“Never Again The Same” – Excerpts

Courtesy Atanu , I stumbled on this 1962 TIME Magazine story on the Indo-Chinese War of 1962. Excerpts below.

*** “Never Again the Same” ***

…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.

.

…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.”

…In New Delhi illusions are dying fast….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.

…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?”

…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.

…

Nehru was coming close to admitting that he had at last discovered who were India’s friends…(Nehru) was shocked when, instead of helping India, Moscow denounced India’s border claims and urged Nehru to accept the Red Chinese terms.

…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….

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.”

…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.”

…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 Chink 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.

…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.

…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.

…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.

…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.”

…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…

Panic spread from the mountains into the plains. Officials in Tezpur burned their files, and bank managers even set fire to stacks of banknotes…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.”

…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.

…There is still considerable dispute over how little or how much the Chinese were after in their attack on India.

…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.

…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.

…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 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.

*** End of Excerpts ***

Sadly, the “determination to see that the Himalayan defeats were avenged” seems to be something we have forgotten.

How else does one explain the Defence Minister’s bland explanation regarding Chinese incursions? or the meek acceptance of backtracking by Chinese government on border agreements? or the government’s silence over Chinese attempts at cartographic aggression? or the unbelievable-but true attempts at blocking Chinese incursions by forming human chains? or the incredibly naive (and ineffective) attempts at thwarting further claims on our territory? or the huge reluctance to admit that India and China are strategic rivals?

Too many uncomfortable questions…but few in New Delhi are loosing sleep over this…

China? You must be joking…We have a bigger problem on our hands….and more important matters to attend to.

Have a peaceful weekend (if you can).

P.S. If anyone of you read (or heard) the word “China” in any news-reports about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit, pl. leave a comment below with the relevant link. Thanks.

Related Post: “China: Will India repeat the mistakes of 1962?” – Excerpts