India's fading Chinese community faces painful war past

Kolkata (AFP) - Suspected of being a spy or a China sympathiser, nine-year-old Indian-born Monica Liu and her family were loaded into railway cars for a detention camp in India's Rajasthan desert.

Liu was one of about 3,000 people of Chinese descent, most of them Indian citizens, rounded up and held at the fenced camp without trial after India's month-long border war with China in 1962.

During her five years in Deoli camp, built in the 1800s by the British, Liu remembers the heat, lack of schooling and the sound of her mother crying "from morning till night".

But her strongest memories are of her family's desperation once they were finally freed without charge by India's government.

"We didn't have a single penny," Liu said in the eastern city of Kolkata, recalling sleeping in a bus shelter with her siblings and parents.

India's Chinese community, whose ancestors flocked to Kolkata and the northeast to do business, bore the brunt of India's humiliating war with neighbouring China -- fought 52 years ago this month.

Over the decades, the two Asian giants have taken steps to heal their festering distrust, a legacy of the war over their 3,225 kilometre-long (2,000 mile) border.

But tensions remain, with Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to New Delhi in September to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi overshadowed by a troop stand-off along their border.