India After Gandhi (58 page)

Less than two months after his troops marched into Goa, Menon was in Bombay to fight his corner of the 1962 general election. Batting for him were the powerful Maharashtra chief minister Y. B. Chavan and senior members of the Union Cabinet. Even Menon’s known critics in government, such as Morarji Desai and Jagjivan Ram, were commanded to go out and campaign on his behalf. Speaking on Kripalani’s side were
such stalwarts as C. Rajagopalachari, as well as many distinguished non-party men – lawyers, intellectuals and industrialists.

The contest was, among other things, a tribute to the cosmopolitan character of Bombay, with a Malayali and a Sindhi competing for the affections of the people of a state not their own. The constituency was very heterogeneous indeed – many Marathi and Gujarati speakers, but also many Bhaiyyas from UP, Goans, Sindhis and Tamilians. These various segments were wooed by both contestants, with the campaign manifesting an intensity commensurate to the stature of the disputants, and the importance of their dispute.

In the rich and by now very extensive history of Indian elections, there has perhaps been no single contest so loudly trumpeted as this one. The journal Link, sympathetic to Menon, called it ‘the most important election in the history of our democracy’. The social worker Jayaprakash Narayan, a friend of Kripalani’s, said that in this contest ‘the future of Indian democracy and our spiritual values are at stake’.

The campaign was colourful, replete with evocative posters and savage slogans. The left-wing weekly
Blitz
ran a blistering campaign against a man they chose to refer to as ‘Cripple-loony’ . On the other side, Menon was lampooned by versifiers in several languages. One ditty went:
Chini hamla hoté hain/ Menon Saab soté hain/ Sona hai tho soné do/ Kripalani ji to aané do
. (As China advances, Menon sleeps/ Let him sleep if he must/ But call Kripalani to be with us.) An English verse advanced the same sentiments, if more elegantly: I do not hold with all these cracks and mockery/ At Krishna Menon./ It is his virtues I would rather pin on./ For instance, consider his skill with crockery:/ What could be finer/ Than the loving care with which he handles china?

The prime minister took the challenge to Menonas a challenge to himself. Nehru inaugurated the Congress campaign in Bombay, and found reason to support his man in other places as well. In Sangli, in Poona, in Baroda, he said that a defeat for Menon would signal a defeat for his own policies of socialism and non-alignment. His mentor’s support helped Menon immeasurably. So did the liberation of Goa, which resonated well with the public of North Bombay, and not just with the Goans among them.

In the event, Kripalani’s campaign was undone by Nehru’s speeches, the action in Goa and the strength of the Congress Party machinery. He lost by more than 100,000 votes.
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In the general elections of 1952 and 1957 the Congress had made much of its being the party of the freedom struggle. In 1962, however, its campaign focused more on what it had done since. Its policies, it said, had increased agricultural and industrial production, enhanced education and life expectancy and promoted the unity of the country. Never having held power, the opposition could not match these claims with counterclaims of their own.
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In the event, the Congress comfortably retained its majority in Parliament, winning 361 seats out of 494 all told. The communists secured 29 seats, while the new opposition party, Swatantra, put up a decent show, returning 18 MPs. In the state of Madras there was a challenge from the quasi-secessionist DMK, which won 7 Parliamentary seats (to go with 50 in the Legislative Assembly). But on the whole the Congress Party was confirmed in its pre-eminence, and Jawaharlal Nehru entered into his fourth term as prime minister.

The opposition within had been shown its place, but the opposition without remained. Throughout the spring and summer of 1962 clashes on the border continued. In July the Delhi journal
Seminar
ran a symposium on India’s defence policy. One contributor insisted that ‘the People’s Republic of China does not pose any military threat to our country’. Another contributor was not so sure. This was General Thimayya, now retired, who noted that there were threats from both Pakistan and China. Where the country was moderately well placed to meet an attack from the former, Thimayya could not ‘even as a soldier envisage India taking on China in an open conflict on its own. China’s present strength in manpower, equipment and aircraft exceeds our resources a hundred fold with the full support of the USSR, and we could never hope to match China in the foreseeable future. It must be left to the politicians and the diplomats to ensure our security’. The ‘present strength of the army and air forces of India’, said the general, ‘are even below the “minimum insurance” we can give to our people’.
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The implications were clear: either the diplomats should seek a treaty deal with China, or the politicians should canvass for military help from the Western bloc. But the rising tide of patriotic sentiment ruled out the first; and the non-alignment of the prime minister, strengthened by the anti-Americanism of his defence minister, ruled out the second.

In the third week of July 1962 there were clashes between Indian
and Chinese troops in the Galwan valley of Ladakh. Then, in early September, a conflict arose over the Dhola/Thag La ridge, in the valley of the Namka Chu river, some sixty miles west of Tawang. The region was where the borders of India, Tibet and Bhutan all met; the exact alignment of the McMahon Line was in dispute here. The Indians claimed the ridge fell south of the Line; the Chinese argued that it was on their side.
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It was back in June that a platoon of the Assam Rifles had established a post at Dhola, as part of the still continuing forward policy. On 8 September the Chinese placed a post of their own at Thag La, which overlooked (and threatened) Dhola. Peking and New Delhi exchanged angry letters. On the ground, Indian commanders were divided as to what todo. Some said that the Chinese must be shifted from Thag La. Others said that it would be too difficult, since the terrain was disadvantageous to the Indians (Thag La lay some 2,000 feet above Dhola). Meanwhile, at the site itself, the Chinese troops took to addressing homilies in Hindi via a megaphone. ‘
Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’
, they shouted: ‘
Ye
zamin hamara hai. Tumvapas jao’
(Indians and Chinese are brothers-in-arms, but this land is ours, so you may please vacate it).

The stalemate continued for three weeks, troops of the two nations facing each other across a narrow river, not knowing whether their leaders were making peace or about to go to war. Finally, on 3 October, Lieutenant General Umrao Singh, who had counselled prudence, was replaced as corps commander by B. M. Kaul, who flew in from Delhi to take command in NEFA. Those who recommended caution were overruled. ‘To all objections Kaul gave sweeping and unrealistic assurances, based on the assumption of Delhi’s future logistical support for any gamble he might now take.’
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To dislodge the Chinese from Thag La, he now moved two battalions up from the plains. The troops had light arms and only three days of rations, no mortars or rocket launchers and only promises that supplies would catch up with them.

Indian soldiers reached the Namka Chu valley on the afternoon of 9 October, after a march through ‘mud, mountains and rain’. ‘Exhausted by days of marching over massive heights and appalling weather conditions, [these were] troops badly in need of a breather and the tools for war.’
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That same evening they setup a post in a herder’s hut from where they would, when reinforcements arrived, try to uproot the enemy. They were not given the chance. On the morning of the 10th the Chinese attacked. The
jawans
fought hard, but they had been
drained by the long march up. They were also outnumbered and outgunned, their light arms proving no match to the heavy mortar used by the Chinese.

From 1959, in both Ladakh and NEFA, the Chinese and Indians had played cat-and-mouse, sending troops to fill up no-man’s-land, clashing here and there, while their leaders exchanged letters and occasionally even met. Now things escalated to unprecedented levels. The Indian siting of Dhola was answered by the Chinese coming to Thag La, directly above it; this in turn provoked an attempt by the Indians to shift them. When this failed, Nehru, back in Delhi, told the press that the army had been given instructions to once more try and push out the ‘enemy’.

In the event it was the enemy who acted first. A phoney war, which had lasted all of three years, was made very real on the night of 19/20 October, when the Chinese simultaneously launched an invasion in both the eastern and western sectors. The ‘blitzkrieg’ across the Himalaya had come, as ‘Pragmatist’ had predicted it would. And, as he had feared, the Indians were unprepared. That night, wrote the
New York Times
, a ‘smouldering situation burst into flame’ as ‘heavy battles broke out in both of the disputed areas. Masses of Chinese troops under the cover of thunderous mortar fire drove the Indians back on each front’. Both sides had built up forces on the border, but ‘independent observers laid the onslaught to the Chinese’. The Chinese attacked in waves, armed with medium machine guns backed by heavy mortars. Two Chinese divisions were involved in the invasion, these using five times as many troops as had the Indians.
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The Indians were ‘taken by surprise’ as the Chinese quickly overran many positions, crossed the Namkha Chu valley and made for the monastery in Tawang. Another detachment made for the eastern part of NEFA. Chinese troops moved deeper and deeper into Indian territory. Eight posts were reported to have fallen in Ladakh; almost twenty in NEFA. Tawang itself had come under the control of the Chinese.
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The ease with which the Chinese took Indian positions should not have come as a surprise. Their troops had been on the Tibetan plateau in strength from the mid-1950s, fighting or preparing to fight Khampa rebels. Unlike the Indians, they were well used to battles in the high mountains. Besides, access was much easier from the Tibetan side, the relatively flat terrain conducive to road building and troop movement. The geographical advantage was all to the Chinese. From Assam up to
the McMahon Line the climb was very steep, the hills covered with thick vegetation and the climate often damp and wet. The Indian forward posts were hopelessly ill equipped; with no proper roads, they ‘lived from air-drop to air-drop’, dependent on supplies and for survival on sorties by helicopters.
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The Indian problems were compounded by a vacuum of leadership. On 18 October General Kaul had come down with acute chest pains. He was evacuated to Delhi and his corps was left leaderless for five days, by which time Tawang had fallen.

On 24 October the Chinese halted their advance, while Chou En-lai wrote to Nehru seeking away to ‘stop the border clashes’ and ‘reopen border negotiations’. Over the next fortnight they wrote each other two letters apiece, these achieving nothing. Chou said that China and India shared a common enemy, ‘imperialism’. The current conflict notwithstanding, he thought it possible for both of them to ‘restore Sino-Indian relations to the warm and friendly pattern of earlier days and even improve on that pattern’. His solution was for each side to withdraw twenty kilometres behind the line of actual control, and disengage.

Nehru’s replies displayed his wounds for all to see. ‘Nothing in my long political career has hurt me more and grieved me more’, he said, than ‘the hostile and unfriendly twist given in India-China relations’ in recent years, culminating in ‘what is in effect a Chinese invasion of India’, in ‘violent contradiction’ of the claim that China wanted to settle the border question by ‘peaceful means’. Peking had taken ‘a deliberate cold-blooded decision’ to ‘enforce their alleged boundary claims by military invasion of India’. Chou’s offer, he wrote, was aimed at consolidating and keeping the gains of this aggression. The solution he proposed was for Chinese troops to get behind the McMahon Line in the east, and to revert in the west to their position as of 7 November 1959, thus cancelling out three years of steady gains made by establishing posts in territory under dispute.
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Meanwhile, a casualty in Delhi had been added to all those suffered on the front. Now that Indian weaknesses had been so comprehensively exposed, V. K. Krishna Menon was finally removed as defence minister. (He was first shifted to the Ministry of Defence Production, then dropped from the Cabinet altogether.) Menon’s exit was accompanied by a call by Delhi for Western arms. On 28 October the American ambassador went to see the prime minister. Nehru ‘was frail, brittle and seemed small and old. He was obviously desperately tired’. India must have
military aid from the West, he said.
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Soon Britain and America were sending transport planes with arms and ammunition. France and Canada had also agreed to supplyweapons.
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On 8 November the prime minister moved a resolution in Parliament deploring the fact that China had ‘betrayed’ the spirit of Panchsheel and India’s ‘uniform gestures of goodwill and friendship’ by initiating ‘a massive invasion’. The hurt was palpable; that ‘we in India, who have . . . sought the friendship of China . . . and pleaded their cause in the councils of the world should now ourselves be victims of new imperialism and expansionism by a country which says that it is against all imperialism’. China may call itself ‘communist’, said Nehru, but it had revealed itself as ‘an expansionist, imperious-minded country deliberately invading’ another.