How K.M. Panikkar became India's first ambassador to China

Mint

13-07-2025

The choice of K.M. Panikkar as India's ambassador to China in 1947 has in retrospect been the cause of both controversy and debate. But it was a decision based on many factors. The first was trust and long-standing friendship. Nehru had known Panikkar since his days in Amritsar and at the Hindustan Times in the 1920s. He had never lost track of Panikkar's career, following his arguments for federalism and for getting the princes on board with the Indian Union. The Indian prime minister had also read Panikkar's works on foreign policy and history, especially during the war years, with keen interest. His sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit's endorsement of Panikkar's intelligence counted with Nehru too. He had always been thinking about how to present India to the wider world, and from his reading of Panikkar's work, he knew this ambition was a shared one. Now that India was looking to consolidate its position as a postcolonial power, particularly in South Asia, that presentation became even more important.
India was already in the unique position of being an international presence by 1945, from Dumbarton Oaks to San Francisco. But with independence, new eyes and ears were needed. Nehru insisted that it could not be those who had worked previously for the British as 'that would in effect be a British approach with the background of British foreign policy', and would lead to India being looked upon as a satellite of the empire. 'I am anxious to have public men as our ambassadors,' he mused to Bajpai (G.S. Bajpai), '… more especially with regard to some of our first appointments. Panikkar, by 1948, was very much a public man, and what was more invaluably, he had shown himself to be more than capable of wearing multiple hats.
Also read: How to build AI literacy and become a power user
India did not as yet have trained career diplomats. Even as Krishna Menon reported a keen interest from European capitals to establish relations with the newly independent India, there was a severe manpower crisis, one that was accentuated with the transfer of power and Partition.
To put things in perspective, independent India needed about three hundred diplomats to start with. There were only about fifty people actually available who commanded enough experience to qualify. Small wonder that Girija Shankar Bajpai was forced to reply to Menon that 'the possibility of opening new missions abroad is scant in the extreme'.
With personnel in short supply and India dealing with successive internal crises in the wake of transfer of power and partition, Nehru simply couldn't afford to send people he didn't know to important postings. This often resulted in 'strange choices', like Asaf Ali's appointment as India's ambassador to Washington DC in January 1947, and some controversial ones, like his sister's appointment as India's ambassador to Moscow, all of which resulted in the creation of policies that were not always in line with those of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Panikkar's appointment, given this backdrop, was very much in accordance with Nehru's thinking about how to choose ambassadors in the first hectic days of Indian independence.
Then there was the fast-changing foreign policy situation regarding Tibet and China. Nehru had a vision for what he wanted to achieve in Asia. In 1946, he wrote for The New York Times, 'A free India will link together the Middle East with China. India is so situated as to form the centre of a group of Asian nations for defence as well as trade and commerce.' He wrote this essay against the backdrop of the excellent relations between India and Nationalist China in the inter-war years.
But the Asian Relations Conference should have been the first indicator that, while idealism was all very well, realpolitik and pragmatism should have been the first principles of the hour.
Nehru envisioned the ARC as a harbinger of solidarity when it was actually a mirror to how far that solidarity would go. Nationalist China was furious that India had invited Tibet as an independent country, suspecting Nehru of wanting to 'promote his personal prestige'. In addition, China was also outraged over the map hanging in the main conference hall, which showed Tibet outside China and its mention as India's neighbour. Nehru mollified the Chinese representatives by welcoming China as 'that great country to which Asia owes so much and from which so much is expected'.
In May 1947, Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) government, also known as the Nationalists, sent Luo Jialun as its ambassador to India as a gesture of support from one Asian country to the other.
Luo's appointment, short and ill-starred though it was, is little studied in India. According to his diary, he was summoned early in 1947 by the generalissimo and told that he would be going to India as the Republic of China's ambassador. The bespectacled serious-faced Luo was more of an academic than a diplomat and he was considerably startled at this request. But Chiang was persuasive. China was looking, he said, for a man with academic credentials and excellent knowledge of the Tibet issue. Cultural, civilisational and academic ties were to be the cornerstones of bilateral relations between independent India and China.
Luo fit this bill despite his own misgivings on the subject. He had always been an industrious, brilliant student, and he had trained in history at Princeton, Columbia, London, Paris and Berlin. In 1919, he had been a prominent leader of the May Fourth Movement, the cultural and anti-imperialist political movement which grew out of student protests in Peking and marked a move towards populist politics in China. At the time of his appointment as ambassador to India, Luo had taught history at universities across China and was a respected scholar in his own right. Chiang Kai-shek was aware of his political leanings and his academic accomplishments, and to his mind, the professor would be an asset in India.
Luo would live up to Chiang's hopes during his time in India, authoring a poem to celebrate Indian independence and a paper on Chinese sources for Indian history while he was in India. He also used his knowledge of frontier issues like Xinjiang and Tibet—knowledge that China could use to reinforce its own ideas of sovereignty over Tibet. Before leaving for India, Luo was personally briefed by Chiang Kai-shek. He was told to tell Nehru that, 'except for China's own interests, India's interest is the most important one to China'. He was also asked to keep an eye on the workings of the Muslim League and to see to it that the Chinese embassy in India functioned as a kind of research centre for Tibetan affairs.
Luo's arrival in India on 3 May 1947 was symbolic for many reasons. It coincided with China's victory in the Second World War and India's navigation of its final days of being a colony. It also coincided with the turning of the tide of civil war in China, with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the chairmanship of savvy, brutish Mao Tse-tung seeming ever more likely, and the winding down of the Raj's policies in Tibet.
By April 1947, the Foreign and Political Department was telling Hugh Richardson, its political officer in Gangtok, that if, in the light of the participation of a Tibetan delegation in the most recent Chinese National Assembly, China and Tibet should work out some kind of modus vivendi between them, India should neither object nor interfere. On 23 July 1947, in a message approved by His Majesty's Government, Tibet was informed that, after transfer of power, Lhasa would deal exclusively with New Delhi, 'upon whom alone the rights and obligations arising from existing treaty provisions will thereafter devolve'. Tibet agreed to abide by the Simla Convention (1914) and reserved its right to discuss the question of trade and boundaries in the future which, much to Richardson's irritation, it did not do.
As these niggles continued, in October 1947, India and China found themselves at odds over the question of the grant of an Indian visa to the newly appointed Chinese Amban or high official who would be proceeding to Lhasa via India. India insisted that the visa be granted subject to a no-objection certificate from Lhasa as per past precedent. China, on the other hand, said that the visa should be granted without consulting Lhasa at all.
These irritants were the backdrop against which Panikkar was dispatched to China. He would be taking over from K.P.S. Menon, India's agent-general in Chongqing since 1943. Menon was fully aware that he was in China at a time when it stood at the crossroads between the old and the new. He had reported from across Nationalist China now for five years: during the ongoing civil war and the slow unravelling of Kuomintang power and during the changing role and influence of the United States. From Menon's detailed, eloquent and brisk reports, Nehru understood just a little more than Chiang Kai-shek would have liked. By 1947, Menon was writing directly to Nehru, much as Panikkar would do.
Excerpted from A Man for all Seasons: The Life of K.M. Panikkar, with permission from Westland Books.
Also read: Frederick Forsyth's 'Jackal' is back in 2025