[nukkad] NEHRU-- The 1962 Indo-China Conflict

[zaverirm <>]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it 
will be too late. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,
This is an article from another group that delves into certain grave
mistakes committed in India's foreign and domestic policies by her first
prime and foreigner minister. Read through to erase many misconceptions you
may have in mind.

Rohit Zaveri.
============================================================================
===============

-----Original Message-----
From: BHAILAL@aol.com 
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 12:00 AM
To: Bhailal Patel
Subject: [IndianCivilization]Subj: Fw: NEHRU-- The 1962 Indo-China
Conflict  Date: 12/5/2002 7:24:34 AM Cent


Subj:   Fw: NEHRU-- The 1962 Indo-China Conflict 
Date:   12/5/2002 7:24:34 AM Central Standard Time
From:   <A
HREF="mailto:hindu_santoshkumar@hotmail.com">hindu_santoshkumar@hotmail.com<
/A>

Subject: NEHRU-- The 1962 Indo-China Conflict
The Rediff Special/Wing Commander (retd) R V Parasnis

By and large Indians have always lacked an understanding of the concept of
sovereignty. Therein lie the roots of our slavery by foreign rulers for over
1,000 years. These foreigners all came for plunder or trade, but stayed on
to
rule and earned the right to call themselves Indians. All the while the
local
kingdoms squabbled between themselves and myopically called for foreign help
to overcome their adversaries.

The concept of sovereignty calls for a thorough understanding of national
interests and goals; developing means (especially economic strength) and
infrastructure to achieve them; fair and just rule of law; and military
muscle along with a willingness to use it when necessary. Care also has to
be
taken to ensure that pragmatism and practicality prevail in all national
policies, or else sovereignty can never be sustained.

The great Shivaji understood the concept of sovereignty perfectly well and
was therefore able to create an empire out of nothing, surrounded by enemies
on all sides. The British creation of 'protectorates' and 'buffer states'
for
the defence of India too developed because of this concept, and the lack of
resources, especially manpower, with Great Britain to conquer, control, and
administer every small or big state bordering India. Economically and
administratively, it was not viable to expand the borders of the empire
thoughtlessly over unproductive terrain.

 The India-China-Tibet treaties of the British days were thus created
according to the British defence concept to guard and expand their empire,
and deliberately kept vague. The British had the military muscle to remain
flexible in philosophy and enforce whatever they thought was best in their
interests at any given time.

But after Independence, in spite of the British understanding with Tibet and
the willingness of the Tibetan authorities to expand that understanding to
let India help them keep their country safe from external aggression (they
only had China to fear), we did nothing.

On the other hand, a year after the People's Republic of China was declared
in 1949, the People's Liberation Army entered Tibet and made it a province
of
their country.

That is foresight and quick action. They acted when the time was ripe and
before anyone else could react. They knew exactly what their country's goal
was and secured it. Sadly, Tibet has become an abandoned land since, and its
well-developed, proud culture is on the wane in full sight of the world due
to deliberate design and effort, often accompanied with brutal repression.

Sardar Patel was constrained to state in writing to Nehru that the Tibetans
had reposed their trust in and looked up to us to protect them, but we had
let them down. India could have entered into a treaty with Tibet and taken
over the defence - and, perhaps, foreign affairs -- of Tibet in return for
expenses while the Communists under Mao Zedong were busy fighting the
Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, whose defeat appeared imminent. The
US
of those days would have given any amount of military aid to contain the
Russia-China Communist axis, so obsessive with pathological hatred for
Communism were they at the time.

 That would certainly have created conditions for a serious confrontation
with the Chinese in future, but with American help we could have prepared
for
that eventuality.

As for our leaders then, only Sardar Patel had some understanding of the
concept of sovereignty. Nehru always displayed an abject lack of it.
Examples
are galore, right from the time of Partition.
His refusal to accept the accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir on
September 19, 1947, when it was originally offered by Maharaja Hari Singh, a
good five weeks before the invasion of his state by Pakistan. Had the
accession been accepted then, the entire state would have been ours. The
Pakistan of those days would never have dared attack India, so superior was
our military strength on account of the division of the armed forces on
religious lines.
Later, Nehru practically surrendered our sovereignty when he invited Lord
Louis Mountbatten, the governor general, to preside over and chair the
meetings of his own Cabinet and the Cabinet Committee on Defence on matters
regarding the accession and the military action after Pakistan invaded Jammu
and Kashmir. Mountbatten, basically a servant of the British Crown, did his
best to delay the decisions.
Worse, as India started winning the war and liberating parts of north
Kashmir, Nehru inexplicably (most likely under the strong influence of
Mountbatten and his wife, who shaped much of his thinking in those days)
declared a 'ceasefire' and stopped our victorious army dead in its tracks
before it could liberate the entire state. He declared the ceasefire
arbitrarily, without consulting his full Cabinet, the Constituent Assembly
(as Parliament was then known), his military commanders, or the
maharaja/prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
Nehru was the architect of Article 370, with which he burdened India to
placate a hurt Sheikh Abdullah.
The Chinese occupation of Tibet should have forced a reassessment of the
threat to India. After they enforced their suzerainty on Tibet in 1951, the
threat deserved greater attention. But when General K M Cariappa met Nehru
to
discuss the defence of the North East Frontier Agency, he was bluntly told
to
mind only Kashmir and Pakistan as his concerns for defence and leave China
to
the politicians and the diplomats.

As Lieutenant General S P P Thorat recounts in his autobiography 'From
Reveille to Retreat', "When [in 1959] I, as GoC-in-C Eastern Command, met
Menon in Delhi, I opened the subject [of defence against the Chinese] with
him. In his usually sarcastic style he said that there would be no war
between India and China and [if there was] he was quite capable of fighting
it himself at the diplomatic level."


Nehru learnt no lessons from the war in Kashmir. Practicality always took a
back seat in his mind, which was dominated by idealism. He went on
emotionally in his rhetoric of 'Hindi Chini bhai bhai', all the while
considering himself a superior international statesman and India an elder
brother of China.  He was proudly going around as the unchallenged leader of
the Third World. He failed to realise that the Chinese leaders had begun to
resent his approach and his manner of dealing with them, that as per them
China was the natural leader of the Third World, that the initial bond of
personal friendship he had formed with the Chinese leaders was not strong
enough to withstand this strain, and that personal relations can never score
over vital national interests in any case. Countries fight wars when their
vital interests are threatened. Nehru and Krishna Menon failed to understand
this.


Nehru's rigidity on the border issue, his insistence on Chinese withdrawal
before border talks could begin, his grant of political asylum to the Dalai
Lama and permission to him to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile (an
act
that created conditions for a future invasion of Tibet by India or outside
powers through India to restore the Dalai Lama's rule, if desired), the
hostile Indian press on the question of the occupation of Tibet, and Nehru's
increasingly aggressive statements on the border made the Chinese believe he
had become a tool in the hands of the Anglo-American imperialists. Chinese
Premier Zhou Enlai was maintaining a friendly posture, but he had
practically
begun to hate Nehru, as is clear from the text of his conversations with US
President Richard Nixon in 1972, now made public. There were possibly some
outward signs of this and some hints were dropped, but Nehru was blind to
them. The Chinese, basically secretive in nature, were also not very open
about their ill feelings.

The Chinese also knew that India was unprepared for a high-altitude war, and
there was no imperial power behind her with any ready plan to enter Tibet.
Since the Indian threat was unreal, punishing Nehru must have been the only,
or a major, motive for their attacks.


Nehru continued with his blind love for socialism and an oppressed sister
nation. Zhou and his generals were invited for many military functions like
the passing out parade of the National Defence Academy, firepower
demonstration/exercises by the army, and even visits to the various military
establishments like the Defence Services Staff College and the College of
Combat, Mhow. Zhou embraced the young cadets passing out then with
affection,
but had no qualms in butchering them when they were guarding our borders in
1962 as young officers. The Chinese premier and his generals went all round
India visiting our industrial and military establishments, observing,
learning and preparing for an eventuality (or planning for a showdown?),
while we enjoyed our reverie. The example of one firepower demonstration in
1956 arranged by none other than General B M Kaul stands out.

"The firepower demonstration went off admirably well. It had to; we had
practised it for months. A Chinese general who was sitting next to General B
M Kaul found it a bit too difficult to swallow and asked General Kaul
whether
it would be possible to achieve in actual battle conditions, the kind of
concentration of fire then observed during the demonstration.

"Instead of answering that question directly, General Kaul went into the
mechanics of strategy and tactics vis-à-vis firepower concentration. The
Chinese military delegation on their return journey said to the Burmese in
Rangoon that the senior officers of the Indian Army were 'chair-borne'
soldiers," says Captain C L Datta, who was ADC to Presidents Rajendra Prasad
and S Radhakrishnan, in his book With Two Presidents.

When Gen Kaul evacuated his forces from NEFA in 1962, the opposing Chinese
general was the same one who had sat next to him during the demonstration
and
asked him that question!

Nehru took it upon himself to prop up China and take up their cause at every
possible international forum, at times without even any specific request
from
them. But that earned him little or no gratitude.

If China was a friendly country and its claim on Tibet was acceptable to us,
where was the question of granting the Dalai Lama and his entourage asylum
in
India to establish and run a parallel government? We even posted a foreign
ministry officer to Dharamsala to represent India in the durbar of the Dalai
Lama. If we believed in the justness of the Chinese claim over Tibet, then
the maximum we should have done was granted asylum to the Dalai Lama with a
small entourage (not thousands of followers) on humanitarian grounds, but
permitted no political activities. Alternatively, we could have objected to
the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, albeit in soft, diplomatic
language,
insisted on retaining our mission in Lhasa as per the 1906 convention with
Tibet and agreed to and ratified by China; protested when they forced Tibet
to surrender its sovereignty and permitted it to maintain only regional
self-governance in 1951, and in 1956 when they began to deny them
self-governance, eventually forcing the Dalai Lama to flee. Granting
political asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959 would then have been justified.
As
a result, the Chinese would have certainly remained hostile to us on this
point, but respected us for what we are.

Instead, in 1955, while relinquishing the rights and privileges India had
enjoyed in Tibet from the times of Colonel Younghusband's expedition in
1904,
Nehru declared: "Free India has no wish to continue with any imperialistic
rights or privileges."

India as a nation itself was an imperialistic creation. India's borders,
including the addition of the state of Greater Assam to the Union, were a
British creation. If we rejected our rights in Tibet as an imperialistic
creation, what rightful claim had we on the borders fixed in accordance with
British expansionism? But without the military might to back it up, Nehru
did
exactly that.

India, under Nehru, was an antithesis of most of the theories he applied in
governance. Taking advantage of the British imperial legacy when it suited
us
while otherwise denouncing it roundly, we managed to lose all the respect
China had for us, to be replaced by contempt. Which made it easier for them
to ambush and capture or kill our patrols and take punitive action against
us
in 1962.

In retrospect, it can be said that Nehru's greatness and his many sterling
qualities eventually came to naught on account of his lack of understanding
of the concept of sovereignty in general and national interest in
particular.
He failed to fix the national goal. His hatred of imperialism and love for
democracy mixed with socialist leanings and the prime ministerial
responsibility that demanded pragmatism and cold national interest left him
confused and irresolute.

Nehru, therefore, knew not where our borders should be fixed, or why. Yet,
after Independence, he went on to fix India's northern and northeastern
borders, left undemarcated by the British, on his own, without consulting
China, leave alone getting them to agree.

The principle he followed was arbitrary, perhaps not always unjustified or
unfair, but possibly wrong in places, and certainly disputable in many
places. That often led to vague and irrational diplomatic arguments during
talks with China or postponement of negotiations. His vacillating mind
didn't
stand him well against energetic and radical leaders like Mao and Zhou, both
of whom were very clear about the concept of sovereignty.








------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To join/leave, use the form at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/#options
This list is archived at: http://www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/archive.html