He said that instead of insisting on the resolutions made, Atal Bihari Vajpayee called the problem “intractable” and put it on the backburner while Narsimha Rao brought back humiliation in the form of a “treaty of peace and tranquility” on their visits to China.

Criticising Pt Nehru’s Non-aligned Movement (NAM) and foreign policy, Jethmalani said wrong foreign policy has put India in a state of humiliation and successive Governments and ministers had compounded it.

Jethmalani said, “Pt Nehru concealed from the people of India that Chinese were making claims to large chunks of Indian territory but did not opt for arbitration and ignored Article 51 of the Indian Constitution,” that called for arbitration. “Within the last three months there have been 120 intrusions in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh by the Chinese. Yet the defence minister says: ‘Unfortunately the boundary is not properly marked between the two countries.’ How is it that only the Chinese are trespassing and not the Indians?”

Stating that it was America and Israel who helped India in crisis, Jethmalani said: “Democracies have not attacked us ever, but helped us. Yet gratitude is not a part of foreign policy.”

“Communism,” he said, “was among the three causes of war outlined by Mahatma Gandhi, and the communists of India should be modest enough to recognise that.” Jethmalani said in addition to 93,000 square kilometers of “Bharat Mata,” the Chinese captured Indian markets with subsidised goods, wiping out our small-scale industries yet the communists in this country are not in a position of speak up for at least a portion of it.