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THE NORTH EAST FRONTIER AGENCY (pop. 450,000) is almost completely isolated from the rest of India. Though nominally part of the state of Assam, the rambling (31,000 sq. mi.) region is administered directly by the central government because Prime Minister Nehru wants to preserve its primeval aboriginal character. In some of N.E.F.A's valleys are nightmarish rain forests where animist tribesmen invoke among their deities a Dysentery God who, when angry, racks their guts with a quick but painful death.
Imperialist Product. Red China's first attempt to bite off an Indian finger came after its subjugation of Tibet, when it repudiated the so-called McMahon Line, the border arranged between British India and Tibet in 1914, and named after the head British negotiator. Running across N.E.F.A. from Bhutan to Burma, the line set the border at the watershed at the crest of the highest mountains. But the Red Chinese declared the McMahon Line an "illegal, null and void" product of "British imperialism," claimed that the actual border ran along the southern foot of the mountains.
Suddenly, new Chinese maps began falling like snow, extending the land grab all along the Himalayan frontier. China now claimed the southern slopes of most of the major trans-Himalayan passes so as to be able to control absolutely access routes to the North. To India's protests, Red China's Chou En-lai replied that the maps were really "old" ones that his young nation had not got around to revising. India had also been lulled in 1954 when it concluded a trade treaty with the Chinese based on the ancient Buddhist code of Panch Shila, or principles of coexistence, which guaranteed, among other things, mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity.
As it turned out, all the respect came from India. Less than a year after the Panch Shila agreement, the Chinese began building a military road between Western China and Tibet that cut 112 miles across Ladakh. So casually did India patrol the area that the road was not discovered until 1958—though it had been shown on available Chinese maps for more than a year. But only after squashing the Tibetan revolt in 1959 did the Chinese go out of their way to provoke India.
Moving into Ladakh in force, the Chinese waylaid an Indian patrol near Kongka Pass in October 1959, killed nine men.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles across India in N.E.F.A., a party of 38 Indian soldiers in Longju beat off an ambush by 300 Chinese.
China's blatant resort to force finally woke India up. Slowly Menon began to build up India's defenses in the Himalayas. Krishna Menon's troop units were strengthened with thousands of additional soldiers in N.E.F.A., Sikkim and Ladakh and issued new mountain fighting equipment. Some 4,000 miles of new military roads are being laid through the slopes to ease the problem of supply; bulldozers are shaving away hillsides to straighten out the hairpin turns in old roads. Most of the mountain roads, however, are still little better than mountain-goat paths on which, says one survivor, "you lean to the inside, put your hand out toward space, and don't look."