Although critics called the Panch Shila naive, Nehru calculated that in the absence of either the wherewithal or a policy for defence of the Himalayan region,India's best guarantee of security was to establish a psychological buffer zone in place of the lost physical buffer of Tibet. It is the popular perception that the catch phrase of India's diplomacy with China in the 1950s was Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai, which means, in Hindi, "Indians and Chinese are brothers" but in 1958, Nehru had privately told G. Parthasarathi, the Indian envoy to China not to trust the Chinese at all and send all communications directly to him, bypassing the Defence Minister VK Krishna Menon since his communist background clouded his thinking about China.
Therefore, in unison with diplomacy, Nehru sought to initiate a more direct dialogue between the peoples of China and India in various ways, including culture and literature. Around that time, the famous Indian artist (painter) Beohar Rammanohar Sinha from Visva-BharatiSantiniketan, who had earlier decorated the pages of the original Constitution of India, was sent to China in 1957 on a Government of India fellowship to establish a direct cross-cultural and inter-civilisation bridge.