Inder Malhotra's series on 1962 war

[rohitvats]

^^^Add to the above - when SPP Thorat, then Eastern Army Commander, sent the papers of Operation Lal Qila (a table top exercise he had done) to him, he threw it out saying that IA was war-mongering. This exercise contained the exact sequence of war as it might happen given our military posture and infrastructure. As luck would have it, the Chinese followed the script in the exercise to the letter T.

During the lull in Chinese offensive in 1962, Nehru called SPP Thorat for opinion on likely action by Chinese...SPP Thorat said PLA will advance no further due to logistic issue. Thorat also showed him the OP Lal Quila papers.....on being questioned by Nehru as to why this was not shown to him, Thorat categorically said that for this, Nehru needs to question Menon. Nehru reaction was, "Menon, Menon, why do you have your knife into him. You don't know what an intellectual giant he is". To this, Thorat replied, "In this case, sir, we're yet to see the evidence".

[abhishek_sharma]

The courage of 13 Kumaon : Inder Malhotra

Amid the army’s ignominy in 1962, there were stories of incredible bravery — like the battle of Rezang La

So painful, indeed traumatic, is the story of the 1962 border war with China that while winding it up, the spotlight needs to be turned on whatever little did go right amidst the overwhelming disaster when almost everything else went unbelievably wrong. Sadly, the Indian army did disgrace itself. But it was the incompetence of the army high command, consisting largely of amiable frauds or flatterers who had flourished until then, which drove the army to its nadir, not the rank and file or young officers.

The lowest depth was reached, of course, in the Kameng division of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, when the general officer commanding (GOC) of Fourth Division, the once heavily decorated Major-General A. S. Pathania, losing his nerve, ordered the division to withdraw. He had tried to get his decision endorsed by the Corps Commander, Lieutenant-General B.M. Kaul, who was, as usual, flying around and therefore unavailable. The army chief, General P. N. Thapar, and the GOC in charge of the Eastern Army Command, Lieutenant-General L. P. Sen, who were present at the Corps headquarters didn’t want to interfere with the politically influential Kaul’s command. The avoidable retreat degenerated into rout and the rout into the nation’s shame.

Even so, Brigadier Hoshiar Singh, commanding his men atop Sela, refused to withdraw. He argued he was adequately equipped and fully prepared to take on the Chinese. He was forced to leave on pain of being court-martialled, and was ambushed and killed by the Chinese.

It must also be reported that while A. S. Pathania was guilty of what can only be called cowardice, his cousin, Major-General M. S. Pathania, fought gallantly at the Walong front in an adjoining division though he had eventually to yield ground to the advancing Chinese. There were many other similar instances of heavily outnumbered and outgunned Indian soldiers living up to the army’s glorious traditions of valour.

The brightest of the bright spots in the pervasive darkness of 1962, however, was the Battle of Rezang La at the other end of the high Himalayas in Ladakh. The place is a massive 16,000-feet-high feature in the narrow gap between the even higher mountains surrounding the strategic village of Chushul and the Spanggur Lake that stretches across both Indian and Chinese territories. Rezang La is therefore, vital for the defence of the crucially important Chushul. Any invader reaching there would have had a free run to Leh, the capital of the Ladakh province of J&K.

The 13th battalion of the Kumaon Regiment was entrusted with the defence of Chushul. Its C Company, consisting of 117 men, commanded by a major with the unusual name, Shaitan Singh, was responsible for holding Rezang La. He had deployed his three platoons across a two-kilometre frontage deftly with a view to protecting Rezang La from whatever side the Chinese might choose to attack. His men were well-entrenched and reasonably well-equipped. But they did not have mines, and the overhead shelter for the command posts was inadequate in sub-zero temperature.

It was at first light on November 18 that the first Chinese attack came. Two of the three Indian platoons opened relentless rifle, machine gun and mortar fire on the advancing Chinese and repulsed them. The Chinese casualties were heavy. Their immediate reaction was intense artillery firing on Indian positions. Later, they made a second attempt to occupy Rezang La, this time with a four-to-one numerical superiority. The Indian platoon that had previously held its fire confronted them with all the weaponry it had. After many of them had fallen, 20 of the survivors decided to charge the Indian platoon. A dozen Kumaonis jumped out of their trenches to take them on in hand-to-hand combat.

Having failed in their frontal onslaughts, the Chinese then attacked the Indian positions from the rear while keeping up the artillery and mortar barrage and eventually succeeded in overrunning the platoon shortly before China’s unilateral ceasefire.

Be it noted that these details, initially sketchy, were given to the battalion headquarters by the three grievously wounded survivors of the C Company who had managed to get there. The real glory and grandeur of the defence of Rezang La became known only three months later when, with the advent of spring, the first Indian party could climb up there. All the 109 soldiers were frozen as they had died with weapons in hand. Five of their comrades had been taken prisoner by the Chinese. Each had fired all the ammunition he had. The C Company had literally fought to the last man and the last bullet. The Chinese casualties had been removed but there was enough evidence to show that these were many.

It was also discovered that Major Shaitan Singh, who was constantly moving from one platoon to the other, was wounded by the Chinese firing. Two of his comrades tried to carry him to safety but he told them to put him down behind a boulder and go to fight the enemy. He later died on the same spot. His body was flown to his village near Jodhpur to be cremated with full military honours. For his exemplary leadership and extraordinary courage he was awarded the Param Vir Chakra. He was the second army man to win this highest gallantry award. Several other men of the company earned the Vir Chakra, also posthumously.

As it happened, among the dead there were three members of the same family, two brothers and their brother-in-law (sister’s husband). They were the ones who had given the company early warning of the Chinese assault. A large number of men, though not related to one another, belonged to the same village!

General K. S. Thimayya, the most celebrated Kumaoni and independent India’s fourth army chief, applauded the defenders of Rezang La in glowing terms, as did his successor more than a decade later, General T. N. Raina, also belonging to the Kumaon Regiment. Wrote Thimayya: “In military history you rarely come across such examples when facing such heavy odds the men fought to the last bullet and the last man”. Indeed, in the annals of war the name of 13 Kumaon deserves to be written in letters of gold.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator

[rohitvats]

^^^The memorial at Chusual for 13 Kumaon aptly reads, "How can man die better than facing fearfull odds, for ashes of his fathers and temples of his god".

To the story of 13 Kumaon, one must add the story of 2 Rajput on Namka Chu where Major Pant led his company in a hopeless position against the Chinese. Of the 112 men under his command, 82 were killed in action, including Major Pant. His last last words were: "Men of Rajput Regiment, you were born but to die for your country.God has selected this small river for which you must die. Stand up and fight as true Rajputs'. He for sure deserved a PVC and many others too - just that all was lost in the gloom of defeat.

[nachiket]

I remember the story of Subedar Joginder Singh and his platoon's heroics in the Tawang sector, because it was a chapter in the class 7 (or 8 ) Hindi textbook when I was in school. He and his platoon fought off two waves of Chinese and after losing half their men and using up all their ammo, bayonet charged the Chinese. They were eventually overpowered and Subedar Joginder Singh succumbed to his wounds in captivity. He was awarded the PVC posthumously. His wiki entry which contains the citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joginder_Singh_Sahnan

Sadly none of the events any of the wars fought by Independent India were ever a part of any of the History text books in school. (I went to school in the 90s)

[abhishek_sharma]

The Sheikh’s last stab: Inder Malhotra

In 1964, Sheikh Abdullah visited Pakistan again to suggest a confederation between India, Pakistan and Kashmir

Despite the fiasco of the marathon Swaran Singh-Zulfikar Ali Bhutto negotiations in the summer of 1963 and the end of the Anglo-American pressure for mediation over Kashmir later that year (‘Mirage of Mediation’, IE, January 23), Nehru did not give up the search for a modus vivendi with Pakistan, though he knew it was an uphill task. Towards the end of the year, two factors goaded him to accelerate the quest.

The first, which did not become known until several years after his death when his Commonwealth secretary (later foreign secretary), Y. D. Gundevia, revealed it in his book Outside the Archives, was a letter from a “friend” whose name the prime minister told no one though he shared the letter’s gist with a few of his confidants. The letter-writer had advised him not to leave both the China and the Kashmir problems to his successors but to solve at least one in his lifetime.

Secondly, the prolonged imprisonment of his old friend and comrade and Kashmir’s tallest leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, was weighing on Nehru’s mind. The first “prime minister” of the sensitive state after Independence, the Sheikh was dismissed and detained without trial in 1953 because he suddenly wanted Kashmir to be independent of both India and Pakistan, which was totally unacceptable.

The Sheikh’s successor in Srinagar, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, reluctantly released him, largely at Nehru’s insistence, in 1958, only to re-arrest him almost immediately. This time around the Sheikh was charged with “treason” under what came to be known as the Kashmir Conspiracy case that dragged on and on.

In the last week of December 1963, a tremendous upheaval erupted in the Kashmir Valley because a holy relic — a hair of the Prophet’s beard — was stolen from the Hazaratbal shrine. Not until it was recovered and certified by religious leaders as genuine was a semblance of calm restored (‘Hanging by a Hair’, IE, August 9, 2009). Nehru’s mind was made up that the Sheikh must be released and his help sought to bring normalcy and stability back to Kashmir. About instant reconciliation with his old friend he had no doubt whatsoever. He was privy, however, to the Sheikh’s firm belief that without an understanding between India and Pakistan there could be no peace or stability in Kashmir.

Surprisingly, Nehru’s fiercely loyal Intelligence Chief, B. N. Mullik, vehemently opposed his idea of withdrawing the Kashmir Conspiracy case and promised to prove the charges within a few weeks. Furiously, the prime minister rebuked him.

On being released from the Jammu jail, together with his lieutenant, Mirza Afzal Beg, on April 8, 1964, Sheikh Abdullah had an invitation from Nehru waiting for him. It requested him to come to Delhi as soon as possible and stay with Nehru at Teen Murti House so that the two could discuss the future rather than the past.

Since the Sheikh had already planned to go to Srinagar via Bhadarwah and Kishtwar areas of Jammu, and then address a series of public meetings in the valley, he got to Delhi early in May. It is already well known that while agreeing to go to Pakistan to explore the possibility of finding a solution, the Sheikh argued that a confederation of India, Pakistan and Kashmir was the best way to cut the Gordian knot. This was unacceptable to Nehru who said that a federation was the maximum he could agree to.

Even so, in his talks with President Ayub Khan, the Sheikh did put forward the idea of a confederation. Ayub rejected it out of hand. Without going into details, the two sides simply announced the failure of the Sheikh’s mission, but added, optimistically, that a meeting between Nehru and Ayub would take place in Delhi in June, and that the Sheikh “would not be far away from the conference table”. All this came to pass on the evening before the day of Nehru’s death when, according to his schedule, the Sheikh and his caravan left Rawalpindi for Muzzafarabad, the capital of “Azad” Kashmir.

This should also explain why the Sheikh’s visit, during which he was given a hero’s welcome, was completely overshadowed by Nehru’s death and particularly by the tremendous outpouring of grief across Pakistan, including the part of Kashmir under its control (‘Mourning Nehru in Pakistan’, IE, May 29, 2010). So much so that it was nearly a month after our return from Pakistan that I learned of the Kashmir leader’s programme to stay in Pakistan for 16 days that was so cruelly cut short.

Even today it is not widely known that the Sheikh’s original plan was to go to Pakistan by walking across the Ceasefire Line (now Line of Control). Nehru had gone along with the idea, little realising the risks it entailed. After all, the dividing line was heavily defended on both sides. What if some Pakistani soldier shot at the “intruders” from the Indian side? Mridula Sarabhai, a former general secretary of the Congress who had become a staunch supporter of Sheikh Abdullah after his imprisonment, was the first to raise the alarm. Gundevia and G. Parthasarthy, then high commissioner to Pakistan, who was in Delhi for consultations, appreciated her concerns, and with Nehru’s consent, persuaded the Sheikh not to cross the Ceasefire Line but to fly to Rawalpindi.

What Ayub Khan had to say in his memoirs, Friends, Not Masters, published in 1967, is revealing: “When Sheikh Abdullah and Mirza Afzal Beg came to Pakistan in 1964, they had brought the absurd proposal for a confederation between India, Pakistan and Kashmir. I told him (sic) plainly that we would have nothing to do with it. It is curious that whereas we were seeking the salvation of Kashmiris, they had been forced to mention an idea which, if pursued, would lead to our enslavement. It was clear that this was what Mr. Nehru had told them to say to us.”

When the Sheikh was shown the book (in jail, yet again, though this time in Kodaikanal in the south), he immediately wrote to Ayub: “The late Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru... never forced us to put before you any particular proposal. No, we are not made that way”.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.

[ramana]

The Sheikh’s successor in Srinagar, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, reluctantly released him, largely at Nehru’s insistence, in 1958, only to re-arrest him almost immediately. This time around the Sheikh was charged with “treason” under what came to be known as the Kashmir Conspiracy case that dragged on and on.

In the last week of December 1963, a tremendous upheaval erupted in the Kashmir Valley because a holy relic — a hair of the Prophet’s beard — was stolen from the Hazaratbal shrine. Not until it was recovered and certified by religious leaders as genuine was a semblance of calm restored (‘Hanging by a Hair’, IE, August 9, 2009). Nehru’s mind was made up that the Sheikh must be released and his help sought to bring normalcy and stability back to Kashmir. About instant reconciliation with his old friend he had no doubt whatsoever. He was privy, however, to the Sheikh’s firm belief that without an understanding between India and Pakistan there could be no peace or stability in Kashmir.

Surprisingly, Nehru’s fiercely loyal Intelligence Chief, B. N. Mullik, vehemently opposed his idea of withdrawing the Kashmir Conspiracy case and promised to prove the charges within a few weeks. Furiously, the prime minister rebuked him.

If S was arrested in 1958 and in 1963 the case was still going on how could the police chief sa he would prove the charges in a few weeks? What stopped him all the years?

[ramana]

Indian Air Force in Wars-Jasjit Singh

Important segment relevant to this thread...

Sino-Indian War 1962

Relations between the PRC and India had begun to deteriorate after 1959 when on one side Chinese military had killed a dozen Indian policemen manning the border in the High Himalayas, and the Tibetan revolt which led to the Dalai Lama fleeing to India. As of now there are nearly 150,000 Tibetan refugees living in India most of them in the Himalayan regions alongside the Dalai Lama. Indian defence minister Krishna Menon, a brilliant man who strongly believed that China was not a threat and whose personalized style of functioning often cut through military command chains, had left the higher defence organization in disarray when the Chinese struck on 20th October, 1962. The Indian Army had assumed responsibility for the borders only the previous year.

There were clear failures of assessment of intelligence about the Chinese capabilities and intentions beyond generalised conclusions based on simplistic extrapolations. What perhaps tilted the final balance in defence decision making at the top was that not only did Prime Minister Nehru did not expect the Chinese to launch a major offensive, but he seems to have a great belief that the Indian army was well prepared and could handle any situation. An objective study of Indian foreign and defence policy of that period by an Israeli scholar concluded that “Nehru was oblivious to the relative weakness of the Indian Army, to the inadequacies of its logistics, numbers, and training, and the impact of all these factors on its ability to carry out India’s Forward Policy in the face of massive Chinese military reaction.”4 He seems to have not included the Air Force in the calculations one way or the other; and it is not clear if he consulted the air chief at any time. The Defence Minister who should have briefed him correctly perhaps did not. This was a different Nehru from that who directed the military strategy so effectively in the Defence Committee of the Cabinet during the 1947-48 war. Nehru’s “faith that even if he was underestimating the Chinese threat, the Indian Army could successfully cope with any resulting scenario” only tended to work against looking at alternatives in case the Chinese did not act as they had in the past.5

The most critical factor adverse to Indian Army operations was of logistics requirements. There were really no roads beyond the few leading to a couple of hill stations built by the British. Building roads in the Himalayan Mountains would take time and the construction work had started only after 1959. The army was thus dependent on air supply only; and air supply had its own problems. “The paucity of road communications on the Indian side of the border was such that the deployment, maintenance and even the very survival of ground forces was dependent upon air supply. This was especially true of Ladakh, as right up to August 1962, Leh was still to be connected by a road.”6 Meanwhile the Chinese were pushing their claim line further into Indian territory. The nature of the challenge may be grasped by the fact that in June 1962 the Army required a total of 44,000 tons to be airlifted by the end of the year in Ladakh, while total capacity was less than half (21,600 tons) of this requirement. The situation in the eastern sector was worse.

The IAF put in a Herculean effort to supply the army by air in spite of shortages of aircraft and aerial delivery equipment. The classical example that stands out is the airlift of three AMX light tanks from Chandigarh to Chushul airfield in Ladakh which was under heavy attack by the Chinese army. The urgency of the task did not allow time for dismantling the tank’s turret to bring the weight down to permissible levels. The An-12 aircrew decided to reduce the fuel to the barest minimum (which would not permit any diversion) and the tanks were manhandled into the aircraft and ferried to Chushul and immediately went into action. Chushul was saved.

On the other hand the hazards of aerial dropping aside, dropping zones were few and far between, and any minor error in air drop in the Himalayan regions (in west and east) would result in significant loss of dropped supplies. A handful of light transport squadrons and a few helicopters in service performed far beyond their capabilities. The worst handicap for the army was the deficit in force levels and reinforcements that did not possess winter clothing. The rapidly moved up troops, (to heights of 10,000 to 18,000 ft) were not acclimatized and hence were fighting under severe adverse physical limitations. Given the institutional as well cultural weaknesses to analyse and assess the enemy’s capabilities and intentions beyond the “bean count” this created a serious deficiency in our ability to make an objective assessment so vital to military operational planning. This inherited weakness came from the infirmities that had developed over the previous decade at the higher inter-service levels and even above that at the higher defence management institutions.

The most adverse factor that contributed to the defeat of Indian Army in 1962 was the nonuse of combat air power of the IAF. This was no doubt due to the dissipation of a coherent functioning of the higher defence organization due to the personalized way of functioning of Krishna Menon as the defence minister. Looking back, one can identify multiple reasons for this serious lapse which might have made the critical difference since the Chinese Air Force, though reported to possess over 2,600 combat aircraft, would have had serious problems of operating from airfields in Tibet (at an average altitude of 10,000 ft) and would have been handicapped in payload and fuel supplies. The information about airfields in Tibet was even more sketchy and vague even on the number of airfields let alone the deployment of Chinese air force on them. The only reference available in the official history is to the use of the air force to bomb and strafe Tibetan forces in the early 1950’s and to 102 air violations in the Ladakh sector 52 of which took place during a six month period in early 1962.

The most likely causes of not employing combat air power can be traced to multiple factors. Firstly, at the political level there were serious concerns about the Chinese likelihood of bombing Indian cities. It needs to be noted that most of the political leaders were conscious of the city bombing of the Second World War and the havoc it had created among people; and more so the Japanese fleet having bombed Indian cities (though only with a handful 250lb bombs) from Madras to Calcutta on India’s east coast in early 1942 which had led to the British governor ordering the evacuation of Madras city. Secondly, Indian army leadership was deeply worried that the use of IAF combat squadrons for close air support in the high Himalayas would not be effective particularly since the army organization for close air support was nonexistent at that time. Thirdly, the Army leadership was concerned that the Chinese air force may retaliate to IAF being employed in a combat role and could disrupt the air drop campaign which was considered more important. The IAF apparently had not thought through the potential of interdiction and did not recommend close air support, the only mission the army was interested in. Lastly, it appears that the US embassy also advised that combat air power should not be used on the grounds of its being “escalatory.” We lost the war, especially near dramatically in the eastern sector where the Chinese finally declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew even from the territory they still claim.

One of the few objective analysis of the 1962 war.

[abhishek_sharma]

On the back foot: Inder Malhotra

An argument in the Lok Sabha over Nehru’s faulty China policy led to the only no-confidence motion against his government.

In an earlier column (‘Purge with no losers’, IE, March 19), a passing reference was made to the first and only motion of no-confidence in the Nehru government, nearly nine months after the catastrophic border war with China in 1962. At least a glimpse of this unique event is necessary, if only to reflect the national mood in those tormenting times.

The first point to be made is that the highly emotional and usually eloquent discussion that lasted nearly 24 hours spread out over four working days, all too often descended to a low level of petty personal attacks, sometimes bordering on the scurrilous. To cite only one of numerous examples, socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, a powerful orator who had made one of the half a dozen finest speeches during the debate, slamming the government’s policies across the board, spoilt it all by embarking on a shabby tirade against the prime minister personally: “The government was spending on Nehru Rs 25,000 a day”, that even his “dog needed security”, that the presence of B.K. Nehru, R.K. Nehru, General B.M. Kaul and other Kashmiris in the higher echelons of the government “proved” that the prime minister was “guilty of nepotism”, and much else in the same vein.

Finance Minister Morarji Desai, not a great admirer of Nehru, took Lohia on, point by point, and hit him hard. He reserved his sharpest condemnation of the socialist leader for the latter’s observation that Nehru was “plotting” to ensure that his daughter succeeded him and that this would give newspaper readers every morning “a comely face to behold”. “Dr Lohia”, said Desai, “is a brilliant man, but his brilliance has run amok”.

Of course, name-calling wasn’t a one-way street. Congress MPs were equally unrestrained. Some of them accused Acharya Kripalani of having “defalcated Rs 25,000 from the funds of a Gandhian organisation”. Some others made tasteless remarks about the Acharya being at odds with his wife. He retorted: “I am neither henpecked, nor do I kick my wife when she disagrees with me”.

Secondly, there were more than half a dozen parties in the Lok Sabha of which the now-defunct Swatantra Party, a party of big business, was then the largest, though not large enough to be recognised as the opposition. However, these parties couldn’t table the motion jointly because, even at the height of their unity against the Congress, they were like a gaggle of squabbling geese. It thus fell to Kripalani, formerly a comrade of Nehru and other leaders of the freedom movement, to sponsor the motion. The Congress benches made much of it. Nehru did so with subtlety.

He had heard, the prime minister said, leaders of the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and the DMK, were all in “serried ranks behind General Kripalani”. What had “brought together this curious array”, he added, was not the dislike of the government so much as the dislike of him. He also twitted three of the opposition’s main speakers — Kripalani, Lohia and Minoo Masani — who had won three key by-elections in April-May, saying that they “were still excited over their electoral victory”.

As for the substance of the debate, the government was clearly on the back foot. For, although its domestic and economic policies were also under attack, the focus was on Nehru’s faulty China policy and Krishna Menon’s appalling performance as defence minister that had led to a military debacle and political disaster. More than once, there was a suggestion that in Menon’s case, it was not merely incompetence but also “something much worse”. When the Congress benches protested that the opposition’s insinuation against the former minister was “malicious”, the retort from the other side was: “So, you have sacked an innocent man!”

Nehru spoke at some length to deny Kripalani’s charge that the government had concealed from the country Chinese occupation of Indian territory but Kripalani, in his reply to the debate, quoted chapter and verse about Aksai Chin to confute the prime minister.

On economic issues, there were tense exchanges between Lohia and Nehru. As a forerunner to today’s controversy over the poverty line, the socialist leader contended that an average Indian had to live on “three annas a day” (a sum equal to today’s 20 paise at 1963 prices) and Nehru insisted that this figure was “absurdly low”.

For my then newspaper, The Statesman, I had covered the debate elaborately. At the end of the fourth day, my conclusion — on which the next morning’s banner headline was based — was that Kripalani’s motion “had been defeated, but not Kripalani”.

The narrative of this extraordinary event cannot be complete without a mention of the two revealing sidelights. In the first place, the Communist Party of India (at that time still undivided) had refused to support the no-confidence motion but had used the occasion to demand the dismissal of the “two reactionary ministers in the Nehru cabinet, Morarji Desai and S.K. Patil”. Communist leader Hiren Mukherjee had made his plea with customary oratorical skill. Patil, as good a parliamentarian as the best of them, hit back in kind. He read out an editorial in the Soviet newspaper Pravda to underscore that Hiren Babu was “only his master’s voice”.

Secondly, the Communists were not the only ones to disassociate themselves from the no-confidence motion. Among many others on the opposition benches was Frank Anthony, nominated to represent the Anglo-Indian community, who also led a small group of independent parliamentarians. He was unsparing in telling the Congress party what was wrong with it. On China and Menon, no one was more trenchant than him.

Yet he argued that whatever the weaknesses of the Congress, it alone had given the country “democratic continuity and political coherence”. Moreover, to Nehru had been given “absolute power, and to that extent his responsibility was also absolute”. Anthony concluded on a note of prayer that God give Nehru “the strength, the determination and aye, the ruthlessness to sweep clean because that’s the only way of democratic survival”.

This obviously was more heartening to the Congress and its leader than the easily anticipatable rejection of the no-confidence motion by 346 votes to 61.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.

[ramana]

History proved Lohia right that JLN was grooming his daughter IG to take over and she did and cleaned up with the vigor that Frank Anthony wanted!

[ramana]

Busy till the end: Inder Malhotra

Nehru did not, in the end, ‘defeat time’. But he utilised every minute he had

It goes without saying that “China’s perfidy in 1962”, as most Indians called it then, had shattered Nehru in more ways than one. Yet, the physical impact of the trauma hadn’t become noticeable for a rather long time. Strangely, even the after-effects of a viral infection in his urinary tract in the spring of 1962 had not registered with his countrymen. They continued to believe what A.J. Toynbee had said in 1957: that Nehru “seemed to have defeated time”. This impression was perhaps strengthened when for nearly a year even after the debacle in the border war with China he went about performing his duties vigorously, often being combative with critics he thought were unfair.

However, age, strain and accumulated fatigue of years were bound to take their toll some day, and that happened on January 6, 1964, when he suffered a stroke at Bhubaneswar where he had gone to attend the annual Congress session.


Both the Congress leaders on the spot and the top functionaries of the government in Delhi bent over backwards to downplay his illness. The official word was that the prime minister was suffering from “high blood pressure” and had been advised complete rest for a few days. Though aware that this would not pass muster, the ministry of external affairs sent strict instructions to all Indian embassies that any suggestion by foreign governments or press that Nehru had had a stroke must be “refuted firmly”. Phone calls to South Block by Delhi-based diplomats got the same curt answer. But how long could the truth have been suppressed?

In any case, the Congress session over, top leaders had to return to Delhi. All that we, the hack pack, were told was that the PM’s plane would arrive around noon. A record gathering of journalists assembled at Palam and waited with bated breath as the IAF aircraft landed. Only the then home minister, G.L. Nanda, and some others came out. About Nehru’s whereabouts nobody was prepared to say a word. Dejected we drove back. Some distance away, we were stopped. From another road was coming the car of the prime minister who had landed at Palam’s air force base and been taken to his car in a wheelchair.


Whoever had organised this operation — reportedly it was the intelligence czar, B.N. Mullik, with some help from the then army chief, General J.N. Chaudhuri — had done a tremendous PR job. Far from whizzing past us, Nehru’s car stopped. We were asked to assemble around his vehicle in an orderly manner. Smiling wanly he told us, through the car window, that he had been taken ill but was now recovering and would be back to work “very soon”. From then onwards the “state of Panditji’s health” became the biggest news.

In an earlier column (‘Kamaraj’s formidable power’, IE, April 2) a full account has been given of Lal Bahadur Shastri’s appointment as minister without portfolio to assist the ailing prime minister and he did the best he could. But this did not prevent Nehru from insisting that all official papers requiring a decision should be sent to him as in the past. When his principal aides tried to reduce the burden on him, he called in secretary-general M.J. Desai and foreign secretary Y.D. Gundevia and rebuked them sharply.

In a few days, the prime minister was able to stand up though with a limp on the left side, and this photograph was flashed across the world. He also started taking walks in his garden, although sometimes these became too tiring. On January 22, he conveyed to the MEA that he would be attending office the next day and he duly did so. None of the senior officials wanted to embarrass him by receiving him at the entrance because they knew not in what state he might be.

Some of them hid behind doorways, however, to watch his progress, and nearly wept. For here was the man who had always strode rather than walked, had never used a lift and had run up the broad, red-stone stairs two at a time, but was now dragging himself painfully slowly. He also had to take the lift. Two securitymen never left his side, just in case.

Only after he had sat down behind his desk did his aides troop into his room to welcome him. He had a question for each one of them. What had happened to a particular matter he had discussed with them before going to Bhubaneswar? Had any progress been made? If not, why not?

One issue that appeared to be weighing rather heavily on his mind was the inauguration of the Indo-Nepal Gandak project by King Mahendra of Nepal at a small place on the border between the two countries with the charming name Bhainsalotan. He and the king had spoken about it just before he had fallen ill. He therefore ordered the foreign office to instruct the ambassador in Kathmandu to arrange the function on the earliest possible date convenient to the king.

Gundevia dragged his feet in the hope that he would thus save the prime minister an extremely hazardous journey in a small aircraft. A furious Nehru rang for a stenographer, dictated a “most urgent” telegram to the ambassador in Nepal and told the foreign secretary that he wanted an answer to it at once. May 5 suited King Mahendra. In the terrible heat and dust of the season, Nehru undertook the journey and saw to it that the function went through smoothly.

Returning home, K.L. Rao, his minister of water resources and an eminent irrigation engineer himself, embarked on “briefing” the prime minister on the Gandak project and went into dreary details. He had been in full flow for nearly 15 minutes when he looked up and saw that the prime minister was in no position to pay him any attention. This problem was to torment many an interlocutor of the great man in the next three weeks.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.

[Christopher Sidor]

Indian Air Force in Wars-Jasjit Singh

Important segment relevant to this thread...

Sino-Indian War 1962

Relations between the PRC and India had begun to deteriorate after 1959 when on one side Chinese military had killed a dozen Indian policemen manning the border in the High Himalayas, and the Tibetan revolt which led to the Dalai Lama fleeing to India. As of now there are nearly 150,000 Tibetan refugees living in India most of them in the Himalayan regions alongside the Dalai Lama. Indian defence minister Krishna Menon, a brilliant man who strongly believed that China was not a threat and whose personalized style of functioning often cut through military command chains, had left the higher defence organization in disarray when the Chinese struck on 20th October, 1962. The Indian Army had assumed responsibility for the borders only the previous year.

There were clear failures of assessment of intelligence about the Chinese capabilities and intentions beyond generalised conclusions based on simplistic extrapolations. What perhaps tilted the final balance in defence decision making at the top was that not only did Prime Minister Nehru did not expect the Chinese to launch a major offensive, but he seems to have a great belief that the Indian army was well prepared and could handle any situation. An objective study of Indian foreign and defence policy of that period by an Israeli scholar concluded that “Nehru was oblivious to the relative weakness of the Indian Army, to the inadequacies of its logistics, numbers, and training, and the impact of all these factors on its ability to carry out India’s Forward Policy in the face of massive Chinese military reaction.”4 He seems to have not included the Air Force in the calculations one way or the other; and it is not clear if he consulted the air chief at any time. The Defence Minister who should have briefed him correctly perhaps did not. This was a different Nehru from that who directed the military strategy so effectively in the Defence Committee of the Cabinet during the 1947-48 war. Nehru’s “faith that even if he was underestimating the Chinese threat, the Indian Army could successfully cope with any resulting scenario” only tended to work against looking at alternatives in case the Chinese did not act as they had in the past.5

The most critical factor adverse to Indian Army operations was of logistics requirements. There were really no roads beyond the few leading to a couple of hill stations built by the British. Building roads in the Himalayan Mountains would take time and the construction work had started only after 1959. The army was thus dependent on air supply only; and air supply had its own problems. “The paucity of road communications on the Indian side of the border was such that the deployment, maintenance and even the very survival of ground forces was dependent upon air supply. This was especially true of Ladakh, as right up to August 1962, Leh was still to be connected by a road.”6 Meanwhile the Chinese were pushing their claim line further into Indian territory. The nature of the challenge may be grasped by the fact that in June 1962 the Army required a total of 44,000 tons to be airlifted by the end of the year in Ladakh, while total capacity was less than half (21,600 tons) of this requirement. The situation in the eastern sector was worse.

The IAF put in a Herculean effort to supply the army by air in spite of shortages of aircraft and aerial delivery equipment. The classical example that stands out is the airlift of three AMX light tanks from Chandigarh to Chushul airfield in Ladakh which was under heavy attack by the Chinese army. The urgency of the task did not allow time for dismantling the tank’s turret to bring the weight down to permissible levels. The An-12 aircrew decided to reduce the fuel to the barest minimum (which would not permit any diversion) and the tanks were manhandled into the aircraft and ferried to Chushul and immediately went into action. Chushul was saved.

On the other hand the hazards of aerial dropping aside, dropping zones were few and far between, and any minor error in air drop in the Himalayan regions (in west and east) would result in significant loss of dropped supplies. A handful of light transport squadrons and a few helicopters in service performed far beyond their capabilities. The worst handicap for the army was the deficit in force levels and reinforcements that did not possess winter clothing. The rapidly moved up troops, (to heights of 10,000 to 18,000 ft) were not acclimatized and hence were fighting under severe adverse physical limitations. Given the institutional as well cultural weaknesses to analyse and assess the enemy’s capabilities and intentions beyond the “bean count” this created a serious deficiency in our ability to make an objective assessment so vital to military operational planning. This inherited weakness came from the infirmities that had developed over the previous decade at the higher inter-service levels and even above that at the higher defence management institutions.

The most adverse factor that contributed to the defeat of Indian Army in 1962 was the nonuse of combat air power of the IAF. This was no doubt due to the dissipation of a coherent functioning of the higher defence organization due to the personalized way of functioning of Krishna Menon as the defence minister. Looking back, one can identify multiple reasons for this serious lapse which might have made the critical difference since the Chinese Air Force, though reported to possess over 2,600 combat aircraft, would have had serious problems of operating from airfields in Tibet (at an average altitude of 10,000 ft) and would have been handicapped in payload and fuel supplies. The information about airfields in Tibet was even more sketchy and vague even on the number of airfields let alone the deployment of Chinese air force on them. The only reference available in the official history is to the use of the air force to bomb and strafe Tibetan forces in the early 1950’s and to 102 air violations in the Ladakh sector 52 of which took place during a six month period in early 1962.

The most likely causes of not employing combat air power can be traced to multiple factors. Firstly, at the political level there were serious concerns about the Chinese likelihood of bombing Indian cities. It needs to be noted that most of the political leaders were conscious of the city bombing of the Second World War and the havoc it had created among people; and more so the Japanese fleet having bombed Indian cities (though only with a handful 250lb bombs) from Madras to Calcutta on India’s east coast in early 1942 which had led to the British governor ordering the evacuation of Madras city. Secondly, Indian army leadership was deeply worried that the use of IAF combat squadrons for close air support in the high Himalayas would not be effective particularly since the army organization for close air support was nonexistent at that time. Thirdly, the Army leadership was concerned that the Chinese air force may retaliate to IAF being employed in a combat role and could disrupt the air drop campaign which was considered more important. The IAF apparently had not thought through the potential of interdiction and did not recommend close air support, the only mission the army was interested in. Lastly, it appears that the US embassy also advised that combat air power should not be used on the grounds of its being “escalatory.” We lost the war, especially near dramatically in the eastern sector where the Chinese finally declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew even from the territory they still claim.

One of the few objective analysis of the 1962 war.

What piece of crap shit. Our territory was being over run and yet we were worried about some actions of ours being perceived as "escalatory" ?? The fact that the enemy decided to violate our borders, and please do not give me the excuse that the chinese have not recognized the MacMohan Line, was not "escalatory" enough. And why did we buy the fighters, so that some guys can perform acrobatic feats?

Let us not hide behind what Americans told us or did not tell us. As it is, all Americans did was make some proper noise. They did not help us one bit. What was the root cause of the October debacle was not the "forward policy". It was the gross incompetence of our leaders and our army. The fact that our generals send troops in Summer gear to fight at heights above 4000 meters, our artillery guns running out of ammunition, our troops not having enough ammunition, speaks volumes about the caliber of Indian generals. And let us be very clear our leadership has not improved one bit. In the kargil war, our decision not cross the LoC or the IB was again a folly of gigantic proportions.

[Sushupti]

"The Hindus acted in Tibet as if it belonged to them," Mao told Khrushchev in 1959. Transcript of the conversation:

http://www.scribd.com/ideopreneur/d/927 ... Tibet-1959

[svinayak]

Very interetsing facts and info about how chinese felt about their control over Tibet and Tibet people

He admits that China cannot control the border which is an admission that they naver had Tibet before.

THey dont know the border and are not connected to the people.

[ramana]

“We don’t need a defence policy. Our policy is ahimsa. We foresee no military threat. As far as I am concerned, you can scrap the Army- Police are good enough to meet our security needs.”


“It is not the business of the Commander- in- Chief to tell the Prime Minister who is going to attack us and where. In fact, the Chinese will defend our Eastern Frontiers.”

Jawaharlal Nehru

[ramana]

Read the following keeping the above post in mind:

When Nehru Looked Out

Book: The Peacemakers

Author: Manu Bhagavan

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 237

Price: Rs 499

For the last two decades, as India reformulated its engagement with the world to take into account both its growing international clout as well as the end of the Cold War, a key issue has been the foundations on which this reformulation should rest. Nehruvians were increasingly dismayed by what they saw as the abandonment of some of India’s core principles — non-alignment, Third World solidarity and, most importantly, the transformative potential of India’s idealism. For others, Nehru was much more of a Realist than traditional Nehruvians assumed. They saw Nehru’s idealism as either a long-view Realism or, more crudely, as a clever mask. Manu Bhagavan’s deeply researched and well-written account injects a necessary dose of substance into a question that has hitherto been debated more on faith than knowledge.

Bhagavan examines one little recognised aspect of Nehru’s worldview and policy: the struggle to establish global human rights norms through the United Nations which Nehru saw as a pathway towards his ultimate objective of “One World”, an undefined kind of global government. The point person was Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who represented Nehru’s views at the UN and as India’s ambassador to both the Soviet Union and the United States. These efforts were less than successful, but the most fascinating part of the story is that of Nehru’s ideas about internationalism itself. As much as a work on India’s early steps in the global arena, this is a story about Nehru’s internationalist philosophy.

At first brush, this is an account that will gladden the hearts of Nehruvian idealists, but the story is more complex. Contrary to the tendency in subsequent Indian foreign policy to fiercely defend national sovereignty, Nehru was an internationalist who saw human rights as a global value that required international scrutiny and intervention. Far from defending national sovereignty, he saw sovereignty as an obstacle and argued that it should not be allowed to block the international defence of human rights. This was a deeply interventionist view of human rights promotion, more R2P than Panch Sheel. Nevertheless, he also compromised when it came to defining human rights, accepting Moscow’s stratagems that served, in effect, to reduce the efficacy of international scrutiny.

Still, Bhagavan is firm about Nehru’s idealism, at one point calling him a utopian. And in Bhagavan’s characterisation, “idealism” and “utopianism” are anything but pejorative. This highlights the primary shortcoming of this work: despite Bhagavan’s painstaking detailing, this is a deeply adulatory treatment with nary a criticism. All shortcomings and failures of Indian policy are others’ fault rather than Nehru’s: India’s failures in the UN are blamed on the superpowers who did not understand his nuances; India’s failure to condemn Moscow over the invasion of Hungary in 1957 (which undermined India’s moral standing) was because Krishna Menon jumped in to defend Soviet actions without instructions from Nehru; Menon is also blamed, for good measure, for both the Goa invasion in 1961 and India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian border war.

{Mark of a hagiography is it finds no faults or blemishes in the subject.}

But the failure of Nehru’s efforts was not so much others’ fault as much as that of the impracticality of Nehru’s vision. An important question, and unfortunately one which Bhagavan does not ask, is how Nehru and his compatriots thought that a poor, weak and newly independent India expected to have the kind of clout in the global arena to pull such weight as to transform the very nature of international relations. The answer is not entirely clear, and it does not appear to have been seriously considered by Nehru or anyone else, though there are some clues. The assumption, and it was nothing more than that, was apparently that some combination of the force of India’s arguments, the weight of India’s size (“one-fifth of mankind”) and the moral standing of India’s non-violent freedom struggle gave India a global appeal that would overcome its material weakness. Nehru’s and Pandit’s undeniable popularity were seen as indicators of India’s clout; their oratorical brilliance would be sufficient to turn the day.

This illustrates the core of idealism: a touching faith in the capacity of human agency. And much like the fate of a canoeist who gets too close to a waterfall, the results are usually as unfortunate as they are predictable. The failure of Nehru’s “One World” vision would not have been a surprise even in the most propitious of circumstances. At the height of the Cold War, it was preordained. What mattered ultimately was not so much India’s moral appeal but its material weakness.

For all his shortcomings, Nehru was a sincere idealist, committed to a deeply held and noble, if impossibly impractical, global vision. A half century after his death, India’s foreign policy is left with neither his utopian grandeur nor any form of the Realism he despised but with a hollow idealism bereft of his sincerity. It is reduced to self-righteousness serving not grand designs but defending murderous regimes such as the one in Damascus in the name of Third World solidarity. Bhagavan’s book recaptures Nehru’s true idealism, even if somewhat uncritically.

[ramana]

The fundamental problem is JLN did not believe in India as a nation but was an internationalist, a citizen of the world. He had no right to continue as the PM of India and jeopardize the security time and again in 1947 and in 1962.
He took advantage of the aura of the freedom struggle and the awe that Indians held him in high regard and duped them for his own deluded ideals. He left so many unresolved problems and festering sores.

[Christopher Sidor]

"The Hindus acted in Tibet as if it belonged to them," Mao told Khrushchev in 1959. Transcript of the conversation:

http://www.scribd.com/ideopreneur/d/927 ... Tibet-1959

Amazing. Even in 1959 the tension between the Soviets and the Chinese were visible,
"I must tell you I am not afraid of your fury".
It was clear that the soviets were looking to keep nehru and consequently India out of the American camp and if not in the soviet camp then at least neutral. See the reference to Naser, if the soviets had not given him the credit than he would have gone into an american embrace.

Also the repeated talk about "The Hindus" clearly shows that most of our enemies consider India and Hindus as synonyms. A mistake which they make. Good for us, more the mistakes they make more they will stumble. Moreover this view is held by our enemies on the west too. So we now not only have a uniform set of weapon system targeting us across the McMohan line and the Radcliffe Line but also the same view point.

[ramana]

One aspect we haven looked at is how Indian officials attitudes towards PRC were framed by legacy of British raj era thinking on how to deal with Tsarist Russia.

I would like to know more about BN Mullick's early life in the Indian Police services. And those of the early directors of IB.

These are the people who were the eyes and ears of the GOI and would like to know their minds.

[Sanku]

http://dailypioneer.com/columnists/item ... truth.html

Man who saw the truth

Sydney Wignall had in the mid-fifties reported to Indian authorities on the roads being built by the Chinese along the border. He was rebuffed.

Though he died unknown in India, Wignall has done something great for India.

In 1955, Wignall led a Welsh Himalayan expedition to climb the Gurla Mandhata, a peak dominating the Mansarovar and the Rakshastal lakes, not far from Mount Kailash, near the tri-junction between Tibet, Nepal and India.

The expedition was officially sponsored by the Liverpool Daily Post and Life magazine. Unknown to the public, Wingnall had agreed to collect information on the strategic road bordering India’s northern borders.

Already during the mid-fifties, the Indian Army strongly suspected the Chinese of wanting to construct a road linking their new acquired provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. Was the road crossing Indian territory?
................
Different incidents occurred in the early 50s which should have woken the Government of India out of its soporific Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai dream world.

First, the harassment of the Indian trade agent in Gartok, which was without doubt linked with the work which had started on the Tibet-Xinjiang highway; in 1953, the Chinese even forced Jawaharlal Nehru to close the Indian agency as the presence of an Indian official was embarrassing for the PLA.

Brigadier SS Mallik, then Indian Military Attaché in Beijing, made some references to the Chinese road-building activities in a report to the Government around that time; a year later, the Military Attaché would confirm the construction of the strategic highway through Indian territory in Aksai Chin.
..................................
The Official Report states: “China started constructing motorable road in summer 1955. …On October 6, 1957, the Sinkiang-Tibet road was formally opened with a ceremony in Gartok and 12 trucks on a trial run from Yarkand reached Gartok.”

It was Wignall who had informed the Government of India about the Chinese scheme. Wignall was eventually caught by the Chinese Army, interrogated and kept prisoner for several weeks.

He was later released in the midst of winter in a high altitude pass. The Chinese had thought that he would never survive the blizzard or find his way back to India. But, after an incredible journey, he managed to reach India and was able to report to Lt Col ‘Baij’ Mehta, his contact in the Military Intelligence

....................................

Wignall was later told by his Army contact: “Our illustrious Prime Minister Nehru, who is so busy on the world stage telling the rest of mankind how to live, has too little time to attend to the security of his own country. Your material was shown to Nehru by one of our senior officers, who plugged hard. He was criticised by Krishna Menon in Nehru’s presence for ‘lapping up American CIA agent-provocateur propaganda.’ Menon has completely suppressed your information.”

The Government of India did not acknowledge that already in 1955, it had information about the Aksai Chin road. The issue was discussed for the first time in the Lok Sabha in August 1959 only.

{Sanku: So Nehru, is shown to be a certified liar once more, just like some of other our other incorruptible honest leaders}

One of the most distressing parts of this story is that, when Wignall offered his manuscript to Indian publishers, he was politely told that they could not publish ‘this stuff’ in India. He had no other choice but to publish his book in the UK.

Its too late to cry about the blatant disregard for the security and well being of the country today in the 2G era, Nehru had seen to it that the country would go down the tube the best he could in 50s itself.

[ramana]

Wignall's book was discussed on teh forum long time ago. He was tasked by Gen Thimmayya himself.

The odd thing is looks like IA cant do anything to bolster its troops etc without political orders.
All they can do is fret and fume.

[ramana]

Pioneer, Letters to Editor

China hatched 1962 plot while India slept

LINK

Thursday, 07 June 2012 22:31 Krishan | Via web

This refers to the article, “Man who saw the truth” (June 7) by Claude Arpi. In the summer of 1960, I was part of a joint expedition team from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany in Lucknow. The expedition started at Darjeeling and trekked to the tri-junction — where Nepal, Sikkim and West Bengal meet.

The purpose of the expedition was to collect the plant samples from the area. It was a well-organised expedition with an army of porters carrying equipment and supplies, making stops at forest bungalows along the way. While everything else seemed normal, one thing was very strange about these porters. In addition to singing their native songs, they would often chant, “Chin Ka Raja Bara Hai; Hindustan Ka Raja Chota Hai.”

I was a junior member and did not ask them why they sang that or who had told them to do so. I left for the United States in the summer of 1961 — before the Chinese invasion of India. But looking back, it is obvious that the Red Army was preparing for what was to come to India, and Nepal later. This shows that China has always had a long-term strategy to expand its influence in the region, even if by force.

Wish he had reported to his seniors or the local police guys.

[svinayak]

But they can still find out how the local population figured out in 1950 that PRC will be giant and will go after Tibet. Tibet occupation changed the local pop perception about PRC.

But the britality of the PLA must have woken them up. With Tibetians suffering this may have changed. But PRC can still do social engineering and create hate India campaign inside Nepal. PLA has carefully cultivated an image of benevolent power near the border region of India - NE, Nepal, Burma and even BD.

[Sanku]

"varunkumar" >> An article published in the Time magazine in 1962 after India's China war.

INDIA: Never Again the Same

Red China behaved in so inscrutably Oriental a manner last week that even Asians were baffled. After a series of smashing victories in the border war with India. Chinese troops swept down from the towering Himalayas and were poised at the edge of the fertile plains of Assam, whose jute and tea plantations account for one-fourth of India’s export trade. Then, with Assam lying defenseless before her conquering army. Red China suddenly called a halt to the fighting.

Radio Peking announced that, “on its own initiative.” Red China was ordering a cease-fire on all fronts. Further, by Dec. 1, Chinese troops would retire to positions 12½ miles behind the lines they occupied on Nov. 7. 1959. If this promise is actually carried out. it would mean, for some Chinese units, a pullback of more than 60 miles. These decisions. Peking continued, ”represent a most sincere effort” to achieve ”a speedy termination of the Sino-Indian conflict, a reopening of peaceful negotiations, and a peaceful settlement of the boundary question.” War or peace, the message concluded, ”depends on whether or not the Indian government responds positively.”

In New Delhi the government of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was taken completely by surprise. An Indian spokesman first denounced the Chinese offer as a “diabolical maneuver.” which was later amended to the comment that India would “wait and see” exactly what the Chinese were proposing. A communique confirmed that, after the cease-fire deadline, there “had been no report of firing by the Chinese aggressors.” Indian troops also stopped shooting, but Nehru warned India: “We must not imagine that the struggle will soon be over.”

On closer examination, the Chinese cease-fire proved to be a lot less mysterious. It did offer India’s battered armies a badly needed respite. But it left the Chinese armies in position to resume their offensive if Nehru refuses the Peking terms. And it puts on India the onus of continuing the war. Said the Hindustan Times: “The latest Chinese proposals are not a peace offer but an ultimatum.”

Whatever the results of this peace bid tendered on a bayonet, India will never be the same again, nor will Nehru.

Barren Rock

In New Delhi illusions are dying fast. Gone is the belief that Chinese expansionism need not be taken seriously, that, in Nehru’s words, China could not really want to wage a major war for “barren rock.” Going too, is the conviction that the Soviet Union has either the authority or the will to restrain the Chinese Communists. Nehru’s policy of nonalignment, which was intended to free India from any concern with the cold war between the West and Communism, was ending in disaster. Nearly shattered was the morally arrogant pose from which he had endlessly lectured the West on the need for peaceful coexistence with Communism. Above all. the Indian people, fiercely proud of their nationhood, have been deeply humiliated and shaken by the hated Chinese.

India, which is equally capable of philosophic calm and hysterical violence, showed, in the words of President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. a “great soul-awakening such as it has never had in all its history.” The awakening took some curious forms. The Buddhist nuns and monks of Ladakh devoted themselves to writing an “immortal epic” of India’s fight against Chinese aggression. A temple in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh converted its 85-lb. gold treasury into 15-year defense bonds, while New Delhi bank clerks shined shoes outside a restaurant after hours and gave their earnings to the government, men jammed the enlistment centers and showered Nehru with pledges to fight signed in blood.

The 73-year-old Nehru gave the impression of being swept along by this tumult, not of leading it. His agony was apparent as he rose in Parliament, three days before the Chinese cease-fire announcement, to report that the Indian army had been decisively defeated at Se Pass and Walong. The news raised a storm among the M.P.s. A Deputy from the threatened Assam state was on his feet, shaking with indignation and demanding, “What is the government going to do? Why can’t you tell us? Are we going to get both men and materials from friendly countries to fight a total war, or is the government contemplating a cease-fire and negotiations with the Chinese?” Other gesturing Deputies joined in, shouting their questions in English and Hindi. “Are we nothing?” cried one Praja Socialist member. “Is the Prime Minister everything?”

While the Speaker asked repeatedly for order, Nehru sat chin in hand, obviously scornful of this display of Indian excitability, his abstracted gaze fixed on nothing. Finally Nehru rose again and tried to quiet the uproar by saying, “We shall take every conceivable and possible measure to meet the crisis. We are trying to get all possible help from friendly countries.”

Attic Burglar

His critics accused him of still clinging to the language of nonalignment. Later, in a radio speech in which he announced the fall of Bomdi La,

Nehru sounded tougher. He no longer defended his old policies, denounced China as “an imperialist of the worst kind,” and at last thanked the U.S. and Britain by name for arms aid, pledging to ask for more.

Nehru was coming close to admitting that he had at last discovered who were India’s friends. The neutral nations, which so often looked to India for leadership in the past, were mostly embarrassingly silent or unsympathetic—a government-controlled newspaper in Ghana dismissed the war as “an ordinary border dispute.” As for Russia, its ambiguously neutral position, argued Nehru, was the best India could hope for under the circumstances. Actually, Nehru had obviously hoped for more, and was shocked when, instead of helping India, Moscow denounced India’s border claims and urged Nehru to accept the Red Chinese terms.

As India’s poorly equipped army reeled under the Chinese blows, the West moved swiftly and without recrimination to India’s defense. Shortly after the Chinese attack, frantic Indian officers simply drove round to the U.S. embassy with their pleas for arms and supplies. Eventually their requests were coordinated. During the tense week of the Cuban crisis, U.S. Ambassador to India Kenneth Galbraith was virtually on his own, and he promised Nehru full U.S. backing.

When Washington finally turned its attention to India, it honored the ambassador’s pledge, loaded 60 U.S. planes with $5,000,000 worth of automatic weapons, heavy mortars and land mines. Twelve huge C-130 Hercules transports, complete with U.S. crews and maintenance teams, took off for New Delhi to fly Indian troops and equipment to the battle zone. Britain weighed in with Bren and Sten guns, and airlifted 150 tons of arms to India. Canada prepared to ship six transport planes. Australia opened Indian credits for $1,800,000 worth of munitions.

Assistant Secretary of State Phillips Talbot graphically defined the U.S. mission. “We are not seeking a new ally,” he said. “We are helping a friend whose attic has been entered by a burglar.” In Washington’s opinion, it mattered little that the burglar gratuitously offered to move back from the stairs leading to the lower floors and promised not to shoot any more of the house’s inhabitants. “What we want,” said Talbot, “is to help get the burglar out.”

To that end, a U.S. mission headed by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Averell Harriman and U.S. Army General Paul D. Adams flew to New Delhi to confer with Indian officials on defense requirements. Soon after, Britain’s Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys arrived with a similar British mission. Their most stunning discovery: after five years under Nehru’s hand-picked Defense Minister, Krishna Menon, the Indian army was lamentably short of ammunition even for its antiquated Lee Enfield rifles.

Misbehaving People

So far, the fighting has shown that the Indians need nearly everything, except courage. Chinese burp guns fire 20 times faster than Indian rifles. The Indian 25-pounder is a good artillery piece, but is almost immobile in the mountains and cannot match the Chinese pack artillery, recoilless guns and bazookas. Each Chinese battalion has a special company of porters whose job it is to make sure the fighting men have ample ammunition and food. The Indians must rely on units from their unwieldy Army Service Corps, who were never trained to operate at heights of 14,000 feet and over mule paths. In addition to bulldozers and four-wheel-drive trucks, the Indians need mechanical saws that can match the speed of those the Chinese use to cut roads through forests.

India’s catastrophic unreadiness for war stems directly from the policy of nonalignment which was devised by Nehru and implemented by his close confidant Krishna Menon. Says one Indian editor: “Nonalignment is no ideology. It is an idiosyncrasy.”

Indians like to say that it resembles the isolationism formerly practiced by the U.S.. but it has moral overtones which, Nehru claims, grow out of “Indian culture and our philosophic outlook.” Actually, it owes as much to Nehru’s rather oldfashioned, stereotyped, left-wing attitudes acquired during the ’20s and ’30s (“He still remembers all those New Statesmen leaders.” says one bitter critic) as it does to Gandhian notions of nonviolence. Nehru has never been able to rid himself of the disastrous cliche that holds Communism to be somehow progressive and less of a threat to emergent nations than “imperialism.”

Nehru himself has said: “Nonalignment essentially means live and let live—but of course this doesn’t include people who misbehave.” During its 15 years of independence. India has dealt severely with the misbehavior of several smaller neighbors, but has been almost slavishly tolerant of Communist misbehavior.

The Communist Chinese invasion of Korea was “aggression.” but the West was also “not blameless”; the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion was unfortunate, but all the facts were not clear; when the Soviet Union broke the nuclear test moratorium last year, Nehru deplored “all nuclear tests.”

Like a Buddha

Yet in its way, nonalignment paid enormous dividends. India received massive aid from both Russia and the West. Getting on India’s good side became almost the most important thing in the United Nations. At intervals, the rest of the world’s statesmen came to India to pay obeisance to Nehru as though to a Buddha. And Nehru obviously believed that whatever he did. in case of real need the U.S. would have to help India anyway. Meanwhile, as he saw it. the object of his foreign policy was to prevent the two great Asian powers —Russia and China—from combining against India. In his effort to woo both, acerbic Krishna Menon, says one Western diplomat, “was worth the weight of four or five ordinary men. He was so obnoxious to the West that, almost alone, he could demonstrate the sincerity of India’s neutrality to the Russians.”

At the 1955 Bandung conference. Nehru and China’s Premier Chou En-lai embraced Panch Shila, a five-point formula for peaceful coexistence. The same Indian crowds that now shout. “Wipe out *deleted* stink!” then roared “Hindi Chini bhai bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers). India refused to sign the peace treaty with Japan because Red China was not a party to it. At home, Menon harped on the theme that Pakistan was India’s only enemy. Three years ago, when Pakistan proposed a joint defense pact with India, Nehru ingenuously asked, “Joint defense against whom?” Western warnings about China’s ultimate intentions were brushed aside as obvious attempts to stir up trouble between peace-loving friends.

Even the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1951 had rung no alarm bells in New Delhi—and therein lie the real beginnings of the present war.

Initialed Map

Under the British raj, London played what Lord Curzon called “the great game.” Its object was to protect India’s northern borders from Russia by fostering semi-independent buffer states like Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. In those palmy colonial days, Tibet was militarily insignificant, and China, which claims overlordship of Tibet, was usually too weak to exercise it.

When the Chinese Republic of Sun Yat-sen was born in 1912, Britain decided to look to its borders. At a three-nation meeting in Simla in 1914, Britain’s representative. Sir Arthur McMahon, determined the eastern portion of the border by drawing a line on a map along the Himalayan peaks from Bhutan to Burma. The Tibetan and Chinese delegates initialed this map, but the newborn Chinese Republic refused to ratify it, and so has every Chinese government since.

The McMahon Line was never surveyed or delimited on the ground, and British troops seldom penetrated the NEFA hill country, where such tribes as the Apatanis. the Tagins and the Hill Miris amused themselves by slave-raiding and headhunting. As recently as 1953. the Daflas wiped out a detachment of the Assam Rifles just for the fun of it.

At the western end of the border, in Ladakh. the British made even less of an effort at marking the frontier, and the border with Tibet has generally been classified as “undefined.” Red China was most interested in Ladakh’s northeastern corner, where lies the Aksai Chin plateau, empty of nearly everything but rocks, sky and silence. For centuries, a caravan route wound through the Aksai Chin (one reason the Chinese say the plateau is theirs is that Aksai Chin means “China’s Desert of White Stone”), leading from Tibet around the hump of the lofty Kunlun range to the Chinese province of Sinkiang. In 1956 and 1957 the Chinese built a paved road over the caravan trail, and so lightly did Indian border police patrol the area that New Delhi did not learn about the road until two years after it was built.

Time Immemorial

Firing off a belated protest to Peking, India rushed troops into the endangered area, where they at once collided with Chinese outposts. Attempts at negotiation broke down because India demanded that the Chinese first withdraw to Tibet, while the Chinese insisted that Aksai Chin, and much more besides in NEFA and Ladakh. was historically Chinese territory. Neither side has basically changed its position since.

On Oct. 25, strong Chinese patrols began penetrating the NEFA border, occupying Longju and Towang and threatening Walong. For once, Nehru was badly shaken. He said: “From time immemorial the Himalayas have provided us with a magnificent frontier. We cannot allow that barrier to be penetrated because it is also the principal barrier to India.” But the barrier was being daily penetrated. Ten months ago, Nehru appointed Lieut. General Brij Kaul, 50, to command the NEFA area. Then, without consulting any of his military men, Nehru publicly ordered Kaul to drive out the Chinese invaders of NEFA.

The opposing armies were of unequal size, skill and equipment. The Chinese force of some 110,000 men was commanded by General Chang Kuo-hua, 54, a short, burly veteran of the Communist Party and Communist wars, who well understands Mao Tse-tung’s dictum, “All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” His army is made up of three-year conscripts from central China, but its officers and noncoms are largely proven cadres who served with distinction in the Korean war. The infantry is armed with a Chinese-made burp gun with not very great accuracy but good fire power, hand grenades, submachine guns and rifles. The light and heavy mortars, which have a surprising range, are also Chinese made, but the heavy artillery, tanks and planes are mostly of Soviet manufacture.

The Indian forces number some 500,000, but fewer than 100,000 men were committed to the Red border area—the bulk of the army, and many of its best units, being kept on guard duty in Kashmir watching the Pakistanis. A strictly volunteer army, with the men serving five-year terms, it drew its troops largely from the warrior races of the north—Jats, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Dogras, Garhwalis. Over the past century, the Indian army has fought from France to China, and has usually fought excellently, whether pitted against Pathan guerrillas, Nazi panzer grenadiers or Japanese suicide squads. In the 1947-48 war in Kashmir, the Indians were fighting a British-trained Pakistani army very like themselves. Since independence, the Indian army has not encountered a really first-rate foe. The guerrilla war with the rebellious Naga tribesmen of Eastern Assam and the walkover in Goa were little more than training exercises.

Infinite Testiness

For the past five years, the Indian army has also been plagued by Defense Minister Krishna Menon, who was both economy-minded and socialistically determined to supply the troops from state-run arsenals, most of which exist only as blueprints. Sharing Nehru’s distrust of what he calls the “arms racket,” Menon was reluctant to buy weapons abroad, and refused to let private Indian firms bid on defense contracts. Menon’s boasts of Indian creativity in arms development have been revealed as shoddy deceptions. A prototype of an Indian jet fighter plane proved unable to break the sound barrier. Even the MIG-21 planes that the Soviet Union has promised to deliver in December are of questionable value, since jet fighters are useless without an intricate ground-support system, which India is in no position to set up.

A man of infinite testiness, Menon was soon squabbling with independent-minded generals. Lieut. General Shankar Thorat and Commander in Chief General K. S. Thimayya appealed to Nehru against Menon’s promotion policies. When Nehru, who has long scorned the British-trained officers as men who “did not understand India,” refused to listen to complaints about Menon, both generals retired from the army in disgust. Menon named as new commander in chief P. N. Thapar, a “paperwork general.”

Skyward Zigzag

Before Kaul had a chance to try and “clear out” the Chinese in NEFA, the Chinese struck first on Oct. 20. Some 20,000 burp-gun-toting infantry stormed over Thag La ridge and swept away a 5,000-man Indian brigade strung out along the Kechilang River. The surprise was complete, and dazed survivors of the Chinese attack struggled over the pathless mountains, where hundreds died of exposure. In Ladakh the Chinese scored an even bigger victory, occupying the entire 14,000 square miles that Peking claims is Chinese territory.

While the Indians worked to build up a new defense line at Walong and in the lofty Se Pass, reinforcements were hurried to Assam. The effort to bring up men and supplies from the plains was backbreaking. TIME Correspondent Edward Behr made the trip over a Jeep path that was like a roller coaster 70 miles long and nearly three miles high. He reports: “The Jeep path begins at Tezpur, amid groves of banana and banyan trees, then climbs steeply upward through forests of oak and pine to a 10,000-ft. summit. Here the path plunges dizzily downward to the supply base of Bomdi La on a 5,000-ft. plateau, and then zigzags skyward again to the mist-hung Se Pass at 13,556 ft. Above the hairpin turns of the road rise sheer rock walls; below lie bottomless chasms. Rain and snow come without warning, turning the path to slippery mud. Even under the best conditions, a Jeep takes 18 hours to cover the 70 miles.

“At this height, icy winds sweep down from the snow crests of the Himalayas, and if a man makes the slightest exertion, his lungs feel as if they are bursting. Newcomers suffer from the nausea and lightheadedness of mountain sickness. Every item of supply, except water, must be brought up the roller coaster from the plains. There are few bits of earth flat enough for an airstrip, and helicopters have trouble navigating in the thin air.”

Shell Plaster

After three weeks, Kaul felt emboldened to make a probing attack on the Chinese lines. Following an artillery barrage, 1,000 Indian jawans (G.I.s) drove the Chinese from the lower slopes of a hill near Walong. It was a costly victory, for the Chinese launched a massive counterattack through and around Walong, driving the Indians 80 miles down the Luhit valley. At Se Pass, the Chinese victory was even more spectacular. Having spotted the Indian gun emplacements, the Chinese plastered them with mortar and artillery shells, and then sent forward a Korea-style “human sea” assault. Two Chinese flanking columns of several thousand men each moved undetected and with bewildering speed through deep gorges and over 14,000-ft. mountains around the pass to capture the Indian supply base at Bomdi La, trapping an Indian division and throwing India’s defense plans into chaos.

Panic spread from the mountains into the plains. Officials in Tezpur burned their files, and bank managers even set fire to stacks of banknotes. Five hundred prisoners were set free from Tezpur jail. Refugees jammed aboard ferry boats to get across the Brahmaputra River. Even policemen joined the flight.

Indian army headquarters was hastily moved from Tezpur to Gauhati, 100 miles to the southwest. Officers and men who had escaped from the fighting referred dazedly to the Chinese as swarming everywhere “like red ants.” An Indian colonel admitted, “We just haven’t been taught this kind of warfare.”

Needed Intellect

Though India—like the U.S. after Pearl Harbor—could not yet afford scapegoats and recrimination, Defense Minister Krishna Menon was almost universally blamed for the inadequacy of Indian arms, the lack of equipment and even winter clothing. His fall from grace not only finished his own career but brought a turning point in Nehru’s. The Prime Minister had tried to pacify critics by taking over the Defense Ministry and downgrading Menon to Minister of Defense Production, but Nehru’s own supporters demanded Menon’s complete dismissal.

On Nov. 7, Nehru attended an all-day meeting of the Executive Committee of the parliamentary Congress Party and made a final plea for Menon, whose intellect, he said, was needed in the crisis.

As a participant recalls it, ten clenched fists banged down on the table, a chorus of voices shouted, “No!”

Nehru was dumfounded. It was he who was used to banging tables and making peremptory refusals. Taking a different tack, he accurately said that he was as much at fault as Menon and vaguely threatened to resign. Always before, such a threat had been sufficient to make the opposition crumble with piteous cries of ‘Panditji, don’t leave us alone!” This time, one of the leaders said: “If you continue to follow Menon’s policies, we are prepared to contemplate that possibility.” Nehru was beaten and Menon thrown out of the Cabinet. Joining him in his exit was Menon’s appointee, Commander in Chief General P. N. Thapar, who resigned because of “poor health.” (This P.N. Thapar is the father of arch-secularist Karan Thapar.)

The Defense Department at once, but belatedly, got a new look and a firmer tone. Impatient of turgid oratory and military fumbling, all India turned with relief to the new Defense Minister, Y. B. Chavan. A big man in every sense of the word—including his burly 200 lbs.—Chavan served for six years as Chief Minister of Bombay, the richest and most industrialized Indian state. The army’s new commander in chief, Lieut. General J. N. Chaudhuri, the “Victor of Goa,” who also saw action in World War II campaigns in the Middle East and Burma, is a close friend of Chavan’s.

Though a socialist and a onetime disciple of Nehru, Chavan is cast in a different mold. Once a terrorist against the British and a proud member of the Kshatriya warrior caste, Chavan says: “There can be no negotiations with an aggressor.” Unlike Nehru, who still maintains that China’s attack is not necessarily connected with Communism, Chavan declared: “The first casualties of the unashamed aggression of the Chinese on India are Marxism and Leninism.”

Old Twinkle

There has been some grumbling that Nehru is no wartime leader. At 73, he often seems physically and mentally spent. His hair is snow-white and thinning, his skin greyish and his gaze abstracted. Since the invasion, he has not spared himself, and his sister, Mme. Pandit, thinks Nehru is “fighting fit-he’s got that old twinkle in his eye.” But he tires noticeably as the day goes on. One old friend says, “It makes a big difference whether you see him in the morning or the evening.”

No one seriously suggests that Nehru will be replaced as India’s leader while he lives. To his country, he is not a statesman but an idol. Each morning, large crowds assemble on the lawn outside his New Delhi home. Some present petitions or beg favors, but thousands, in recent weeks, have handed over money or gold dust for the national defense. Most come just to achieve darshan, communion, with the country’s leader. The throng is comforted and reassured, not by the words, but by the presence of Nehru.

His widowed daughter, Indira Gandhi, 45, who is functioning as his assistant and has sometimes been mentioned as his favorite choice to succeed him, is still essentially right when she says: “Unity can only be formed in India behind the Congress Party, and in the Congress Party only behind my father.”

Nevertheless, Nehru’s power will be circumscribed from now on. His long years of unquestioned, absolute personal rule are at an end. For the first time, leaders of the ruling Congress Party are demanding that attention be paid to the majority sentiment in the party as well as to Nehru’s own ideas. The 437 million people of India may cease being Nehru’s children and may at last become his constituents.

This does not mean that Nehru no longer leads, but only that from now on he will have to lead by using the more orthodox methods of a Western politician. Conservative members of the Congress Party, notably Finance Minister Morarji Desai, have been strengthened, and expect that Nehru’s dogmatic reliance on socialism and the “public sector” of industry will be reduced; if India is to arm in a hurry, they argue, it will need the drive and energy of the “private sector.”

Moreover, the Indian army may not only at last get the equipment it needs but may also gradually emerge as something of a political force. While this view is still vastly unpopular, many army officers think it is time for India to come to terms with Pakistan over the nagging Kashmir issue, so that the two great countries of the subcontinent can present a united front to China.

Bartered Gains

There is still considerable dispute over how little or how much the Chinese were after in their attack on India. One theory held by some leading Indian military men is that the Reds want eventually to drive as far as Calcutta, thereby outflanking all of Southeast Asia. In such a drive, the Chinese would be able to take advantage of anti-Indian feeling along the way, notably among the rebellious Nagas in East Assam, and in the border state of Sikkim. Reaching Calcutta, perhaps the world’s most miserable city, where 125,000 homeless persons sleep on the streets each night, they would find readymade the strongest Communist organization in India. According to this theory, the Reds could set up a satellite regime in the Bay of Bengal and, without going any farther with their armies, wait for the rest of India to splinter and fall. This strategy has not necessarily been abandoned for good, but it certainly has been set aside. For one thing, the Chinese attack shattered Communism as a political force even in Calcutta.

The prevailing theory now is that the Chinese had less ambitious aims to begin with: to take the high ground and the key military passes away from the Indians, and to finally establish, once and for all, Chinese control of the Aksai Chin plateau in Ladakh, so as to safeguard the vital military roads to Sinkiang province. The Chinese may have been unprepared to exploit the almost total collapse of India’s armed forces and may even have been surprised by their swift success. On this reading, the terms of the Chinese cease-fire offer become intelligible. The Nov. 7 line would in effect barter away the sizable Chinese gains in NEFA for Indian acceptance of China’s property rights in Aksai Chin.

Viewed from Peking, the difficulties of supply through the Himalayas in dead of winter might make the Communists hesitate to try to occupy Assam, especially since India’s determined show of national unity, and the West’s evident willingness to support India to the hilt. There is a significant indication of one Chinese anxiety in the cease-fire offer. After warning that renewed war will “bring endless disaster to India,” Peking says: “Particularly serious is the prospect that if U.S. imperialism is allowed to become involved, the present conflict will grow into a war in which Asians are made to fight Asians, entirely contrary to the fundamental interests of the Indian people.” Implicit in those words are Red Chinese memories of the prolonged Korean war. which ended in a gory stalemate.

India’s angry millions, armed, trained and aided by the U.S., must be a prospect that not even Mao Tse-tung relishes facing. Instead, by in effect quitting while they are ahead, the Chinese can play the peacemakers in the short-sighted eyes of the neutral nations, while having dramatically demonstrated their military superiority over India and without having to abandon the long-range threat. Says Madame Pandit: “This attack was far more than just an attack on one border. India is completely and wholly dedicated to democracy and not to some kind of ‘Asian democracy.’ China’s motive was to humiliate India and to prove democracy is unworkable in Asia.”

Without Meaning

Even if Nehru were prepared to give away Ladakh in return for a Chinese pullback elsewhere, he is committed to clearing all Indian territory of the invaders. And Nehru must know that the situation has reached a point where he can never again trust a Red Chinese promise and that the relationship between India and China has changed irrevocably. His policy of nonalignment has not been jettisoned. It has just ceased to have any meaning.

But Americans in New Delhi last week were irritated by evidence that the Indian government still prefers equivocation to the plain truth. Official requests went out to the Indian press not to print photos showing the arrival of U.S. arms, and the twelve U.S. Air Force transport planes sent by Washington to ferry Indian troops were made to sound like leased aircraft flown by mercenaries. The crowds know better. A current slogan is a revision of the earlier cry for brotherhood with China: “Americans bhai bhai; Chini hai hail” (Americans are our brothers; death to the Chinese!).

An Indian Cabinet minister, who disagrees with Nehru politically but respects him, says passionately: “He will come to many changes now. You cannot imagine how difficult it was for him to get rid of Menon. Do not think it was easy for him to ask for American arms. Right now, it is important not to push him into a corner in public.” Another Cabinet minister, who does not like Nehru, also counsels patience: “His will to resist will wear down. It is already worn down a long way. Hitherto, there was no opposition at all in India. Now, Nehru is relying on his opposition. He may hate it. He has been thrown into the company of people like me, people he does not like. We make strange bedfellows, but together we are going to win the war.”

To Americans it may sound like a peculiar way to win a war. But though India moves at a different pace and speaks with a different voice few could doubt last week the Indian determination to see that the Himalayan defeats were avenged, however long it may take.

[ramana]

Sanku< Good find. It has lot of things that help understand what happened. Will leave to better hands to deconstruct the article and reconnect the dots.
One way of looking is

What US aims were achieved by the Chinese attack?
What Chinese aims were achieved by this attack?
And what Indian aims were achieved or thwarted by this Chinese attack?

[Sanku]

Sanku< Good find.

Thanks Ramana, credit goes to the poster varunkumar who posted it in the GDF -- JLN thread. I figured it would get more eyeballs here.

[ramana]

Now that you have done it why not look for quotes on the lines I suggested!

[svinayak]

An Indian Cabinet minister, who disagrees with Nehru politically but respects him, says passionately: “He will come to many changes now. You cannot imagine how difficult it was for him to get rid of Menon. Do not think it was easy for him to ask for American arms. Right now, it is important not to push him into a corner in public.” Another Cabinet minister, who does not like Nehru, also counsels patience: “His will to resist will wear down. It is already worn down a long way. Hitherto, there was no opposition at all in India. Now, Nehru is relying on his opposition. He may hate it. He has been thrown into the company of people like me, people he does not like. We make strange bedfellows, but together we are going to win the war.”

Always there is somebody who does not like the Indian govt and will talk to the foreigners about the govt.
Even during national crisis they have to look at India in a different way

[KLNMurthy]

So, Americans talking about "settling" cashmere with TSP and containing China using India is not new then. The quotes from Indian generals to that effect might be invented psyops.

[nvishal]

Why the chinese attacked a defenceless region with impunity is baffling. And then to nuclearize pakistan was the final straw in history. Do the chinese really understand what internecine warfare is?

One would assume that the cheenees think long term. I think they're near-sighted.

"varunkumar" >> An article published in the Time magazine in 1962 after India's China war.

INDIA: Never Again the Same

A weasel worded article critical of the non-alignment movement.

Nehru's vision was correct and long term but he was no military man. India needed the awakening of 1962.

[Christopher Sidor]

People make the mistake of clubbing together the Non-alignment policy with the forward policy. Non-alignment policy was correct. We were not going to have any part in the so-called containment of Soviet Union. We had no cross to bear against the soviets. At the same time we were not going to become a Soviet Socialist republic and rant against the capitalist world. What we should not have done is be preachy or moralistic but that is again not a critique of non-aligned policy, just of the individuals which were tasked to implement that particular policy.

Forward policy failed because of our leadership was not upto the task. We did not adequately supply our troops. We did not augment the size of IA and IAF. We worked on some horse-shit assumptions that Chinese would not retaliate. Finally we went to war with some superiority complex. Sardar Patel always said plan first thoroughly and then execute it. We did not do this.

But the problem is that since both of these policies originated with Nehru, when one failed, i.e. forward policy, the other was also deemed with the same brush, i.e. of failure. This occurred famously with the Bofors saga too, where a fantastic gun for its time was maligned with the corruption allegation.

[Johann]

The fundamental problem is JLN did not believe in India as a nation but was an internationalist, a citizen of the world. He had no right to continue as the PM of India and jeopardize the security time and again in 1947 and in 1962.
He took advantage of the aura of the freedom struggle and the awe that Indians held him in high regard and duped them for his own deluded ideals. He left so many unresolved problems and festering sores.

There are two things I think in particular intersected in the run-up to the 1962 war

(a) Nehru's belief in solidarity at all costs in Asia and Africa to remake the world order and end the colonial era.

(b) Nehru's conviction that the British Raj's policy goals were unhealthily dominated by defence because of great power rivalry, and that this came at the expense of development.

As far as the first item goes, its clear that Nehru's hopes for Afro-Asian solidarity died after 1957, when the Chinese unabashedly and *officially* opened the road through Aksai Chin. Indian support for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans shot up, and there was cooperation with the Americans on that front.

Its in the second area, and his conviction that military men could not and should not be trusted by civilians for advice on policy that really produced the debacle of 1962 despite five years of building tension.

Then again strong, cohesive civilian leadership was perhaps the biggest reason that India was one of the few decolonised states that avoided coups and/or military hegemony.

[ramana]

johann said:

Then again strong, cohesive civilian leadership was perhaps the biggest reason that India was one of the few decolonised states that avoided coups and/or military hegemony.

Not quite. The reason there ae no coups/military hegemony is the Indian military distaste for things political. They do not want political power. Unfortunately JLN did not understand this as he saw the situation in TSP and other nascent democracies which fell to military coups and internalized his fears on the Indian military and did not fund its expansion even when he was aware of the Chinese threat.

BTW need to revisit the role of the US in engineering coups all over the world in their struggle with FSU.

Miles Copeland in Game Of Nations writes about his participation in such pastimes.

[ramana]

For lack of better thread as IMji is covering the Nehru years quite well.

Bruce Reidel writes in National Interest from USA:

X-post...

The National Interest magazine has a piece on JFK's efforts at resolving the Kashmir problem. No new insight except to say that the solution should not be geographical settlement but something that makes it irrelevant. he doesn't spell out what contours that could have taken. I suppose that is what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meant when he famously spoke of how he had no mandate to change the borders but he can make it irrelvant. Here is the link.
[url=http://nationalinterest.org/article/jfk ... show}JFK's Overshadowed Crisis

I think the Cuban Missile cirsis and the 1962 China aggression are related. The missile crisis provided the opportunity for PRC to exploit it.

[svinayak]

For lack of better thread as IMji is covering the Nehru years quite well.

Bruce Reidel writes in National Interest from USA:
The National Interest magazine has a piece on JFK's efforts at resolving the Kashmir problem. No new insight except to say that the solution should not be geographical settlement but something that makes it irrelevant. he doesn't spell out what contours that could have taken.


I think the Cuban Missile cirsis and the 1962 China aggression are related. The missile crisis provided the opportunity for PRC to exploit it.

We need to go back to 1955 when Mao and EnLai made sure that the Asian solidarity was fragmented.

The enemies of Kennedy (Republican establishment who had secret links to Mao) and enemies of Nehru JLN (Mao and Chau Enlai) came together in 1961.
JLN acheived Goa liberation in 1961. Kennedy won the election in 1961 and he was up against the Eisenhower establishment.
http://www.kennesaw.edu/pols/3380/pres/1960.html


In 1962 the cuban crisis was aimed at the Kennedy administration.
( October 14–28, 1962 - Blockade of Cuba ended November 20, 1962 )
Oct 22 - U.S. military forces go to DEFCON 3

In 1962 the Indo China war was aimed at Nehru and his worldwide image of freedom fighter against imperialists.
( 20 October – 21 November 1962 )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War

The Chinese had advance knowledge about the coming Cuban Missile Crisis, and Mao Zedong could pursue Nikita Khrushchev to reverse Russians policy backing India temporarily. Indians were stunned when Pravda in mid-October editorially advised to maintain peace “Chinese brothers” and “Indian friends”. This situation lasted however only till the end of the Cuban confrontation and Mao publicly reprimanded him for “perfidy in the Himalayas”(against Indians) and “cowardice in the Caribbean”(against Americans)

[ManuT]

Thanks to Varun Kumar and Sanku ji for the article.

> It is off on at least one count though

Moreover, the Indian army may not only at last get the equipment it needs but may also gradually emerge as something of a political force. While this view is still "vastly unpopular", "many army officers think it is time for India to come to terms with Pakistan over the nagging •Kashmir issue,• so that the two great countries of the subcontinent can present a united front to China."

This is clearly a Pakistani viewpoint. (Need to refer to Ayub statements, and talks did take shape of Bhutto-Swaran Singh talks) But Pakistan learnt drew from it and opened relations with China right away, while hoping Indians will remain 'non aligned'.

Pakistan also drew the 'right' lesson the IA was weak and it was encouraged enough to do 65. This is what India got for being unprepared.

>

Official requests went out to the Indian press not to print photos showing the arrival of U.S. arms, and the twelve U.S. Air Force transport planes sent by Washington to ferry Indian troops were made to sound like leased aircraft flown by mercenaries.

I don't know what was the big deal for this i.e. to keep it hush-hush.

> It can be safely said that Krishna Menon exhibited the behaviour of a Fifth Columnist i.e. sabotaged India from within by tinkering with the system and delayed denied arrival of aid to the extent possible.

Moreover Krishna Menon impacted the way India was viewed by US, giving Pakistan a free handle on things.

> For India, it still took 3 more decades and the collapse of FSU for it to change its outlook. (At its height, I remember I K Gujral ji was shaking hands with Saddam in 1991).

> In India, Leftists are pretty much hale and hearty even today. There cousins Maoists are there hale and hearty too, as a consequence.

> nvishal ji, the needed awakening that is supposedly did not much sign of it today. There were changes internal to IA which came in handy in 65, but that's about all, rest are 'operational secrets'.

[ramana]

Origins of the civil-mil tussle in independent India. As suspected the good for nothing IB chief was at the root of it.

Army’s shadow over Shastri’s succession: Inder Malhotra

In order to wind up the story of Shastri’s succession to Nehru it is necessary to recount just one more episode of some consequence, especially because it finds no mention in most of the narratives of this critically important interlude. The basic reason for the underlying restraint is that the incident had brought in the army, though very briefly and marginally, into the political process at that crucial and delicate juncture.

The facts that are being cited here have never been disputed by anybody. But on what they really meant differences were sharp, even angry. Suspicions arose that perhaps taking advantage of the interregnum the army leadership was toying with the idea of attempting a coup. By the time the government, at the highest level, concluded that nothing of the sort had happened, a lot of bickering and blamegame had gone on in the higher echelons of the establishment though almost entirely behind a curtain of secrecy.

The government’s verdict, together with the country’s proud belief that the Indian military is apolitical and under civilian control, became the incentive to not merely downplay the incident but to ignore it altogether. However, it is wrong to suppress any facet of history. So here goes the sequence of events.

At the time of Nehru’s death, the army chief, General J.N. Chaudhuri (“Muchu”, to friends) was inspecting the troops down south. He immediately flew back to Delhi. The first thing he did was to call in the area commander to ask him whether he had enough men to be able to control the sea of humanity that would turn up for Nehru’s last rites. The major-general confidently replied that he had. But the chief was sceptical. Not wanting to take any risk, he ordered 6,000 soldiers in nearby districts of Uttar Pradesh to come to Delhi. What he omitted to do was inform Y.B. Chavan, who was defence minister in the cabinet, now headed by G.L. Nanda. Chaudhuri’s subsequent explanation to Chavan and many others was that having been in charge of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral in January 1948 he had found that the manpower at his disposal had proved to be inadequate. This time round, therefore, he wanted the arrangements to be foolproof. About his failure to inform the government his explanation was that it was a routine troop movement. All he was ensuring was that nothing would go wrong while managing crowds of gargantuan proportions mourning a beloved leader.

The highly influential intelligence chief, B.N. Mullik, who had stayed at the prime minister’s elbow practically all through the Nehru era, had anticipated Chaudhuri’s explanation and rejected it completely. He had smelled a rat and had lost no time to inform his boss, Nanda, who was both prime minister and home minister. Not content with this, the intelligence czar even took some rather laughable measures to thwart a military coup. For, he rushed in quite a few battalions of paramilitary formations into the national capital. Those few who knew of this development were surprised that a man of his wide experience should have been so naïve as to think that formations of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) could take on the army’s might. The Border Security Force (BSF) is much better equipped. But it did not exist at that time; it was formed only after the 1965 war with Pakistan.

In all fairness, one must not be too critical of Mullik. He may have been paranoid but there was a reason why he acted the way he did. Since the army takeover in Pakistan under Ayub Khan in 1958 and the Krishna Menon-Thimayya spat in this country — Menon was a waspish defence minister and Thimayya a highly respected and popular army chief — shortly thereafter, he was a deeply disturbed man. He deemed it his paramount duty to see to it that the disaster of military rule never struck India. His fears were accentuated in 1960 when General Ne Win overthrew the civilian government in Burma, now called Myanmar. He therefore kept a sharp eye on the goings-on within the armed forces, especially on generals he regarded as ambitious. Unfortunately, the situation got aggravated after Chaudhuri became chief of army staff nearly 18 months before the end of the Nehru era. Relations between the two became heavily strained because the general constantly accused the director of the Intelligence Bureau (there was no other intelligence agency then) of not providing the army with the intelligence it needed, and Mullik charged Chaudhuri with pusillanimity for refusing to send the troops back to at least those areas of today’s Arunachal Pradesh which even the Chinese, after their withdrawal, conceded were to the “south of the so-called MacMahon Line”. This inevitably affected the events of May 28-29, 1964.

Unlike Mullik, Nanda did not get agitated or excited. Coolly he asked the Union home secretary, L.P. Singh, to find out what exactly was the legal position about the army’s right to move troops in the kind of situation the country was facing. LP entrusted the task to his trusted aide, B.S. Raghavan, who reported back that under the law governing the army while rendering aid to the civil authority, and the accompanying rules and directives, the army could bring in more troops if it felt that the “situation was likely to spin out of control”. This brought the matter to an end.

In any case, by then Nehru’s funeral was over. As the famous British journalist, James Cameron, wrote in The Guardian, during the iconic prime minister’s last journey, New Delhi had become the “most overpopulated spot on earth, and yet not a single untoward incident had taken place”.

Only one small mystery remained among only those in the know. Why had it taken Chaudhuri a fortnight to go and see Chavan and for the latter to express “full satisfaction” with the way all concerned had handled the situation and to declare the chapter as closed? Months later, it transpired that the general had suffered a mild heart attack and could leave his sickbed only when allowed by his doctors.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.

Wonder if them both being from Bengal had something to do with Mullick's ire?

[K Mehta]

Wow, never in my dreams had i thought such a gem of an article would be posted by him when i started this thread.
The parallels with the "coup" by VK are mind-boggling. The more the things change the more they remain the same!

[svinayak]

http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news ... h-india/4/

Maos return to power passed through india

Historian Shi Bo9 believes that in view of “practical difficulties associated with China’s domestic situation”, the PLA troops “would quickly disengage and end the fighting as quickly as possible” after achieving their military objectives.
‘China’s domestic situation’ is obviously referring to the power struggle within the Party and the return of Mao to the center stage.
This was wise from the Chinese point of view; further in India, the trauma associated with the conflict would remain for decades.

Mao acknowledged that a war with India presented several dangers:
Nehru enjoyed great international status;
India was a leader of the non-aligned movement;
India enjoyed great international prestige as an advocate of non-violence;
Both the United States and the Soviet Union were courting India;
India saw itself as the leader of the ‘third force’ in the world.
However according to the PLA’s calculations, China was militarily far superior to India (Indian forces were not prepared and their strength was 1/6th of the Chinese troops).
Beijing anticipated some negative reactions from Washington and the Western world in general (and perhaps even from Moscow), but the long-terms benefits of a severe, but limited blow, would compensate and ultimately bring peace for several years between the neighbours.


The Final decision
Apparently Mao had still some doubt. Politically he could not afford to have a semi-victory, a total triumph was necessary to assert his newly recovered position at the head of the Communist State. His ideological high stand on the agriculture policy had to be backed by a resounding victory against the ‘arrogant’ Prime Minister of India and the insult inflicted by the Dalai Lama when he took refuge in India three years earlier. The affront had to be avenged.
Till the last minute, Mao had some hesitations:
Should China permit Indian forces to advance a bit further into Chinese territory under the Forward Policy to show the world that China acted in self defense?
What should be the main objective of the attack against India?
Should the attack focus on the Aksai Chin in the West, the main bone of contention between India and China?


From a military point of view, an attack in NEFA had better chance to succeed as larger formations could concentrate in the area which was more accessible with easier lines of communication and supplies.

To prove Nehru’s stubborn and hegemonic attitude, NEFA was ideal as Nehru would then be compelled to agree the McMahon Line was not an ‘established fact’, but a disputed border and only negotiations could achieve a lasting peace and the settlement of the border issue.
Further winter was approaching fast, should the operations be postponed for a few months (July-September was the best period for military operations)? The Tibet Military district had warned that the snow in winter could trigger ‘great difficulties’ in moving supplies and reinforcements across the high passes.

The Army intelligence informed the leadership that presently [in October 1962] the military balance tilted heavily in China’s favor. It might not be the case in a few months time.
Considering all these points on October 17, the Central Military Commission met and issued the formal order to ‘exterminate the ‘Indian aggressor forces’. It was termed a ‘self defensive counter-attack war’.
What followed on October 20 on the slopes of Thagla ridge is history.

[ramana]

I guess GOI suffered from lack of objective analysts who might have read the signs early on. It still galls the Indian psyche at the PRC perfidy.

We should study the Factors of Surprise to see what went wrong in 1962.

Meanwhile Claude Arpi's series on

Why Henderson Brooks Report is not released-I

and

Why Henderson Brooks Report is not released-II

[ramana]

X-post....

Army officer corps was split during Sino-Indian war, says former army chief

A total lack of strategic sense among the political leadership in New Delhi was the root cause of the bruising 1962 Sino-Indian war, experts said at a round table here Thursday to mark the 50th anniversary of a conflict whose reverberations continue to be felt to this day.
“There was a total lack of strategic sense at the political level. The first mistake was at Bandung (the 1955 Asian-African conference) when India recognised Tibet as a part of China,” former Indian Army chief Gen. V.K. Sharma said at the round table “50 years after 1962: India-China Relations.

“Once that happened, it followed that the borders as they existed would have to be relooked,” Sharma said at the event jointly organised by the India Internaional Centre, the Society for Policy Studies (SPS) and the Subbu Forum.

“In any case, India’s borders were given to us by the British which was never accepted by China,” he added.

Indicative of the lack of strategic thinking, Sharma said, was the fact that repeated reports from the army’s long-range patrols of Chinese incursions,particularly in the Aksai Chin area, were ignored by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

He also faulted Nehru for not considering Aksai Chin to be of strategic importance because “not a single blade of grass grew there” as the prime minister had famously stated in parliament, attracting the ire of the opposition.

“If no grass grows in your backyard is it still not your own?” Sharma asked.

Adding to the army’s woes was the almost vertical split in the officer corps over loyalty to defence minister V.K. Krishna Menon.

“The officer corps was split, from the colonels to the generals, into the pro and agnostic camps. If you were pro Krishna Menon you were promoted; if you were agnostic, you were ignored. As junior officers, we wondered what to do with the political hierarchy,” Sharma revealed.

Sharma, in fact, echoed the previous speaker, Air Commodore (retd) Jasjit Singh, who pointed to the “failure” of the higher defence organisation in the decade leading up to the 1962 war, a situation that still prevailed.

“The higher defence organisation failed from 1954 to 1962, a situation that has still not been repaired adequately. Worse, during the war, the chiefs of staff committee did not meet even once.

The decisions were taken by the minister and a joint secretary in the defence ministry.”Thus, it is not Nehru alone but the defence minister who was more responsible” for the debacle, Jasjit Singh, who heads the Centre for Air Power Studies, contended.

Speaking about the lack of air support for the ground operations during the war, he said army headquarters never asked for this as it feared that if the Chinese fighters also went into action, this would disrupt the logistic support that was being provided by the Indian Air Force’s transport planes and helicopters.

Then, the “politcal leaders of Bengal put pressure on Nehru not to use the air force (fighters) as they feared Calcutta would be bombed and their memories of World War II (when the city was sporadically bombed 1942-44 by the Japanese) were still fresh,” Jasjit Singh said.

According to veteran journalist and commentator George Verghese, who reported on the 1962 war for The Times of India, the genesis of the conflict lay in the “mistaken belief that an unprepared Indian Army could take on China.

A year before, the Indian Army had overcome Portuguese resistance to free the western India state of Goa from colonial rule and this led to complacency that this could be replicated with the Chinese, Verghese said.

“Politics determined the military disaster. India never learnt the lesson that borders are more important than boundaries,” he added.

The round table was the first in a series of four that will review the 1962 conflict from different perspectives.

I went thru the archives of the USI Journal for the period from 1955 to 1963. There were very few articles or papers on the threat perception from the Chinese.

Same in period from 1963 thru 1971 there was little anticipation or threat articulation about TSP threat.
So there was collective failure in both the political and military leadership.

The decade of 1962 to 1972 was a wakeup call for India.

K Subrahmanyam appears in two articles in 1968.