spirit.

NIXON: Japan and Germany have great drive, and the Chinese people also. They have common qualities. But some people on the subcontinent, maybe because of the environment, never had these qualities. (Sentences deleted)

KISSINGER: The President meant the American Indians. (Chou laughs).

CHOU: As for the subcontinent, our first sympathy is with Pakistan for being dismembered…. We don’t want to place Pakistan in a predicament, making her think she has no friends.

We wanted to improve our relations with India. The Indian government expressed a desire for that, too. Madame Gandhi published this.

NIXON: She told me that when I saw her in New Delhi and in Washington. But she also told me some other things too. She said she would not oppose my meetings with the Prime Minister and the Chinese government, just don’t harm her.

CHOU: But…. Don’t harm—who wants to harm her?

Memorandum of Conversation between Henry Kissinger and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, 27 November 1974

DENG: There’s something very peculiar about Indian policy. For example, that little kingdom Sikkim. They had pretty good control of Sikkim. Why did they annex it?

KISSINGER: It is a good thing India is pacifist, I hate to think (of what they would do) if they weren’t. (laughs).

DENG: Sikkim was entirely under the military control of India.

KISSINGER: I haven’t understood Sikkim. It is incomprehensible.

DENG: After the military annexation, their military position was in no way strengthened.

KISSINGER: They had troops there already.

DENG: And they haven’t increased their troops since. We published a statement about it. We just spoke for the cause of justice.

KISSINGER: Is it true that you set up loudspeakers to broadcast to the Indian troops on the border? It makes them very tense. (Laughs)

DENG: We have done nothing new along the borders, and frankly we don’t fear that India will attacks our borders. We don’t think they have the capability to attack our borders. There was some very queer talk, some said that the reason why the Chinese issued that statement about Sikkim was that the Chinese were afraid after Sikkim that India would complete the encirclement of China.

Well, in the first place we never feel things like isolation and encirclement can never matter very much with us. And particularly with India, it is not possible that India can do any encirclement of China. The most they can do is enter Chinese territory as far as the Autonomous Republic of Tibet, Lhasa. And Lhasa can be of no strategic importance to India. The particular characteristic of Lhasa is that it has no air—because the altitude is more than 3,000 meters.

KISSINGER: It’s a very dangerous area for drinking mao tai. (a Chinese hard liquor)

DENG: Frankly, if Indian troops were able to reach Lhasa, we wouldn’t be able to supply them enough air! (Laughter)

KISSINGER: I don’t think their intention is with respect to Tibet, their immediate intention is Nepal.

DENG: That is correct. They have been recently exercising pressure on Nepal, refusing to supply them oil. It is the dream of Nehru, inherited by his daughter, to have the whole subcontinent in their pocket.

KISSINGER: And to have buffer zones around their border….

It is like British policy in the 19th Century. They always wanted Tibet demilitarized.

DENG: I believe even the British at that time didn’t make a good estimate of whether there was enough air. (Laughter)

KISSINGER: I think an Indian attack on China would be a very serious matter that cannot be explained in terms of local conditions, but only in terms of a broader objective.

DENG: There is no use attacking Tibet, for the Indians. The most they can do is that the Indians give their troops to fight for a broader objective.

—Concluded

(Excerpted from The White House & Pakistan: Secret Declassified Documents, 1969-1974 by Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, Oxford University Press)

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