On Tuesday, Nevile Maxwell, a former journalist with
The Times, posted in Delhi, published sections of the Henderson
Brooks–Bhagat Report on his personal website. The report was an investigation into
the 1962 military debacle and is still classified as ‘Top Secret’ by the
Government of India. Maxwell wrote that he was publishing the report on his
website after efforts to release it to the Indian press had failed with editors
backing out. “So my dilemma continued,” he wrote. “Although with the albatross
hung, so to speak, on Indian necks as well as my own. As I see it now I have no
option but, rather than leave the dilemma to my heirs, to put the Report on the
internet myself.”
The release of the document, by itself, is no great addition
to our understanding of 1962. Maxwell has had the report with him for many
decades and uses it as one of the principal sources for his book, India’s
China War. His account, already widely disseminated, would now be
open to be scrutinised alongside its principal primary source thus adding more
weight to his narrative. Till now, the report being classified, we had to take
Maxwell’s word for it.
Nevertheless, the release of the report does raise some important
points.
The first thing it does is lay bare the almost autocratic
way in which the government in our country functions. The lifeblood of any
democracy is information, on the basis of which the electorate can make
decisions. This level of secrecy—the Henderson Report has been under wraps for
more than 5 decades now—is odd for a country that calls itself a democracy.
Most Western countries, even organisations such as the CIA, declassify
documents after more than 30 years. This is just one example of the paternalism
which the Indian state has inherited seamlessly from the Raj. Our government
still has a tendency to rule rather than govern which is why it can so easily
keep this report away from the prying eyes of its own citizens. With regard to
1962, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that communist China has been more
open than democratic India.
The other thing this hullabaloo does is bring 1962 back into
the spotlight. The renewed interest in India’s greatest military debacle would
help shape India’s response to further conflicts, hopefully in the correct
manner. Till now, with very little information available (and Maxwell’s views
under heavy criticism), the debate around 1962 has been severely hampered. One
half of the efforts have been spent in proving Nehru’s contention that China
“stabbed us in the back”—the official Indian view of the war. The other half,
critical of Nehru, have blamed his appeasement of China for the defeat.
Surprisingly, even this half unquestioningly accepts Nehru’s version of Chinese
perfidy, only berating Panditji for letting down his guard. As luck would have it, both stances are
largely incorrect.
In 1947, as India emerged as a free country, it saw that its
borders with its largest neighbour, China, had been left largely undefined by
the British. In the eastern sector (now Arunachal Pradesh), the border was
demarcated by the McMahon Line, an agreement formalised between British and
Tibetan representatives at the Simla Conference of 1914. The Chinese do not formally
recognise this line. They argue that the Tibetans were not sovereign in 1914
and hence did not have the authority to decide a border. In the western sector,
things were even fuzzier. As late as 1950, India itself had produced maps
marking the border in this sector as “undefined”.
Initially, this ambiguous border wasn’t an issue. China
emerged from World War II a broken country torn apart by civil war. The power
equation between the two countries can be judged from the fact that for the
Bandung Conference, Nehru sent over an Air-India aeroplane to fly Zhou Enlai
(China’s first premier) to Jakarta. This unusual aircraft lending was done
because at the time, strife-torn China did not even have an airline.
However, in 1950, China invaded Tibet, bringing itself to
India’s doorstep and very soon built itself up as a stable power. Around the
same time as India and China committed themselves to the lofty (but, as time
would tell, hollow) principles of Panchsheel, friction
emerged between the two countries with regard to the border. Matters were more
or less settled on the eastern sector. Even though China did not formally
accept the McMohan line (and still does not), the area had been under Indian
control for some time and Zhou Enlai had stated that “now that it is an
accomplished fact, we should accept it”. In the western sector though, India,
curiously, used a shaky treaty from 1842 to unilaterally claim a fixed boundary
(the Kashmir-China boundary shown in Indian maps today). This is an area that
the British has never really had any jurisdiction over, neither de
facto nor de jure. China, on the other hand, claimed
it had controlled the area for over two centuries and, most importantly, it had
certainly been under Chinese control since 1950, ever since it invaded Tibet.
When India first drew a definite border for Aksai Chin (articulated in Nehru’s
letter to Zhou in 1959) China was already in control of Aksai China for almost
a decade (roughly mapping to its present area of control).
This maximalist claim by India, the weaker side, might
strike one as odd but starts to make more sense when taken to be a bargaining
counter. India wanted China to formally accept its claims in the east in return
for which it would accept China’s claims to Aksai Chin. This claim was therefore
never meant to be an actual military posture—just a diplomatic bluff. The logic
of democracy married with jingoism, though, put paid to Nehru’s strategy. Once
the border in the west had been demarcated and put on a map, it took a life of
its own. Public opinion staunchly opposed the idea of a barter, or even the
ceding of an inch of Indian land—which now included Aksai Chin, a region which had
never been in India’s control but was now a part of the country by the occult
powers of cartography. Nehru himself acknowledged this pressure lamenting that
“if I give them that I shall no longer be Prime Minister of India”. President
Radhakrishnan also warned that the maps could not be changed “if only because
public opinion will not tolerate this”.
The end result was that when Zhou Enlai flew to India in
January 1960 (this time, presumably, in his own aircraft) he was ready to
negotiate the border but Nehru was in no position to cede land from areas that had
already been demarcated by his government as India’s. To further press home the
public opposition to any ‘concessions’ to China, Zhou’s visit was marked by protests
and demonstrations including a massive dharnaa staged by the
Jan Sangh outside Nehru’s residence (it is therefore, ironic, that today the
BJP criticises Nehru for 1962—a mistake he committed partially by giving in to
pressure from the Hindutva wing). The east-west ‘barter’ first thought up to
solve the problem—the ‘logical solution’ as per Neville Maxwell—was a nonstarter.
India would not, could not, shift from its claims either in the east or the west.
In spite of these reverses, it still did not mean conflict
was inevitable. In fact, the situation in 1960 is also the situation
today—India holds the McMohan line and China holds Aksai Chin.
What eventually lead to war was something known as Nehru’s
Forward Policy.
In November 1961, the Government, under massive public
pressure, issued instructions to the Army to set up posts all along India’s
claim lines and "especially in such places as might be disputed".
This bizarre strategy, known as the Forward Policy was based on completely misplaced
intelligence from the IB that the Chinese were unlikely to use military force
against India even if they were in a position to do so. NB Mullick, part of
Nehru’s coterie, supplied this fantastic assessment. At Army HQ, Nehru’s other
two acolytes, Lt General BM Kaul and Army Commander, Thapar accepted this order
rather than, as should have been done, protest it from a military point of
view. Valid and urgent objections from
the Western Command (in-charge of operations in Aksai Chin) stating that it
severely lacked forces to carry out the task (much less face the Chinese should
they retaliate) were summarily overruled by Army HQ.
Matters reached a head in June 1962 as India established a
post in the eastern sector at Dhola, which lay around 1.5 kms north of the McMohan line. As explained by Brigadier John
Dalvi in his seminal war memorial, Himalayan Blunder, “the
Thagla-Dhola area was not strictly territory that we should have been convinced
was ours as directed by the Prime Minister, Mr Nehru, and someone is guilty of exceeding
the limits prescribed by him.”
By September, China had attacked and taken over the post. Political
compulsions now forced the government to act and attempt to evict the Chinese
from Dhola—a move not short of suicide given the strength of the Chinese, the
climate and the harsh geography of the area. When the army resisted this move,
the government promptly replaced the intransigent General Umrao Singh (XXXIII
Corps) with General Kaul, sweeping aside all opposition to its plans. The
Indian force that was eventually sent to evict the Chinese from Dhola was
heavily attacked by some 800 Chinese troops supported by heavy mortars. For the
first time, the fiction the IB had spun, that the Chinese would not retaliate
with force, came crumbling down. General Kaul’s first shocked reaction to the
Chinese action is said to have been “Oh my God! You are right, they mean
business.”
By 20 October, the Chinese had launched major offensives in
the west as well as the east, citing “self-defence” against India’s aggression;
ironic because India’s Army was in no possession to defend itself much less be
aggressive. The false bravado of the Forward Policy had collapsed.
Within a month, the Chinese had swept through the west and
east and, having achieved their war aims, declared a unilateral ceasefire. They
withdrew to the Line of Actual Control as it existed in 1959 (and still more-or-less
exists today), which maintained the McMohan line in the east but also firmly
kept Aksai Chin with them. As might be noted, this is a compromise that, at one
time, the Chinese were willing to do at the negotiating table. India’s Forward
Policy had achieved nothing other than a humiliating defeat for its army. While
1962 laid bare the army top brass and political leadership, it must be pointed
out that most Indian Army units showed exceptional courage in the face of almost
impossible odds, fighting a far-more well equipped enemy as well as their own
bumbling leadership.
India has a lot of lessons to learn from this debacle. One
is the double-edged sword that media attention is in a democracy. Media and
public pressure plays a remarkably important role most of the time but in 1962
it also forced Nehru’s hand, compelling him to take unsound decisions such as
the Forward Policy. This lesson is as valid today as it was in ’62, maybe even
more so given how much more stronger the media is as compared to 5 decades back.
The
2013 Daulat Beg Oldi incident is a case in point. Defence minister AK
Antony protested the media reaction, insinuating that television news media
overplayed the face-off by showing old footage of Chinese “incursions” on what
is still an undemarcated boundary—a situation similar to 1962.
It also calls for a reappraisal of Nehru—something both his
supporters as well as critics need to do. In 1962, Nehru’s position of being
“stabbed in the back” was clearly a bit misleading. During the war, he flatly contradicted
a lot of the qualities he is admired for: Third World solidarity, non-alignment
(Nehru appealed fervently for US support in 1962 and was turned down) and
democracy (removed all opposition to his 1962 policies, staffing every level
with ‘yes men’). His critics, mainly from the Right, also seem to have gotten
the wrong end of the stick. For example, in his book Are We Deceiving
Ourselves Again? Lessons the Chinese Taught Pandit Nehru But Which We Still
Refuse to Learn, Arun Shourie
paints Nehru as a Sinophile, a Kumbaya-singing peacenik who was fooled by the
wily Chinese, thus, ironically, buying into the Government’s excuse of being
“stabbed in the back”. Of course, as we see, Nehru was hardly fooled by his own
rhetoric of Hindi-Chini bhai bhai. Nehru understood
realpolitik very well, thank you, and could, be aggressive (in this case,
over-aggressive) as and when needed.
But of course, given our ostrich-like attitude towards history—will
the Henderson Report ever be declassified?—it remains to be seen how much we
learn from this incident.
