A TRIBUNE SPECIAL
There was no institutional mechanism for
decision-making on national security. Indian soldiers fought bravely but were
let down by unspeakably incompetent generals and the political leaders that had
assigned them the commands for which they were unfit Inder Malhotra
SINCE the traumatic story of the brief but brutal
border war with China is too well known, having been written in minutest
details, and indeed is being retold extensively in the run up to its 50th
anniversary there is no point repeating it here. Suffice it to say that whoever
lived through it, as I did, hasn't forgotten it half a century later. As
Jawaharlal Nehru's official biographer S. Gopal said succinctly: "Things
went so wrong that had they not happened it would have been difficult to
believe them". In the heat and humiliation of the moment some quickies
were published on the "Guilty Men of 1962", but these were based more
on anger than on facts. The war's fiftieth anniversary provides an opportunity
to discuss the role of the personality factor — on both sides — in the horrific
events as they developed.
With the benefit of hindsight it should be clear
that had the Indian state been functioning collectively as a modern and
effective one should, it would have realized soon after March 1959 — when the
Dalai Lama fled from Lhasa and was given asylum in this country - that the two
countries were moving from the Hindi-Chini bhai bhai era to the Hindi-Chini bye
bye era. The trend became even clearer when violent armed clashes began and at
Kongka-la in Ladakh the Chinese drew blood for the first time. Meanwhile, in
September 1959, in a curt letter to Nehru, his Chinese opposite number Zhou
Enlai categorically repudiated the Indian Prime Minister's claim that China had
agreed to accept the "so-called McMahon Line" with a few "minor
adjustments", and that there were no great differences between the two
countries on the rest of the border.
All these red signals were ignored because Nehru
had somehow convinced himself that while there would be border skirmishes,
patrol clashes and even bigger spats the Chinese would do "nothing
big". For this the iconic first Prime Minister of independent India must
take his share of blame. But what about others, especially his top advisers,
military and civilians some of whom later claimed that they knew the Prime
Minister's reading of the situation was wrong? Why didn't they say so to him at
least privately? Their unabashed governing doctrine was that "Panditji
knows best".
On September 8, 1962, the Chinese crossed the
Thagla ridge in what was then North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and is now
Arunachal Pradesh. Mired in old beliefs and after consultations with military
leaders Nehru announced that he had directed the Army to "throw the
Chinese out of Thagla" but had fixed no time limit. "It was for the
"Army to decide". The age of innocence ended on October 20 when both
in NEFA and Ladakh the Chinese came down the Himalayan slopes overrunning
manifestly inadequate Indian defences in their way. Having achieved their
immediate objective they halted their offensive five days later. So terribly
shattered was national morale by then the Republic's President S. Radhakishnan
accused his government of "credulity and negligence". Nehru himself
told Parliament ruefully: "We were getting out of touch with the reality
of modern world and were living in an artificial atmosphere of our own
creation".
The second phase of the Chinese offensive, when it came in
mid-November, was even more formidable and furious than the first. In four
days flat the Chinese subjected to this country to a humiliating defeat, a
combination of a military debacle and a political disaster. So much so that
Nehru, believing that the Chinese could take over the entire eastern India,
wrote those pathetic letters to President Kennedy on November 19, the
blackest day of that Black November. (May I have the impertinence to say that
I published them first in November 2010) In any case, these were overtaken by
the Chinese declaration of unilateral cease-fire and withdrawal.
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Since there was no institutional mechanism for
decision making on national security, who all should be held responsible for
the reprehensible way in which the Chinese invasion was handled? Before
speaking about individuals, let it be summed up that the valiant Indian
soldiers fought bravely but were let down by unspeakably incompetent generals
and the political leaders that had assigned them the commands for which they
were unfit.
On top of the list of those to be held accountable
must be the name of Krishna Menon. A brilliant but waspish man, he was also the
Prime Minister's blind spot. As Defence Minister since 1957 he was an
unmitigated disaster, insulting service chiefs, playing favourites in military
promotions and appointments and thus politicising the professional Indian Army.
Menon even believed that China would never attack India, and Nehru knew it.
An inevitable consequence of this shocking state of
affairs was the selection of Menon's hottest favourite, Lt.-General B. M. Kaul,
as the overall commander of the battlefield in the northeast, an appointment
that should never have been made. For although Kaul was a first-rate military
bureaucrat and a man of exceptional dynamism excelled only by his ambition, he
had absolutely no experience of combat. As if this weren't enough Menon did
something incredibly catastrophic. Kaul had fallen seriously ill at Himalayan
heights and was evacuated to Delhi. Menon ruled that his protégé would continue
to command the battlefield from his sickbed in Delhi. The Army Chief, General
P. N. Thapar, did not like this at all. But he did not want to cross Menon's
path and was too timid even to overrule Kaul when the latter was woefully
wrong. Nehru did nothing.
It is a measure of the nation's contempt earned by
both Menon and Kaul that Parliament spent more time and energy in ejecting the
former from the Defence Ministry than on repulsing the invaders. As for Kaul,
when the visiting Senators from America asked the President whether he, too,
had been taken prisoner, he had replied: "That, unfortunately, is
untrue".
There were only three other men - Foreign Secretary
MJ Desai, intelligence czar BN Mullik and the Defence Ministry's all-powerful
Joint Secretary HC Sarin, who had some say in running the war. Mullik's role
was massive and, more enough than not, malignant. If, instead of messing around
with the making of policy, he had done his job of gathering intelligence on
China, India would not have been taken by surprise and might even have escaped
the humiliation.
For, as declassified Chinese documents and eminent
researchers like Roderick Macfarqhuar have revealed, at the precise moment when
Nehru was saying that the Chinese would "do nothing big", in Beijing
Mao Zedong was planning a carefully calibrated limited punitive operation to
"teach India and Nehru a lesson". Nor was this a hurried and casual
decision. Day after day meticulous discussions took place at which all of Mao's
top civilian and military advisers - including Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao
et al — were regularly present. At these confabulations it was decided to make
Marshal Liu Bocheng the overall commander of the operations against India. The
commands of the troops that would march into India went to younger generals of
the PLA that had fought MacArthur to a standstill at Yalu, the river dividing
China and North Korea, during the Korean War (1950-53). The paramount
commandment, however, was that no major step would be taken without Mao's
personal approval. The great helmsman was recovering from the huge setback to
his leadership following the stark failure of his Great Leap Forward movement
that took a toll of 30 million lives in the famine, which followed.
Since Mullik and his minions had no clue to this,
how could they have known that at a time when China was isolated, Mao played
his cards internationally most adroitly? As Henry Kissinger has just reminded
us, in his latest book on China, despite relentless shelling of offshore
islands of Quemoy and Matsu, Mao secured an assurance from the United States at
informal talks at Warsaw that the US "won't unleash" Taiwan on the
Chinese mainland.
The Sino-Soviet split was a cause contributing to
Mao's war on India. The lesson he wanted to teach Nehru was addressed equally
to Nikita Khrushev who was friendly to India. Mao brought him into line with
the skilful use of his foreknowledge of the looming Cuban Missile Crisis. Realizing
that he could not take on both the US and China at the same time, the Russian
leader changed his policy on India and China, no matter how temporarily.
We in this country were shocked and dismayed by the
Pravda editorial of October 25 that talked of "our Chinese brothers and
Indian friends" and advised India to negotiate practically on China's
terms. For his part, Mao timed the start and end of his invasion of India with
the Cuban affair in mind. No wonder at the end of it all he chided Mao for
"cowardice in the Caribbean and perfidy in the Himalayas".
ON November 7, 1950 – twelve years before
the Chinese attack -- the then Home Minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel, wrote a 2,323-word letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, giving his assessment of
the developments across the Himalayan frontier and cautioning Nehru about the
imminent threat from China. The following is the complete text of the letter:
My dear Jawaharlal,
Ever since my return from Ahmedabad and after the cabinet meeting the same day
which I had to attend at practically fifteen minutes' notice and for which I
regret I was not able to read all the papers, I have been anxiously thinking
over the problem of Tibet and I thought I should share with you what is passing
through my mind.
I have carefully gone through the
correspondence between the External Affairs Ministry and our Ambassador in
Peking and through him the Chinese Government. I have tried to peruse this
correspondence as favourably to our Ambassador and the Chinese Government as
possible, but I regret to say that neither of them comes out well as a result
of this study.
The Chinese Government has tried to delude
us by professions of peaceful intention. My own feeling is that at a crucial
period they managed to instill into our Ambassador a false sense of confidence
in their so-called desire to settle the Tibetan problem by peaceful means.
There can be no doubt that during the period covered by this correspondence the
Chinese must have been concentrating for an onslaught on Tibet. The final
action of the Chinese, in my judgement, is little short of perfidy. The tragedy
of it is that the Tibetans put faith in us; they chose to be guided by us; and
we have been unable to get them out of the meshes of Chinese diplomacy or
Chinese malevolence. From the latest position, it appears that we shall not be
able to rescue the Dalai Lama.
Our Ambassador has been at great pains to
find an explanation or justification for Chinese policy and actions. As the
External Affairs Ministry remarked in one of their telegrams, there was a lack
of firmness and unnecessary apology in one or two representations that he made
to the Chinese Government on our behalf. It is impossible to imagine any
sensible person believing in the so-called threat to China from Anglo-American
machinations in Tibet. Therefore, if the Chinese put faith in this, they must
have distrusted us so completely as to have taken us as tools or stooges of
Anglo-American diplomacy or strategy. This feeling, if genuinely entertained by
the Chinese in spite of your direct approaches to them, indicates that even
though we regard ourselves as the friends of China, the Chinese do not regard
us as their friends.
With the Communist mentality of
"whoever is not with them being against them", this is a significant
pointer, of which we have to take due note. During the last several months,
outside the Russian camp, we have practically been alone in championing the
cause of Chinese entry into UN and in securing from the Americans assurances on
the question of Formosa. We have done everything we could to assuage Chinese
feelings, to allay its apprehensions and to defend its legitimate claims in our
discussions and correspondence with America and Britain and in the UN.
Inspite of this, China is not convinced
about our disinterestedness; it continues to regard us with suspicion and the
whole psychology is one, at least outwardly, of scepticism perhaps mixed with a
little hostility. I doubt if we can go any further than we have done already to
convince China of our good intentions, friendliness and goodwill. In Peking we
have an Ambassador who is eminently suitable for putting across the friendly
point of view. Even he seems to have failed to convert the Chinese. Their last
telegram to us is an act of gross discourtesy not only in the summary way it
disposes of our protest against the entry of Chinese forces into Tibet but also
in the wild insinuation that our attitude is determined by foreign influences.
It looks as though it is not a friend speaking in that language but a potential
enemy.
In the background of this, we have to
consider what new situation now faces us as a result of the disappearance of
Tibet, as we knew it, and the expansion of China almost up to our gates.
Throughout history we have seldom been worried about our north-east frontier.
The Himalayas have been regarded as an impenetrable barrier against any threat
from the north. We had a friendly Tibet which gave us no trouble. The Chinese
were divided. They had their own domestic problems and never bothered us about
frontiers. In 1914, we entered into a convention with Tibet which was not
endorsed by the Chinese. We seem to have regarded Tibetan autonomy as extending
to independent treaty relationship. Presumably, all that we required was
Chinese counter-signature.
The Chinese interpretation of suzerainty
seems to be different. We can, therefore, safely assume that very soon they
will disown all the stipulations which Tibet has entered into with us in the
past. That throws into the melting pot all frontier and commercial settlements
with Tibet on which we have been functioning and acting during the last half a
century. China is no longer divided. It is united and strong. All along the
Himalayas in the north and north-east, we have on our side of the frontier a
population ethnologically and culturally not different from Tibetans and
Mongoloids. The undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side
of a population with its affinities to the Tibetans or Chinese have all the
elements of the potential trouble between China and ourselves. Recent and
bitter history also tells us that Communism is no shield against imperialism
and that the communists are as good or as bad imperialists as any other.
Chinese ambitions in this respect not only cover the Himalayan slopes on our
side but also include the important part of Assam. They have their ambitions in
Burma also. Burma has the added difficulty that it has no McMahon Line round
which to build up even the semblance of an agreement.
Chinese irredentism and communist
imperialism are different from the expansionism or imperialism of the western
powers. The former has a cloak of ideology which makes it ten times more
dangerous. In the guise of ideological expansion lie concealed racial, national
or historical claims. The danger from the north and north-east, therefore,
becomes both communist and imperialist. While our western and north-western
threat to security is still as prominent as before, a new threat has developed
from the north and north-east. Thus, for the first time, after centuries,
India's defence has to concentrate itself on two fronts simultaneously.
Our defence measures have so far been based
on the calculations of superiority over Pakistan. In our calculations we shall
now have to reckon with communist China in the north and in the north-east, a
communist China which has definite ambitions and aims and which does not, in
any way, seem friendly disposed towards us.
Let us also consider the political
conditions on this potentially troublesome frontier. Our northern and
north-eastern approaches consist of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling and the
tribal areas in Assam. From the point of view of communication, there are weak
spots. Continuous defensive lines do not exist. There is almost an unlimited
scope for infiltration. Police protection is limited to a very small number of
passes. There, too, our outposts do not seem to be fully manned. The contact of
these areas with us is by no means close and intimate. The people inhabiting
these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India.
Even Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not
free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices. During the last three years, we have not
been able to make any appreciable approaches to the Nagas and other hill tribes
in Assam. European missionaries and other visitors had been in touch with them,
but their influence was in no way friendly to India or Indians. In Sikkim,
there was political ferment some time ago. It is quite possible that discontent
is smouldering there. Bhutan is comparatively quiet, but its affinity with
Tibetans would be a handicap. Nepal has a weak oligarchic regime based almost
entirely on force: it is in conflict with a turbulent element of the population
as well as with enlightened ideas of the modern age. In these circumstances, to
make people alive to the new danger or to make them defensively strong is a
very difficult task indeed and that difficulty can be got over only by
enlightened firmness, strength and a clear line of policy.
I am sure the Chinese and their source of
inspiration, Soviet Union, would not miss any opportunity of exploiting these
weak spots, partly in support of their ideology and partly in support of their
ambitions. In my judgement the situation is one which we cannot afford either
to be complacent or to be vacillating. We must have a clear idea of what we
wish to achieve and also of the methods by which we should achieve it. Any
faltering or lack of decisiveness in formulating our objectives or in pursuing
our policies to attain those objectives is bound to weaken us and increase the
threats which are so evident.
Side by side with these external dangers,
we shall now have to face serious internal problems as well. I have already
asked Iengar to send to the External Affairs Ministry a copy of the
Intelligence Bureau's appreciation of these matters. Hitherto, the Communist
Party of India has found some difficulty in contacting communists abroad, or in
getting supplies of arms, literature, etc., from them. They had to contend with
the difficult Burmese and Pakistan frontiers on the east or with the long
seaboard. They shall now have a comparatively easy means of access to Chinese
communists and through them to other foreign communists. Infiltration of spies,
fifth columnists and communists would now be easier. Instead of having to deal
with isolated communist pockets in Telengana and Warrangal we may have to deal
with communist threats to our security along our northern and north-eastern
frontiers, where, for supplies of arms and ammunition, they can safely depend
on communist arsenals in China.
The whole situation thus raises a number of
problems on which we must come to an early decision so that we can, as I said
earlier, formulate the objectives of our policy and decide the method by which
those objectives are to be attained. It is also clear that the action will have
to be fairly comprehensive, involving not only our defence strategy and state
of preparations but also problem of internal security to deal with which we
have not a moment to lose. We shall also have to deal with administrative and
political problems in the weak spots along the frontier to which I have already
referred.
It is of course, impossible to be
exhaustive in setting out all these problems. I am, however, giving below some
of the problems which, in my opinion, require early solution and round which we
have to build our administrative or military policies and measures to implement
them.
a)
A
military and intelligence appreciation of the Chinese threat to India both on
the frontier and to internal security.
b) An examination of military
position and such redisposition of our forces as might be necessary, particularly
with the idea of guarding important routes or areas which are likely to be the
subject of dispute.
c) An appraisement of the
strength of our forces and, if necessary, reconsideration of our retrenchment
plans for the Army in the light of the new threat.
d) A long-term consideration
of our defence needs. My own feeling is that, unless we assure our supplies of
arms, ammunition and armour, we would be making our defence perpetually weak
and we would not be able to stand up to the double threat of difficulties both
from the west and north-west and north and north-east.
e)
The
question of China's entry into the UN. In view of the rebuff which China has
given us and the method which it has followed in dealing with Tibet, I am
doubtful whether we can advocate its claim any longer. There would probably be
a threat in the UN virtually to outlaw China, in view of its active
participation in the Korean war. We must determine our attitude on this
question also.
f)
The
political and administrative steps which we should take to strengthen our
northern and north-eastern frontier. This would include the whole of the
border, ie. Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling and the tribal territory in
Assam.
g)
Measures
of internal security in the border areas as well as the states flanking those
areas such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal and Assam.
h) Improvement of our
communication, road, rail, air and wireless, in these areas and with the
frontier outposts.
i) The future of our mission
at Lhasa and the trade posts at Gyangtse and Yatung and the forces which we
have in operation in Tibet to guard the trade routes.
j)
The
policy in regard to the McMahon Line.
These are some of the questions which occur
to my mind. It is possible that a consideration of these matters may lead us
into wider question of our relationship with China, Russia, America, Britain
and Burma. This, however, would be of a general nature, though some might be
basically very important, e.g., we might have to consider whether we should not
enter into closer association with Burma in order to strengthen the latter in
its dealings with China.
I do not rule out the possibility that,
before applying pressure on us, China might apply pressure on Burma. With
Burma, the frontier is entirely undefined and the Chinese territorial claims
are more substantial. In its present position, Burma might offer an easier
problem to China, and therefore, might claim its first attention.
I suggest that we meet early to have a
general discussion on these problems and decide on such steps as we might think
to be immediately necessary and direct, quick examination of other problems
with a view to taking early measures to deal with them.
Vallabhbhai Patel,
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