The Chushul brigade headquarters mess which shelters artefacts including a gold statue of the Laughing Buddha seized by the Sikh regiments nearby the Rezang La-Rechin La ridgeline, a tension spot between Indian and Chinese troops.
In British history of India, the Sikh and Punjab regiments were part of an eight-nation mission to neutralise ‘China’s Boxer Rebellion,’ an uprising led by young farmers and workers against foreign influence.
China’s Boxer fighters had threatened foreigners and kept 400 in Beijing’s Foreign Legation Quarter, so the 20,000 alliance troops reached Beijing to fight. 8,000 of them were of the British Army from India, mostly Sikh and Punjabi. The siege lasted 55 days.
After the victory, the British army indulged in looting. French and Russian troops killed civilians and raped women.
The statue of the Laughing Buddha at the army mess in Chushul was an item brought back by the soldiers. A gilded bronze bell dating back to the 1368-1644 Ming dynasty – one of the missing 16 – looted by a British general which was eventually returned by the Indian Army to Beijing’s Temple of Heaven in 1995.
An Indian army commander said this historical context could be a reason why China’s People’s Liberation Army Psychological operations pay so much attention to the Punjabi or Sikh soldiers.
The Chinese leadership used the humiliation suffered after the revolution to build a movement to restore the country. Maxwell also believed there was a link between this mindset and the 1962 Sino-Indian War, said Australian journalist Neville Maxwell in his book, India’s China War.
China’s PLA installed loudspeakers at the points of tension. They accuse New Delhi of escalating tensions to divert from domestic issues and even play Punjabi pop numbers marking at the Indian soldiers deployed to counter PLA.
The last when India-China talked, external affairs minister S Jaishankar had a two-hour-long meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow that helped ease tensions between the two countries. But there is no resolution is round the corner.
