1962: The War That Wasn't

by Shiv Kunal Verma

That the army needed a firm hand at the helm to steady the ship would be to state the obvious. The same applied to the prime minister who, along with Kaul and Thapar, seemed to have lost all sense of proportion. Nehru’s actions over the next forty-eight hours, between the evening of 18 and 20 November, should have been his moment of truth. Here, the prime minister of India was to fail miserably, his panic stricken actions culminating with his speech to the nation and the letter to Kennedy, both damning testimony to the fact that he had completely lost control. As we’ve seen, Nehru’s own insecurity with regard to the armed forces reduced the senior Indian military leadership to a bunch of political appointees that proved to be professionally incompetent. It is ironic that the two men that Nehru decided to thrust greatness upon—Thapar and Kaul—in his need to cut Thimayya and Thorat to size, should be the two who would so blatantly let him down. Whatever else Thapar may or may not be guilty of, his final advice to the prime minister to evacuate Assam must rank as one of the lowest points in the history of post-independence India. The unkindest cut, of course, was that the Chinese premier, Chou en-Lai, called the Indian Charge de Affairs in Peking on 19 November and briefed him that China would be calling a ceasefire at midnight on 20 November. Had the Indian embassy in Peking shown some common sense and urgently communicated this message to New Delhi, the Indian government wo...