India’s Quagmire Of Confusion Over The1962 Sino-Indian Conflict

I have written about the confusion of Indians in understanding the context of events related to the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962 and their inability to benefit from 6 decades of hindsight. I have also written about the lack of understanding of warfare on the part of Indian generals, diplomats and union ministers.

I want to illustrate my arguments in the context of a recent interview of former Foreign Secretary and former Ambassador to China, Nirupama Rao, by well-known journalist Karan Thapar. The interview catalogues four supposed missteps on the part of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his three “lapses of judgement”.

Faulty Premise Sets Stage For Wrong Conclusions

I intend to discuss the incoherence and absurdity of Rao’s arguments. But before, it is important to understand the paradigm in which the irrationality of such arguments escapes smart people like Rao and Thapar.

At the outset, both interviewer and interviewee agree that “India suffered debacle at Chinese hands” and that someone needs to be assigned “primary responsibility and blame”. Assigning blame where due is not objectionable if that individual doesn’t get blamed for things that never happened.

As I stated in my earlier articles, the conflict of 1962 is not as devastating as Indians want to believe. India lost about 1,400 soldiers while China lost 700. While every life matters, in the grand scheme of things, this was very trivial. The interview conveniently omits the fact that China had vacated every inch it had occupied and retreated.

China had, in fact, retreated 20 Kilometers away even from pre-war position (also called Line of Actual Control or LAC) to avoid a flare-up of the conflict. When the enemy retreats, any other nation claims victory. Indians are unique in insisting that they were the ones humiliated and defeated.

If one falls into the trap that this conflict was an unprecedented and unparalleled disaster without any mitigation, it is easy to go along with any irrational accusation as Rao did. But if one understands the triviality of conflict, the rest of the arguments made by Rao will be exposed as silly.

Nehru’s Strategy And Personality

Like all “historians” of modern-day, Rao seems to have no understanding of Jawaharlal Nehru as an individual or as a Prime Minister. She starts off with the presumption that Nehru was “no strategist” and someone “who knows many things but finds it difficult to deduce the core meaning of any of them fully”.

India did not add a single inch to its territory after Nehru except sneaking into Siachen in 1984. That should say a thing or two about Nehru’s strategy and ability to deduce core meaning. Whatever Nehru could not accomplish could not be accomplished by anybody else.

Rao accuses Nehru of wrong assumptions and misreading signals from China and wonders about Nehru’s “inexplicable belief” that the two countries would never go to war. This, however, is just as “inexplicable” as Lal Bahadur Shastri and A B Vajpayee believing in 1965 and 1999 respectively that Pakistan would never go to war against India or Portugal believing in 1961 that Nehru would never invade Goa.

But back to 1962, the fact that China declared a unilateral ceasefire and retreated had proved that China had no intention of a full-scale war and that Nehru’s “belief” is not all that “inexplicable”. Indians don’t understand the difference between cricket tournaments and warfare. Border skirmish in 1962 in uninhabited areas that resulted in no change in LAC is far from any real war.

Nehru’s Supposed Missteps

Like many before her, Rao views the events between 1949 and 1962 as if they happened in an era of mythologies and fails to understand that Nehru operated under the same parliamentary democratic era which we see today. In a democracy, the will of the people cannot be ignored. Nehru, in particular, ran a transparent government, listened to everybody and discussed anything at any time.

First, regarding the western border and Aksai Chin, Rao characterises Nehru accepting the boundary drawn before colonial times, which China never agreed to, as a misstep. Let us accept that Nehru had thus blundered. Did any government after him modify the boundary to China’s satisfaction?

Rao, thus, accuses Nehru of supposedly accepting his own assumptions as facts and of misinterpreting China’s silence as acquiescence. She then makes a somersault and accuses Nehru of ignoring China “building, at top speed, a motor-road” in Aksai Chin which she just accused Nehru of wrongly assuming to be Indian territory.

So, what should Nehru have done? Accept China’s claim over Aksai Chin or destroy their motor-road in Aksai Chin? Nirupama Rao is confused and lost.

Thirdly, Rao accuses that “Nehru did not follow up with the actual occupation of the areas despite the decision… to show the external boundaries of India as firmly defined and delineated”. She doesn’t seem to understand that we have had the same situation with Pakistan where our firmly defined and delineated boundary includes PoK, Gilgit and Baltistan. No PM after Nehru ever tried to occupy either them or Aksai Chin.

Rao then makes another somersault contradicting herself once again, blaming Nehru for implementing forward policy in Aksai Chin. She accuses Nehru of deliberately pushing forward a policy that was likely to provoke the Chinese. She does not seem to comprehend that Nehru was aware of that possibility. That was precisely why he hesitated to march on Aksai Chin, which she blamed as his misstep.

Like all other experts, Rao plays the blame game from both sides, damning Nehru if he did and damning if he didn’t.

Nehru’s Supposed Misjudgments

Two of the three supposed misjudgments of Nehru claimed by Rao, yet again, are the exact contradictions of each other, while the third is outright false. On the one hand, she accuses Nehru of ignoring warnings that China might go to war. On the other hand, she blames Nehru for becoming a prisoner of public and parliamentary opinion and taking aggressive measures of forward policy and going to war himself.

Rao’s claim that the defence budget was reduced between 1957 and 1960 is false, while the truth was the exact opposite. India began building Avadi Tanks, Shaktiman Trucks, Avro and HF-24 Supersonic fighters and built five new ammunition factories between 1957 and 1962. India bought aircraft carriers (INS Vikrant), submarines and helicopters in that timeframe.

The defence budget in 1958 had increased so drastically that alarmed opposition leaders accused Nehru (who was then the Finance Minister himself) of converting Gandhi’s India into a warmongering nation.