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India denies quoting a price for Dalai Lama's asylum

India has denied the secret trade-off theory, suggesting that New Delhi granted asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959 in return for an American commitment to train 400 Indian nuclear scientists who later helped it produce nuclear weapons.

"To me, the whole theory sounds like a fairy tale. I have never heard this before," said T P Sreenivasan, deputy chief of the Indian mission in Washington, at a panel discussion in the American capital organised by the National Security News Service yesterday.

The veteran diplomat was responding to former US Marine Major William Carson's claim that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had told the Americans that if India was to accept the Dalai Lama, the US would have to help India develop nuclear weapons.

"A security assurance is not enough, Nehru said. India required its own nuclear guarantee against China," Maj Carson said. [China would test a nuclear weapon only five years later in October 1964. But India was aware of China's nuclear weapons efforts and overwhelming conventional force.]

Maj Carson said that though the US had helped provide the nuclear reactor, President Dwight D Eisenhower was unwilling to make a direct transfer of nuclear weapons technology. US envoys offered Nehru a compromise: the US would accept 400 Indian students into American graduate programmes in the nuclear sciences.

He said the course of negotiations left no doubt that Nehru would assign the US-trained scientists to produce nuclear weapons.

India tested its first nuclear device in May 1974, less than 16 years after Nehru and the American envoys shook hands over the deal, he added.

Sreenivasan, in response, said, "As far as I know, there is no link between the Dalai Lama's arrival in India and the arrival of Indian scientists in the United States. Moreover, our nuclear programme has been indigenously developed over a period of time.

"India and the United States have a long history of scientific exchange and many scientists have come to the United States in pursuit of knowledge.

"What I know is that the decision to welcome the Dalai Lama to India was India's own and this decision was dictated by the consideration that the Dalai Lama was the spiritual leader of the Tibetans and that he and his followers had nowhere else to go at that time."

He said, "It should also be noted that even though the Dalai Lama and his followers have lived in India for several years and are treated as our honoured guests, they are not permitted to engage in political activities."

Earlier, Carson recalled that in the spring of 1958, he, as the American defence intelligence officer in Hong Kong, learnt from a colleague in the British embassy in Beijing that the Chinese were planning a campaign of final pacification in Tibet for the spring of 1959.

He said President Eisenhower summoned his most trusted national security aides -- a four-star general and two top state department officials -- and told them that the way to thwart the Chinese was to spirit the Dalai Lama out of Tibet before the Chinese could get to him.

Carson said Eisenhower believed India could be persuaded to grant political asylum to the Dalai Lama, but knew he would have to offer some very strong incentives. Nehru was a "notoriously hard bargainer and the favour Eisenhower was asking carried great risk to India", he added.

Nehru made other demands that complicated Carson's job. The Indians required complete deniability of any prior knowledge. And India would not allow any supporting activity on its territory.

Using limited aviation support from Tibet, and moving supplies through an import-export house created for the purpose in Sri Lanka, Carson readied the escape route during the Himalayan winter of 1958-59.

On the night of March 17, 1959, the Dalai Lama and his 84-person retinue slipped out of the summer palace in Lhasa. The party moved by night, navigating with the help of a Hudson bomber. They hid by day, relying on blowing snow to cover signs of their movement.

The Dalai Lama crossed the Indian border on March 31, 1959, and Nehru's government granted him asylum.

UNI

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