We are like this only…
Almost 50 years ago, in October 1962, young men of the Ahir Charlie Company from 13 Kumaon faced an extraordinary assault. It came in the early hours of dawn, as snow was falling at Rezang La, 17,000 feet above sea level. The story of their resistance became a legend..Of the 120 defenders, only three survived, seriously wounded. The rest – including their commander – were discovered after the winter, frozen, mostly holding their weapons but with no ammunition. This was a genuine ‘last man-last round’ defense…and it succeeded in stalling the Chinese advance in Ladakh.
These men – along with many others – eventually succumbed to an enemy that had an overwhelming advantage in men, weapons and resources. The Chinese aggression in 1962 should not have come as a surprise but Nehru was too much in love with “Panchsheel” and in thrall of “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” to notice that something was amiss. The result was a disaster. As TIME Magazine noted,
…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.
..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.
And such was the extent of a sanguine and relaxed attitude in New Delhi that a road built by China in the heart of Aksai Chin did not come to the notice of the government until two years after it was built.
Nehru bravely noted that “We cannot allow that barrier (the Himalayas) to be penetrated because it is also the principal barrier to India“. But the words had little impact.  The Chinese went ahead and occupied 14,000+ square miles of land that belonged to India in the 1962 war. Not much seems to have changed. This land continues to be under Chinese control. Its troops are stationed on this land. While we euphemistically call it “Line of Actual Control” (LAC), for all practical purposes , this is an international border – along which Chinese forces regularly assert their “right” – with force when necessary.
The 1962 conflict exposed the soft underbelly of our defences: the poorly equipped and ill-resourced armed force – men with canvas shoes fighting in sub-zero temparatures in cotton uniforms…
The men were in cotton uniforms, canvas shoes and were living in the open after marching through slushy roads… There were no porters and everything had to back packed [link]
One of the lessons that India should have learnt (or to be more precise, our political leadership should have learnt) from that period was the need for battle-readiness and preparedness when it comes to China – whose behaviour is frequently devious and usually inscrutable & opaque.
Why am I opening wounds from the past, you may be wondering? Because, almost 40 years since, we appear to have learnt nothing. I discovered yesterday that…
Indian Army’s plans to beef up presence on the Indo-China border have met with fierce resistance from two unexpected quarters — the finance and the environment ministries.
..the ministry of finance is not agreeable to spend a whopping Rs12,000 crore to set up a Mountain Strike Corps even as a plan to create an alternate, all-weather route from Siliguri to North Sikkim to rush troops to the Indo-China border has been rejected by the ministry of environment and forests on the grounds that the alignment passes through eco-sensitive areas.
This refusal of funds comes amidst reports that China is “..training two divisions in high altitude warfare”. Â It also comes in the context of this conclusion from an internal study by the Indian Army: “The study group looked at the combined threat from Pakistan and China in a future war and concluded that the bulk of the fighting would take place in the high mountains” [link].
But what do the powers-that-be do? Remain blithefully ignorant of the enormous risks to national security – and continue life as usual – even as China moves steadily ahead, inch-by-inch, from Ladakh to Arunachal. Kyaa karein? We are like this only…
Related Posts: “Never Again The Sameâ€, Inch by inch, slowly but surely, we keep loosing territory… and  Nightmare at Noon* – Water Wars
P.S. It is worth pointing out that India and China have never been neighbours in history…As Prof Brahma Chellaney has noted:
It was not geography but guns…that made China India’s neighbour
Somewhat related: “Why conventional wisdom giving China the military edge over India may not be true“
Thanks for pointing this out, Shantanu.
It is unfortunate that such issues don’t attract the attention of India’s press and senior newspaper editors. A strong “fort” (defence of borders) is crucial for a successful nation state.
As the famous quote (variant) of George Santayana goes, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
S.K
Do read: China could pull a Kargil on India, warns IDSA:
China could pull a Kargil on India “to teach India a lesson”, warned strategic affairs think-tank IDSA, adding it could be a “limited war”.
The limited hostilties could be confined to a specific section of the border, limited in duration and amenable to a negotiated termination, the Insitute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) said in its report.
Projecting conflict scenarios between the two Asian giants, a report titled ‘A Consideration of Sino Indian Conflict’ by Ali Ahmed said, “The lower end of the conflict at this level could be a Kargil-like situation. China’s aim could be to teach India a lesson so as to influence India’s rise before its capacity building underway acquires traction.”
Excerpts from The unlearnt lessons of 1962 by Dr Subramanian Swamy:
There are no two neighbours on the globe with this kind of history of peace*. Similarly placed countries in Europe, for example, witnessed serial wars over a millennium, right up to a couple of generations back.
…
China, because of peer jealousy, keeps a close watch on India and looks for opportunities to strengthen itself at India’s cost, so that it can sustain the credibility of its feigned contempt. The historical China-India hyphenation is today not simply acceptable to the Chinese think-tanks.
Peer jealousy today also makes Chinese intellectuals and PLA personnel feign contempt for India, especially because of India’s comprehensive military, political and psychological debacle of 1962. But, equally, Chinese strategists realise that the cakewalk the PLA had in 1962 cannot be repeated ever again.
The debacle of 1962 however had ended for three decades since the historical China-India hyphenation that had existed for centuries.
But three decades after 1962, thanks to Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, economic liberalisation, and the Y2K problem which launched the software revolution, put India on a high growth rate path, and also as a quality leader on the electronics map globally.
…
Unfortunately, in India the return of Nehruvian smugness on defence issues has also made a comeback.
The smugness that this hyphenation is a settled fact can be again rudely exploded if our military capability continues for long to remain inadequate to sustain the hyphenation.
Due to this smugness, India defence expenditure has steadily fallen to a dangerously low of 2.3 per cent of GDP, with attendant debilitating corruption, whereas China has maintained a steady expenditure of 6 per cent of GDP throughout the past five decades. Obviously, the lesson of 1962 has yet to be etched in our sub-conscious mind.
Today we fluctuate between panic when threatened by an editorial in the Chinese press, to being complacent when there is bonhomie during a visit of a Chinese dignitary making appreciative speeches. Media coverage reflects this dysfunctional dissonance.
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Today we must renew our memory of 1962 in fresh strategic perspective and “sweat†in peace so that we don’t bleed hopelessly in war.
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We now need to rationally look at possible and potential threats to India from China, assess the probabilities of these materialising, and then decide how to prepare credibly against each of these potential threats. This is the way the 1962 syndrome needs to be exorcised.
Thus, no matter how friendly China may sound diplomatically, if its military capability increases then we have to match it by increasing our military preparedness.To sustain the peer status thus, India must now graduate from oscillating between smugness to neurotically reacting to China on a daily basis, feeding the media with our 1962 psychosis, and instead get down to dealing with China rationally on the various dimensions of threats, and soberly examine how to structure our national security architecture and enhance our military capability.”
* With due respect to Dr Swamy – who is vastly better read and learned than me, one factor that prevented a showdown between India and China in the past might have been the natural, insurmountable (until recently) barriers of Himalayas.
Excerpts from Egg on their faces by Kanchan Gupta, from Jul ’99:
Learn from our past? The best way to do so would be to read the authentic history of our military operations prepared by the Military History Division of the Army; they were equipped and trained to do this job and were best placed to assess things in their right perspective.
But the last Congress government to rule India from 1991 to 1996 decided that there was no need to maintain a division to record India’s military operations; obviously, the Congress did not believe in learning lessons. And, as part of its abject undertaking to the International Monetary Fund that India’s defence costs would be cut, the Military History Division was axed.
Sonia Gandhi would, of course, not know of these and other minor details. Therefore, it would be in order to draw her attention to the ‘Memorandum of Economic Policies for 1992-93’ submitted by then Union Finance Minister Manmohan Singh on behalf of the Congress government to the managing director of the IMF in June 1992. Genuflecting at the IMF altar, the memorandum said: “Total defence spending is budgeted to rise by 7 per cent in nominal terms, resulting in a further real decline to 2.5 per cent of GDP.”
The axing of the Military History Division was only one of the fallouts of this cutback on defence expenditure. By persisting with reducing funds for our defence forces in real terms, enormous damage was caused to the preparedness of our army, air force and navy, both in terms of men and material, during Congress rule. Should not any inquiry that is now ordered begin with the Congress neglect, under foreign pressure, of national security concerns?
Or, since no inquiry was ever ordered into any war fought by India and its outcome, should we not go further back and begin with the outcome of the first war independent India fought in 1947-48? For, if we were to accept the reasons now being proffered by Sonia Gandhi and her flock of faithful, then the same reasons would, and justifiably so, apply to the wars that India fought under Congress rule.
Look at the evidence:
In October 1947, Pakistani Army regulars intruded into Jammu and Kashmir while Jawaharlal Nehru fiddled in New Delhi, refusing to act till Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession. By the time formalities — for which Mohammed Ali Jinnah cared a toss — had been attended to, murderous Pakistani soldiers were on the outskirts of Srinagar.
The Indian Army fought valiantly — 1,103 soldiers sacrificed their lives and another 3,152 were wounded. By the beginning of 1948, the Indian Army had managed to turn the tide; the Pakistanis began to retreat. But even as India stood on the threshold of victory, Nehru meekly accepted a United Nations-dictated ceasefire, halting the Indian Army in its tracks and preventing our soldiers from wresting back from Pakistan 83,100 square kilometres of Indian territory, thus creating what is now known as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
A decade-and-a-half later, in 1962, a dumb-founded Government of India, headed by a paralysed Nehru, watched the Chinese army march into India. An ill-clothed, ill-armed, ill-fed Indian Army was sent to defend our national frontier with nothing more than defunct .303 rifles and cotton shirts to protect them from snow and blizzard. India lost 1,521 soldiers; 548 were injured and 1,729 listed as missing.
In what till date remains the most dishonourable act of New Delhi, the people of Assam were left to fend for themselves after the army was asked to withdraw south of the Brahmaputra. We lost Aksai Chin (38,000 square kilometres) and inherited a border dispute that continues to fester.
Today when we hear Sonia Gandhi’s personal bawarchis allege that Kashmir has been “internationalised” by the Vajpayee government by seeking international support against Pakistan’s perfidy, Nehru’s pathetic appeal for American assistance against the Chinese army comes to mind. Maj Gen D K (‘Monty’) Palit, who was director general of military operations, Army Headquarters, in 1962, records in his book, War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962, how Nehru wrote to President Kennedy, begging for American assistance.
“I do not now recollect what the opening paragraph was,” Maj Gen Palit, who was shown a copy of the letter, says, “but my diary records what the second contained: in it the PM was pleading for ‘the active participation of the US Air Force’ for the defence of India. The specific request was for ‘twelve squadrons of F-104 fighters and two squadrons of B-57 bombers’.”
Should we not inquire into why that letter was written? What was the quid pro quo offered by Nehru? Was it a promise to let the Americans set up a Voice of America transmitter on Indian soil? Was the council of ministers taken into confidence before the letter was written? Was the Opposition consulted, and if so, who in the Opposition agreed to Nehru’s plan? Should we not learn from the unmitigated debacle of India and the resultant loss of 38,000 square kilometres of our land?
Soon after the debacle in Bomdilla, in 1965 India was forced into its second war with Pakistan. India lost 2,902 soldiers; 8,622 were wounded and 361 listed as missing. But strategic gains secured by the Indian forces were surrendered by Lal Bahadur Shastri at Tashkent. No inquiry was ever ordered into why the Government of India, then under Congress control, thought it fit to give up vantage positions that would have today put India at an advantage over Pakistan.
India’s decisive victory in 1971 cost the nation dearly: 3,630 soldiers died on the battlefield; 9,856 were wounded and 212 listed as missing. With more than 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, India could have secured a full and final solution to the Kashmir issue by driving a hard bargain with Pakistan. But Indira Gandhi did not do so while signing the Simla Agreement. If anything, she signed away India’s advantage. Is it worth inquiring into what compelled her to give away so easily what had been secured by the blood and sweat of our soldiers?
As for the disastrous Indian Peace-Keeping Force mission to Sri Lanka, India’s former foreign secretary and high commissioner to Colombo, J N Dixit, records in his book Across Borders: “Rajiv Gandhi insisted on the (Indo-Sri Lankan) agreement despite his being advised by the intelligence agencies and the armed forces not to take on the responsibilities envisaged in the agreement. Rajiv Gandhi should not have sent in the Indian Peace-Keeping Forces to Sri Lanka; (The disastrous IPKF mission) signified a major foreign policy failure for India, which Rajiv Gandhi could have avoided.”
The nation had to bear the cost of Rajiv Gandhi’s juvenile delinquency: 1,157 Indian soldiers were killed and 2,065 wounded. And there was nothing to show as gains for this enormous loss. Let us then inquire into why Indian soldiers were sent into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam minefields. Why intelligence reports were ignored? Why the army’s opinion was overruled? And why didn’t the government cut its losses when it was evident to all that we were in the wrong place for the wrong reasons at the wrong time?
The only inquiry that has ever been conducted into military operations is the Henderson Brooke inquiry into the 1962 war. But it was an inquiry instituted by Army Headquarters, not the government, and its mandate was limited to the Bomdilla debacle. The Congress never made the findings of this inquiry public. On the contrary, “national interest” was cited to keep it a secret.