MILITARY NONSENSE

[Guest guest]

The Rediff Special/Col (retd) Anil Athale

I think it was in 1988, at a talk at the IDSA (Institute of Defence

Studies and Analysis, New Delhi) that Neville Maxwell peddled his

thesis that it was India that was the aggressor in 1962, and claimed

that China merely 'reacted'.

 

Maxwell is a self-confessed Maoist, and anybody who has had occasion

to deal with the ideologically motivated scholars (?) of the pink

variety knows how difficult it is to argue with them! Yet, having

spent close to four years researching the subject, backed up by

military experience/knowledge, field visits and hundreds of

interviews, I was on sure ground.

 

The question I posed to Maxwell was simple... if it was merely

reacting to provocations, how come the attack on October 20, 1962,

took place at the same time in the Chip Chap valley in Ladakh and

1000km away on the Namkachu river? The precision and co-ordination

speaks for a well thought-out plan and premeditation. To talk of

these co-ordinated attacks over a wide front as 'reaction' is

military nonsense.

 

The second and even more fundamental point is the huge resources in

heavy artillery and mortars used by the Chinese during the

operations, specially in the Ladakh sector. Tibet, in 1962, was a

virtual desert, bereft of any local resources. Even a pin had to be

brought all the way from the 'mainland', over a tortuous and single

road from the railhead located nearly 2000km away. It is like the

Indian Army fighting in Arunachal with the nearest railhead located

at Kanyakumari.

 

In order to suppress the Tibetans, the Chinese indeed had a very

large military presence in Tibet. But that was mainly infantry, not

heavy weaponry. In fact, it was a journalist of The Hindustan Times

who reported the rumours circulating in Kalimpong (Sikkim was then

independent and heavily infested with Chinese spies) that heavy

artillery from the Taiwan front had been moved to Tibet. The Chinese

took a good six to eight months to gather all these resources. A

reaction indeed!

 

Unfortunately for Indians, with no means to monitor Chinese

movements, India was in the dark about these developments.

 

This does not mean that India, especially Nehru, did not make

provocative statements. He did. The classic being the offhand remark

while leaving for Colombo, when he told the waiting media that he had

ordered the Indian Army to 'throw out the Chinese'! But there is a

vast gulf between verbal and military provocations.

 

But the best-kept secret of the 1962 border war is that a large part

of the non-military supplies needed by the Chinese reached them via

Calcutta! Till the very last moment, border trade between Tibet and

India went on though Nathu La in Sikkim. For the customs in Calcutta,

it was business as usual and no one thought to pay any attention to

increased trade as a battle indicator.

 

There is undeniable linkage between the Cuban missile crisis and the

Chinese attack. This has been brought out in the official history and

was also written about by me in the print media in 1992 (in The

Sunday Observer).

 

The US ordered the call-up of reservists on September 11, 1962, when

the Chinese attacked the Dhola post in the East. The naval blockade

was ordered around October 16 and put in place by October 20, the

exact time of the Chinese attack. Given the close Chinese relations

with the erstwhile Soviet Union, it seems entirely plausible that the

Chinese must have had prior information about the placement of

missiles in Cuba. In December 1962, after the conflict was over, the

Soviet Union charged China with 'adventurism' against India.

 

The unilateral Chinese ceasefire of November 21 and the quick

withdrawal coincided with the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis.

The Chinese were afraid of intervention by the US Air Force. They

were not very wrong, for literally within days the massive American

airlift of supplies for India began on November 23/24, 1962.

 

In international relations there is no room for coincidences.

Certainly not four or five! It would not be an exaggeration to say

that had the Cuban missile crisis not taken place the Chinese would

not have attacked on such a massive scale. This also explains Nehru's

confidence that China would not attack. All these years, the need to

maintain its non-aligned 'virginity' prevented India from

acknowledging that it was the implicit American support against China

that was at the back of Nehru's confidence.

 

It is best to quote Professor Thomas C Schelling (Arms & Influence,

Yale University Press, 1966, page 53): "Our commitment is not so much

a policy as a prediction... In the Indian case, it turns out that we

[the US] had a latent or implicit policy [to support India against

China]. It was part of the effort to preserve the role of deterrence

in the world and Asia. Military support to India would be a way of

keeping an implicit pledge...." (paraphrased)

 

Schelling then goes on to say that Nehru possibly anticipated it for

10 years and that was why he was so contemptuous of the kind of

treaties Pakistan signed with the US. Nehru felt that his own

involvement with the West in emergencies would be as strong without

any treaty.

 

The tragedy was that Nehru could not anticipate the Cuban crisis that

took away the 'shield ' of implicit American support.

 

Colonel (retd) Anil Athale, former director of war history at the

defence ministry and co-author of the official history of the 1962

war, is a frequent contributor to rediff.com