1962: The War That Wasn't

by Shiv Kunal Verma

Shaitan Singh was still conscious and coherent. He ordered the men to stop, leave him where he was and return to No. 9 Platoon that was still holding out. Phool Singh and the two men did as they were told. All three of them returned to No. 9 Platoon and were killed shortly afterwards. Major Shaitan Singh remained where his men left him, too weak to move, eventually breathing his last amidst the stony, desolate wilderness. He had done enough to carve not just his own name, but also the names of all the men under his command into the pages of Indian history. Five men had been disabled and captured; two died of their wounds in captivity. One man survived—Havildar Ram Singh. He was badly wounded. The Chinese threw him into a sangar where he lay till 4 in the morning. He then crawled out in full view of the Chinese who watched him go, no one moving to stop him. After a few hours, as he made his way towards the rear, a jeep from his own battalion picked him up. The men in the vehicle were unable to recognize the burnt and bleeding figure, refusing to believe who he was until he actually started naming them. At 9 a.m. Ram Singh was escorted into Battalion HQ—reported to the adjutant, narrating the details of the Rezang-la battle.

Ever since the fall of Walong, Kaul had been sending frantic messages to Nehru imploring him to ask the United States and Britain to send their air force to stop the Chinese. It perhaps did not even occur to Kaul that India herself had air power that until now had only been used for logistical support.

‘Menon! Menon!’ exploded Nehru. ‘Why have you got your knife into him? You people do not realize what an intellectual giant he is!’ Even at this stage, with the Chinese threatening to spill into the Brahmaputra Plains, Nehru was not willing to listen to any criticism of his former defence minister.

According to unconfirmed sources, even at this stage, Nehru wanted to appoint Kaul as the COAS. However, President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan made it clear that he would not endorse that decision.

India’s request for comprehensive aid, especially ‘immediate support to strengthen our air arm sufficiently to stem the tide of the Chinese advance’ goes into minute detail, and is prefaced by the statement: ‘We have repeatedly felt the need to use our air arm in support of our land forces but have been unable to do so because in the present state...we have no defence against retaliatory action by the Chinese.’ In this context his specific demands were for: ‘[A] minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all-weather fighters’ and ‘modern radar cover [which] we don’t have’. The draft further added that USAF personnel ‘will have to man these fighters and radar installations while our personnel are being trained’. Among other things, Nehru was pleading for twelve squadrons of Lockheed F-104 Starfighters and two squadrons of Canberra B-57 bombers. Both Palit and Lall asked Sarin why the air chief, Air Marshal Aspy Engineer, was not being consulted. Sarin said that apart from him, the foreign secretary and the prime minister, no one else knew of the letter. These two officers were clearly not qualified to answer the question and at best could make only an educated guess.

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...

As we know, after General Thapar’s resignation, Nehru continued to play petty political games, appointing Muchhu Chaudhuri as Chief of Army Staff while holding back his elevation to a four-star rank.

lot of post-war venom has been directed at Menon for his role and style of functioning, but Menon was simply doing what Nehru wanted him to do, as was the case with Kaul. Nehru’s interest in Kaul’s career and his subsequent rise to the top had begun as far back as 1947; from being considered a ‘failed officer’, he was posted to the United States as the military attaché after which he returned to India and became Nehru’s key man in Kashmir. The Menon-Thimayya clash eventually took place when the army chief put his foot down when Kaul was to be placed in Army HQ on promotion as the QMG. Thimayya could not have been more categorical in his official assessment of Kaul, yet it was Thimayya who paid the price for his loyalty to his country and his prime minister. Nehru, despite his stature and reputation, showed that he was not above playing petty politics and with Menon as a cat’s paw, he contrived to not only sideline Thimayya, but used him and the Indian Army as a smokescreen to get himself out of the Aksai Chin highway mess. If that was inexcusable, how should we regard the prime minister’s statement in Parliament the day after he had unilaterally announced the army’s taking over of NEFA, that Thimayya was petulant, then begin focusing on the need to maintain civil supremacy over the military.

Under the umbrella of Mullik’s assurance that the Chinese would not react, Kaul’s illogical desire to push forward on all fronts created the recipe for a military disaster that few could even begin to imagine.

Having thus achieved their immediate objective, Chou En-lai had called the Indian Charge d’Affaires in Peking and told him that China was declaring an immediate ceasefire from midnight the next day. Owing to the complex cipher procedures—and what must rank as one of the most inexplicable and absurd delays of all times—this information was not transmitted to the Indian government in time, leaving them to learn of the Chinese announcement from the newspapers almost forty hours later.