1962: The War That Wasn't

by Shiv Kunal Verma

We died, unsuccoured, helpless We were your soldiers, men of bravery and pride Yet we died like animals, trapped in a cage with no escape Massacred at will, denied the dignity of battle With the cold burning flame of anger and resolution With the courage both of the living and the dead, Avenge Our unplayed lives Redeem the unredeemable sacrifice In freedom and integrity Let this be your inheritance And our unwritten epitaph Harji Malik, ‘Nam Ka Chu: October 1962’

Brigadier Bhagat was to later author the famous Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report that remains classified even today despite successive governments being in power.

Lieutenant General S. P. P. Thorat, he said, was the man everybody expected to succeed General K.S. Thimayya as the army chief. That hadn’t happened because the defence minister, V. K. Krishna Menon, disliked Thorat and had ensured that Prime Minister Nehru sent the general home. Pran Thapar was appointed chief instead.

Thorat had stated quite categorically, ‘You have three years. The Chinese will come down this axis in October-November 1962. They will definitely come.’

The news report, which blew the lid off the Chinese attack on Indian troops at Longju in NEFA three days earlier, meant that Nehru and his government could no longer conceal the fact that the Panchsheel Treaty signed between India and China in 1954 was dead in the water.

The Ministry of External Affairs, under the stewardship of Nehru himself, was preoccupied with fighting India’s Kashmir case at the United Nations while at the same time helping create the platform for Nehru to emerge as the world’s leading Afro-Asian leader.

Nehru airily talked of doing away with an army, claiming that the police was good enough to govern the country and handle external threats.

Despite China having announced its intention of annexing Tibet, the international community was caught completely unawares when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) boldly moved into Tibet on 7 October. When the Tibetan government turned desperately to India for help, Nehru seemed completely at sea. Appeals for aid were turned down and the Tibetans were advised by India to settle the matter peacefully, whatever that was supposed to mean. The fact of the matter was India had absolutely no clue as to how the situation should be handled.

B. N. Mullik, the head of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) at the time, had warned the Government of India that China would almost certainly invade Tibet and had prodded Nehru to consider the option of armed intervention should the situation arise.

The IB chief stated that although neither the United States nor Britain would directly get involved, India could count on their covert support.

When Nehru asked Cariappa for his views, he categorically stated that military intervention on behalf of the Tibetans was beyond the capability of the Indian Army.

The Indian prime minister also felt any military offensive by India would severely impact her standing in the eyes of the world.

Mullik was not the only one calling for a hard line to be taken against China’s expansionist policy. Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, perhaps the only political leader who could challenge Nehru’s vice-like grip on the country, also advocated a showdown with China. So did Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (Minister for Industry and Supply) and a host of others. However, practical considerations, along with Nehru’s cultivated image of being a ‘man of peace’ perhaps resulted in India doing absolutely nothing to counter Chinese moves.

Even though Nehru made some critical mistakes—going to the UN in 1948 just when a military solution to the problem seemed feasible and then supporting China on the world stage despite it having invaded Tibet—he could not have been unaware about the importance of the country’s defence.

The report then went on to suggest that “an expansion and the concentration and redeployment of the Assam Rifles are necessary for more effective occupation of the border area’.

In the Western Sector, the IB and the army set up posts in most areas except for Lingzi Tang, Aksai Chin, the Soda and the Depsang Plains as these regions were almost completely uninhabited and nearly inaccessible.

After 1914, the only known ingress by the Tibetans into Indian territory was in 1942 when they occupied the Tawang salient and the area south of Se-la extending down to the plains near Udalguri.

the prime minister, in keeping with his image as a man of peace, refused to publicly castigate China despite the fact that all committees set up to study the situation on the northern border were indicating that a clash with the Chinese was a distinct possibility.

It took a major operation in December 1953 involving the army and the air force to bring the culprits to book. Though primarily conducted by the Assam Rifles, this was the first time in independent India that the Indian armed forces stepped into NEFA operationally—three companies of the Parachute Regiment, the mortar platoon of 1 Garhwal Rifles, twenty-two signalmen, six Harwards from No. 17 Squadron, six Spitfires from No. 14 Squadron and five Dakotas from No. 5 Squadron.

During the six months of discussions, the Indian ambassador to China, P. Nedyam Raghavan, failed to realize that while the Chinese wanted to resolve the Tibet problem quickly, their strategy with regard to the Sino-Indian border was quite the opposite. A memo accessed from the Chinese Foreign Ministry dated 21 October 1953 clearly states that the Tawang issue needed to be kept ‘alive’ and that it would be beneficial for the Chinese ‘to drag on these issues for the time being’.

The Kulwant Singh Committee recommended that India should immediately increase the force levels on the Indo-Tibetan border. Despite this, during the run-up to the Panchsheel Treaty, not once was the army asked for its assessment of the situation. Nehru, who viewed Mullik as a hawk and suspected his hand in the Tawang affair also, kept the IB chief out of the loop.

Considering the fact that the future of the Tibetan people who had been subjugated by military force was at stake, the preamble was ironic. The Chinese premier gleefully accepted the treaty which not only recognized China’s possession of Tibet but, in fact, legalized it. Additionally, while allowing for trade with the Chinese government in Tibet, the Indians gave up their right over numerous facilities that existed in Lhasa and along the trade route that linked the Tibetan capital to Kalimpong in West Bengal. The Indian infantry detachments at both Gyantse and Yatung and the Indian Mission in Lhasa were to be withdrawn.

The reason for India not insisting on reciprocal concessions while recognizing China’s suzerainty over Tibet can only be understood in the context of the ‘Hindi Chini bhai-bhai’ spirit of the 1950s where Chinese and Indian leaders swore ‘eternal peace and friendship’. Prime Minister Nehru felt quite satisfied having got a written guarantee of good behaviour from China. The treaty was signed on 29 April 1954 at Peking. This, in hindsight, was a diplomatic coup for China. From India’s point of view, it was a disaster, as it mainly served China’s interests, although the Indian government’s PR machinery heralded it as a triumph for Nehru.

With India having scored a self-goal with the highly vaunted Panchsheel Agreement, to save face, Nehru was left with no choice but to keep the flag of Indo-Chinese friendship flying on the world stage leaving the Chinese free to go about the business of further securing Tibet.

The Kulwant Singh Committee Report—another classified document like the Himmatsinhji Report and the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report—not only predicted the clash, it even got the time-frame right. Yet, despite repeated warnings, Nehru would continue to champion China’s case for admittance to the United Nations while also preventing a discussion on the annexation of Tibet.

By the mid-1950s, over 200,000 PLA troops were stationed in Tibet, resulting in famine conditions as the country’s delicate subsistence agricultural system was stretched beyond capacity. Ironically, the Panchsheel Treaty allowed the Chinese to import rice from India to tide over the problem.

The political manoeuvring by Gandhi in 1938 to sideline Subhas Chandra Bose in the presidential race of the Congress Party virtually handed Nehru the prime ministership of independent India. Bose was perhaps the only Indian political leader who understood the significance of armed power as an instrument of state policy while being aware of modern politics.

Nehru, unlike Bose and Patel, veered away from building military power. Although, when cornered, he was not averse to using it—as in the case of Kashmir in 1947-48 and then Goa in 1961—for the most part, he talked disarmament, non-alignment and Panchsheel. In a speech delivered at the Kerala Provisional Conference in 1928, Nehru had spelt out his international assessments: ‘No danger threatens India from any direction; and even if there is any danger we shall cope with it.’

Nehru had exclaimed: ‘Rubbish! Total rubbish! We don’t need a defence policy. Our policy is ahimsa (non-violence). We foresee no military threats. As far as I am concerned you can scrap the army—the police are good enough to meet our security needs.’ It’s a different matter that Nehru had to eat his words by the end of October 1947 itself when the tribal hordes invaded Kashmir.

Nehru could not have reacted militarily when China invaded Tibet in 1950, but since then he had had more than ten years to prepare, from the time General Cariappa had warned him that the army did not have the capability to face the Chinese. Despite repeated warnings from the army and the various committees, Nehru did very little to address the shortcomings of the army.

Nehru was never comfortable with the armed forces. He would make the right noises at the appropriate forums, but his political indoctrination had consciously or unconsciously instilled in him a desire to downgrade India’s officer cadre rather than tap their lead...

Nehru, along with other politicians, began to develop a deep-seated paranoia about the army. Many other countries that had become independent after World War II fell prey to military coups (the most pertinent example being Pakistan). In view of this, politicians and bureaucrats pushed through mindless measures that systematically downgraded the status and influence of the army.

just twenty days before Thimayya took charge of the army, Nehru had replaced the defence minister, Kailash Nath Katju, with Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon.

normally reticent Timmy exchanged angry words with the prime minister. He told Nehru that his arbitrary decision of making NEFA the responsibility of the army, made public in Parliament, was preposterous and completely against Indian interests. Thimayya felt that Nehru had completely compromised the army.

Thimayya asked Nehru to find a way out of the mess in the next couple of weeks, after which he departed. Immediately after Thimayya’s departure, the shaken prime minister summoned Krishna Menon to Teen Murti.

Politics is full of subterfuge, and survival, when the chips are down, is perhaps the biggest challenge. Not only did the Nehru-Menon team now have to survive, they had to neutralize Thimayya.

Even today, the contents of Thimayya’s resignation letter remain a highly guarded secret. Instead, vague stories about Thimayya’s resignation were routinely floated where it was said that Timmy had resigned out of pique because of the manner in which Krishna Menon treated him. On careful scrutiny, that doesn’t hold water.

General Thimayya was, by all accounts, a seasoned, disciplined soldier who would hardly have made issues over trifles.

Krishna Menon who was described by Time magazine as being the second most powerful man in India after the prime minister.

Temperamentally Krishna Menon was a loner, and having had no ministerial or administrative experience, he found it necessary to disguise this deficiency by affecting a perpetual sneer at officialdom. He also sought to dominate the military bureaucracy by trying to make a dent in the solidarity of its senior ranks. In this he succeeded to the extent that Bijji Kaul—basically loyal by nature but emotional, insecure and ambitious—fell for his blandishments and for a time an unwonted relationship was established between the minister and the general officer.

After being commissioned into an infantry battalion, Kaul had voluntarily shifted to the Army Supply Corps while he was still a junior officer. Kaul used the term ‘national priority’ to explain the reason for this shift—a somewhat dubious explanation as no junior officer was likely to be accorded that sort of importance. As a result, Bijji Kaul had not even commanded an infantry company, let alone a battalion, either in war or peace. Though commissioned into the army well before the outbreak of World War II, Bijji Kaul was assigned sundry jobs, none of which had anything to do with combat.

It gave Kaul an excellent opportunity to ingratiate himself with them by giving them unauthorised information. He even went to the extent of removing certain papers from official files to which he had easy access and passing them on to defending lawyers.’

It is interesting to see how the Chinese read Bijji Kaul. General Yang Chengiou, the Deputy Chief of General Staff, had led a PLA team to India in 1957. Apart from visiting ordnance factories and a host of other establishments, 4 Infantry Division (of which Kaul was then the GOC) had put on a demonstration on Indian Army infantry tactics somewhere near Ambala. In a subsequent meeting in Peking, Chairman Mao had asked Yang Chengiou to brief the assembled Chinese leadership on his perception of Kaul.

General Yang Chengiou and the Chinese seem to have, in their brief interaction, seen what Nehru and Krishna Menon failed to see for decades. A quasi-political senior officer in the structured confines of any army would threaten its very core. Not surprising then, that when Krishna Menon pushed for Kaul’s induction into the decision-making level at Army HQ, General Thimayya tried to put his foot down.

In Parliament, Nehru eulogized Bijji Kaul, saying he was one of the best infantry officers in the army. When J. B. Kripalani, leader of the Opposition, questioned this, saying that Kaul’s only achievement was Op Amar (an operation where the army built houses in Ambala), Nehru countered by saying that Kaul was an officer who had been in the infantry for twenty-five out of the twenty-eight years of his service.

when the recommendations based on Exercise Sheel and Thorat’s assessment reached Menon, he shelved them, taking them up only after much prodding. He asked Thimayya to explain the rationale for such a large force as only small numbers had hitherto been involved in the isolated border clashes. The COAS duly did so, only to have Menon declare that it was ‘too much’ and it needed to be ‘pruned down’. Thimayya resisted. And Menon’s stance changed from discussion to confrontation.

On 20 October 1959, the focus shifted dramatically from NEFA to Ladakh when two members of an Indian Police party under Havildar Karam Singh went out on a patrol in the neighbourhood of the Kongka Pass and failed to return by the evening.

According to the latest report, as many as seventeen persons belonging to the Indian party, including the officer-in-charge, have lost their lives and some others have suffered severe injuries.’ India also alleged that the Chinese had used mortars for the first time in any border engagement, a fact that was denied by the Chinese.

Since the end of August 1959, the defence minister had been taking every possible opportunity to further humiliate Thimayya. As the Karam Singh drama unfolded, Menon decided to further up the ante against the hapless army chief. The announcement on 1 November that the army would take control of Ladakh, akin to the earlier statement made vis-à-vis NEFA after the Longju incident, was perhaps aimed more at Thimayya than the Chinese.

In April 1959, after the Chinese crackdown on Lhasa, Ram Manohar Lohia was vocal in saying India simply had to take its head out of the sand: ‘When the “Baby Murder” in Tibet took place nine years ago most of the people who today are raising a hue and cry over the second instalment of Chinese assault on the Tibetan people were, as far as I remember, silent. Something ought to have been done then, something ought to have been said. Which, however, does not mean that nothing should be said now. But while saying it, people should not forget their weaknesses; as they say, when the peacock dances it should do well to be aware of its legs.’