1962: THE WAR THAT WASN’T
The Definitive Account of the Clash between Indian and China
Shiv Kunal Verma
Aleph
425 pages; Rs 995
In 1962, the current Indian prime minister was 12 years old. His Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, was nine. But despite the passage of so much time, India has stubbornly refused to declassify records that could help pinpoint the underlying causes of that disaster. This book attempts to fill that gap, in part at least.
1962 was a stunning defeat for India and the foreign policy repercussions continue to this day. If the Chinese had not opted for a unilateral ceasefire and pulled back, they could possibly have annexed everything north of the Brahmaputra. Apart from territory lost in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian army suffered huge casualties.
This book does not challenge the conventional narrative. It adds information that reinforces it.
Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister, trusted the Chinese too much and did not trust his own army. Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon knew nothing of war and was paranoid about possible army coups. The incompetent Lt General B M Kaul had never seen action but he was pitch-forked into command due to his close relationship with Nehru and Menon. Kaul ran away from the opening battle of Namka Chu.
The orders given to frontline commanders were contradictory and unrealistic since the high command did not know the terrain, or the ground situation. The army was short of ammunition. Troops had no warm clothes. They faced an enemy that enjoyed massive numerical superiority apart from being better-armed and acclimatised. To cap it all, the Chinese had superior intelligence.
Indian strategy and tactics were rigid and farcical. Time and again, formations were outflanked or hit from behind. Some strong defensive setups were abandoned in panic. In other cases, men fought to their last bullet against hopeless odds. The powers-that-be refused to use the air force in an offensive role. Towards the end of the conflict, an absurd request was made for support by the US Air Force, without even consulting the Air Chief Marshal.
This book makes an honest attempt to understand the events that led up to the clash. It starts with the Simla Accord of 1914 where Sir Henry McMahon doodled lines insouciantly on an inaccurately-drawn map. It describes the evolution of the Sino-Indian relationship in the 1950s when Panchsheel and Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai were buzzwords. That was when Maoist China annexed Xinjiang in the west and Tibet in the south and started making claims on Arunachal and Ladakh, based on Tibet's historical associations with those areas. It must be noted that India then barely had a presence in what was known as NEFA (the North-East Frontier Agency).
It is the author's contention that Nehru concealed border clashes as long as he could, and then made disastrous decisions in pursuance of a "Forward Policy". He also criticises the decision to replace the Assam Rifles with the regular army in upcountry Arunachal.
At the same time, the relationships between Nehru, Menon, the legendary B N Mullik, who headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Indian army led to a surfeit of internecine intrigues. The IB did not communicate what it knew. That crippled the army's decision-making and contributed to the defeat.
There is a workmanlike description of the hostilities in October-November 1962 as well as descriptions of the battles with maps of local terrain. The book also refers to accounts by Chinese military historians, which adds more useful detail.
There are sundry eyewitness accounts. The author's father, the late Major General Ashok Kalyan Verma, was a young officer in 2 Rajput, when it took a hammering in Arunachal. He leveraged those family connections to interview officers and JCOs who fought in 1962. Those accounts are gold in the Indian context where battles are generally described in drab officialese.
The horror and fatalism of men knowing that they are being asked to follow senseless orders, which will result in their deaths, comes through. Perhaps the most poignant is the account of the Subahdar threatened with close arrest by Kaul for saying that this is the first time men are being asked to charge out of a nullah to attack a numerically superior force sitting on surrounding heights.
Some 54 years later, the protagonists are mostly dead (Mao, Nehru, Menon, et al), or long retired and elderly. It was a squalid affair. Incompetence, nepotism and lack of coordination between the IB and the defence forces all played a role in the debacle. The culpability must be shared between the political establishment, the bureaucracy and the armed forces.
The Henderson-Brooks Report with its narrow brief of looking at the military lacunae of 1962 was commissioned but it has never been declassified. Nor have other pertinent records been released (the request to the US government to deploy its airforce is available from declassified American archives).
This book throws light on some of the events. But it is one man's interpretation and, of necessity, based on incomplete information. It is said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. But what can one say about a nation that assiduously tries to bury its own past and conceal it from its own citizens?
