今天南华早报文章。

五十年代成立的印中友好协会一直在努力减少民间、官方的相互误解和敌意。

习近平、温家宝都接待过他们的领导Achairi. 照片。一个慈祥的老哥。

1962年大战和最近的边境冲突都让他们的协会十分痛苦。他有精彩分析。

‘The world’s against China’: India’s ICFA comrades keep the faith.

Ageing veterans of the India-China Friendship Association struggle to fathom the logic of those who burn flags, ban apps and demand boycotts.

They say the same anti-communist forces are at work today as when they started promoting people-to-people ties more than 50 years ago.

Shweta Desai, SCMP, 12 July 2020.

“I will not make enemies of them,” declares Bhaskaran, 79, the general secretary of the Karnataka chapter of the ICFA.

“Boycotting is a foolery in a globalised world,” adds Achari, 76, president of the association’s National Committee. “We should not fall prey to China phobia.”

The pair, both from Kerala, have been promoting people-to-people contacts with China for more than 50 years. They are living reminders of the heyday when India’s ruling Congress party dovetailed with China’s communists before the advent of liberalisation and globalisation.

Neither of them has ever used any of the 59 mobile phone apps recently banned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nationalist government. The move was nominally to counter the “threat posed by these applications to India’s sovereignty and security”, but was seen by many as motivated at least in part by the border clash. Achari gave away the Huawei Honor Lite smartphone the Chinese ambassador gifted to him a few years ago.

The criticism of China at home and the international blame game directed at the country over the coronavirus pandemic have wrecked their plans to organise nationwide activities for the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the world’s two most populous nations.

WHOLE WORLD AGAINST CHINA

“It’s the whole world against China,” Bhaskaran says, blaming anti-communist forces for the attacks on Beijing over the pandemic. The same forces have been spreading false propaganda in India since 1962, he adds.

“World peace can happen only if there is friendship between India and China. We oppose war of any kind,” he says.

He is the only Indian to be given awards by China’s former premier Wen Jiabao and its current president Xi Jinping during visits to New Delhi, for his commitment to friendship with the Chinese people. Former consul general Zheng Xiyuan referred to him as “one of our true friends and comrades”.

The hostilities on each side of the border have prevented Bhaskaran and Achari from issuing a public statement in a bid to calm the anger. Well-wishers have advised them against taking any step that might be interpreted as being pro-China.

But they are thinking seriously about how to use the ICFA, which was instrumental in persuading Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to recognise China in 1950 and make India the second non-communist country – after what was then Burma – to establish diplomatic ties.

The ICFA foundations were laid in the then princely state of Mysore by parliamentarian Mulka Govinda Reddy in November 1949, soon after the People’s Republic of China came into being. Its sole purpose was to establish friendly relations with the Chinese people to achieve world peace together. Its charter then, as now, declares its aim to “effectively combat the imperialist manoeuvres aiming at making Asians fight Asians by sowing seeds of discord and ill will among them”.

Reddy led the first goodwill mission in January 1950 at the invitation of Chairman Mao Zedong’s government. India soon became a cultural ally and the ICFA served as an important tool in formulating exchanges connecting Chinese scholars, artists and scientists with Indian audiences, while encouraging the study of Mandarin, and business ties.

Recognising the role of the ICFA, the Ministry of External Affairs backed it in 1955 by appointing the former first ambassador K M Panikkar as the chairman of the national executive and foreign minister Syed Mahmood as the vice-president.

ICFA’s rejection of political and religious affiliations attracted leading communist and non-communist members, giving it the appearance of a popular peace movement. During its peak years, it had more than 158 primary and district branches, from Bombay and Calcutta to Delhi and Kerala, and included politicians, academicians, journalists and businessmen. A 1956 advertisement in The Times of India announced annual membership for 1 rupee. Last year, the ICFA raised its membership fee from 10 rupees to 100 rupees (US$1.25) to cover the expense of its publications.

Historian Arunabh Ghosh of Harvard University is among those to have studied the ICFA’s activities between 1950 and 1960, an era when ties flourished. He highlights the numerous activities of ICFA and its counterpart, the China-India Friendship Association (CIFA), which was founded in 1952 and remained the principal agency through which cultural and other forms of exchange with India were channelled.

These included photo exhibitions like New China at a Glance, on the People’s Liberation Army, and the first visual glimpses of Chinese culture through films like The White-Haired Girl (Bai Mao Nu), based on the folktale of Xi’er and her lover Dachun, representing the oppression of millions of peasants before liberation. It was shown in 1952 and, three years later, Prithviraj Kapoor led a delegation of 11 filmmakers to China, showing Indian movies like Awara, Do Bigha Zameen and Barsaat to Chinese audiences in the hope they would fall in love with the musical romance of Raj Kapoor and Nargis.

Shen Dingli, from Fudan University, remembers the movies being screened. Such programmes “truly helped to advance Chinese understanding and appreciation of Indian culture, and hence build trust”, he says. As a South Asia specialist and member of CIFA, in later years Shen used the platform to advance mutual understanding between China and India at an unofficial level. He launched the Shanghai Initiative, a high-level dialogue between China, India, Pakistan and the United States on nuclear arms control and regional non-proliferation between 1994 and 1998.

Writing in the 1961 issue of the China Quarterly on Sino-Indian cultural relations, Herbert Passin, a scholar on China and Japan, noted that the ICFA involved the participation of tens of thousands of people nationwide. “Strongly supported, it can be expected at all times to exert a pro-Chinese influence on Indian thought and politics.”

All this changed dramatically in 1962, the year Bhaskaran, then a young student activist inspired by the Marxist movement, joined the ICFA. War broke out as Chinese forces seized the Galwan valley and Pangong Tso – which are again the site of confrontation today – along with the Chip Chap valley, areas in Aksai Chin and the North East Frontier Areas.

http://t.cn/A6yaYLGV