India After Gandhi (59 page)

Nehru’s speech might be read as a belated acknowledgement of the correctness of Vallabhbhai Patel’s warning of 1950: that communism in China was an extreme expression of nationalism, rather than its nullification. The debate that followed took a full week; 165 members spoke, apparently a record.
⁷⁵

Back on the borders, the lull in the fighting was broken by a second Chinese offensive on 15 November. A 500-mile front was attacked in NEFA. There was a bitter fight in Walong, where soldiers from the Dogra and Kumaon regiments, hardy hill men all, fought heroically and almost wrested control of a key ridge from the Chinese.
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There was also some spirited resistance in Ladakh, where the field commander was not subject to conflicting signals from Delhi. Here the troops stood their ground, and ‘forced the Chinese to pay dearly for the territory they won’.
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But across most of NEFA it had been a very poor show indeed. Here the Indians simply disintegrated, with platoons and even whole regiments retreating in disarray. When the Chinese swept through there was much confusion among the Indian commanders. Where should they make their first, and perhaps last, stand? The option of Tawang was considered and abandoned. One general advocated Bomdi Lal, a good sixty miles to the south, where supplies could be easily sent up from plains. Finally, it was decided to stop the Chinese advance at Se La, a mere fifteen miles from Tawang.

The decision to make the stand at Se La was Kaul s. When he fell ill, his place had been taken by Lieutenant General Harbaksh Singh, a highly regarded commander with much field experience. But before
Singh could adequately reorganize the defences, Kaul had flown back from Delhi to resume charge once more.

The Chinese had occupied Tawang on 25 October. When they halted there, the Indians were deceived into inaction. In fact, the Chinese were working on improving the road to Se La. On 14 November the Indians began a proposed counter-attack, choosing as their target an enemy post near Walong. Meanwhile, battles broke out north of Se La, the Chinese again with the advantage. The garrison commander, in panic, ordered withdrawal, and his brigade began retreating towards Bomdi La. There they found that the Chinese had already skirted Se La and cut off the road behind them. Large sections were mown down in flight, while others abandoned their arms and fled singly or in small groups. Se La was easily taken, and Bomdi La fell soon afterwards.
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The fall of Bomdi La led to panic in Assam. An Indian reporter, reaching Tezpur on 20 November, found it a ‘ghost town’. The administration had pulled back to Gauhati, after burning the papers at the Collectorate and the currency notes at the local bank. Before leaving, ‘the doors of the mental hospital [were] opened to release the bewildered inmates’.
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Back in Delhi and Bombay, young men were queuing up to join the army. The recruiting centres were usually sleepy places, open one or two days a week, with 90 per cent of the boys who showed up failing the first examination. Now their compounds were ‘besieged by thousands of would-be recruits’. Some were labourers and factory hands; others, unemployed graduates. They all hoped that in this emergency ‘the army will lower its physical requirements and give them food and lodging and a purpose in life’.
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It seems unlikely that these men would have made a better showing than those who had already fought, and lost. In any case, they did not get the chance. Poised to enter the plains of Assam, the Chinese instead announced a unilateral ceasefire on 22 November. In NEFA they pulled back to north of the McMahon Line. In the Ladakh sector they likewise retreated to positions they had held before the present hostilities began.

Why did the Chinese pack up and go home? Some thought they were deterred from coming further by the rallying of all parties, including the communists, around the government. The Western powers had pledged support, and were already flying in arms and ammunition.
⁸¹
As important as these considerations of politics were the facts of nature. For winter was setting in, and soon the Himalaya would be snowbound.
And by pressing deep into India, the Chinese would make their supply lines longer and more difficult to maintain.

While the end of the war can be thus explained, its origins are harder to understand. There were no White Papers issued from the Chinese side, and their records are not open – and perhaps never will be. All one can say is that behind such a carefully co-ordinated attack there must have been several years of preparation. As for its precise timing, a speculation offered at the time and which still seems plausible was that the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, were preoccupied with the Cuban missile crisis, allowing Peking its little adventure without fear of reprisal.

The border war had underlined Chinese superiority in ‘arms, communications, strategy, logistics, and planning’.
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According to Defence Ministry statistics, 1,383 Indian soldiers had been killed, 3,968 were taken prisoner, while 1,696 were still missing.
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These losses were small by the standards of modern warfare, yet the war represented a massive defeat in the Indian imagination. Naturally, the search began for scapegoats. Over the years, a series of self-exculpatory memoirs were published by the generals in the field. Each sought to shift the blame away from himself and towards another commander, or towards the politicians who had neglected their warnings and issued orders that were impossible to carry out. In his own contribution to the genre, Major General D. K. Palit – director general of military operations at the time of the war notes that in these memoirs ‘there are striking inconsistencies; each had his own wicket to defend’. Then he adds: ‘Hindsight tends to lend rationality to events that in fact are innocent of coherence or logical sequence.’
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Among the Indian public, the principal sentiment was that of betrayal, of being taken for a ride by an unscrupulous neighbour whom they had naively chosen to trust and support. In his letters to Chou En-lai, Nehru expressed these feelings as well as anyone else. But for the deeper origins of the dispute one must turn to his earlier writings, in particular to an interview in which he spoke not as India’s leader but as a student of world history. Back in 1959, Nehru had told Edgar Snow that ‘the basic reason for the Sino-Indian dispute was that they were both “new nations”, in that both were newly independent and under
dynamic nationalistic leaderships
, and in a sense were “meeting” at their frontiers for the first time in history’. In the past, ‘there were buffer zones between the two countries; both sides were
remote
from the
borders’. Now, however, ‘they were meeting as
modern nations
on the borders’. Hence it ‘was natural that a certain degree of conflict should be generated before they can stabilize their frontiers’.
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The India-China conflict, then, was a clash of national myths, national egos, national insecurities and – ultimately and inevitably – national armies. In this sense, however unique (and uniquely disturbing) it must have seemed to Indians, it was very representative. For competing claims to territory have been an all too common source of conflict in the modern world. Nehru’s comments to Edgar Snow said as much. However, let us give the last word to an unlikely authority, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. In March 1962 Ginsberg began a two-year trip around the subcontinent, bumming and slumming in the search for nirvana. In August, just as the clashes on the border began to intensify, he made an entry in his diary which set the India/China border conflict properly in perspective:

The Fights 1962:

US vs Russia in General / China vs Formosa over possession / India vs China over border territory / India vs Pakistan over possession Kashmir – Religious / India vs Portugal over possession Goa / India vs Nagas over Independence /Egypt vs Israel over possession of territory and Religion / E. Germany vs W. Germany sovereignty / Cuba vs USA Ideas/N.Korea vs So. Korea – Sovereignty / Indonesia vs Holland – Territory / France vs Algeria – Territory / Negroes vs whites – US / Katanga vs Leopoldville / Russian Stalinists vs Russian Kruschevists / Peru APRA vs Peru Military / Argentine Military versus Argentine Bourgeois / Navajo Peyotists vs Navajo Tribal Council – Tribal / W. Irian? / Kurds vs Iraq / Negro vs Whites – So. Africa – Race / US Senegal vs Red Mali – Territory / Ghana vs Togo – Territory / Ruanda Watusi vs Ruanda Bahutu – Tribe power / Kenya Kadu vs Kenya Kana – Tribe power / Somali vs Aethopia, Kenya, French Somali / Tibet Lamas vs Chinese Tibetan secularists / India vs E. Pak – Assam Bengal over Border & Tripura / Algeria vs Morocco over Sahara.
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Here we are having a grudging time, both with the weather and the problems which are arising; Kashmir, in particular, is giving us a severe headache.

V
ALLABHBHAI
P
ATELto G.D.BiRLA, May1949

A
PART
FROM
THE
SEVERAL
thousand Indian soldiers dead or injured, the casualties of the China war included the chief of army staff, General P. N. Thapar (who resigned, citing ill health), the failed strategic thinker Lieutenant General B. M. Kaul (who was retired prematurely) and the defence minister, V. K. Krishna Menon (who was sacked). A greater casualty still was the reputation of Jawaharlal Nehru. The border war was Nehru’s most consequential failure in fifteen years as prime minister. The inability to bring about radical land reform affected the rural poor; the dismissal of the Kerala communists angered many people in that state; other sections likewise had their own grievances against the government. But the failure to protect the nation’s territory was a different matter altogether. The humiliation that resulted was felt, as military defeats invariably are, by the nation as a whole.

Krishna Menon and the army brass had been sacrificed, yet the prime minister knew that deep down he was ultimately responsible for the disaster, in a general sense, as the head of government, and in a very specific sense, as one who had guided and determined India’s attitudes and policies towards China.

Those attitudes and policies now had to be rethought. Nehru could at last see what Vallabhbhai Patel had sensed long ago: that communism in China was merely a more bellicose form of nationalism. The border
war provoked a reluctant tilt towards the United States, who had come forth with arms while Soviet Russia stayed neutral. A key player in this shift was the American ambassador in New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith. A Harvard economics professor who was sceptical of the free market, a scholar of art history, a noted
bon vivant
and wit, Galbraith was, to Indian eyes, a very untypical American indeed. (In fact, he was by birth Canadian.) Things were changing, back in Washington, where a new young president, John F. Kennedy, was seeking to reverse the American government’s image as uncaring at home and arrogant abroad. It was these winds of liberalism that carried Galbraith along to India.

From the time he took charge in April 1961, the ambassador got on famously with Nehru. They discussed art and music and literature; this, on the Indian’s part, a welcome diversion from the daily grind but on the American’s a shrewd softening-up of a mind long prejudiced against his country. In March 1962 the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, arrived for a trip through India, where she saw the Taj Mahal and Rajput forts and had extended conversations with the prime minister.

Nehru was charmed by Mrs Kennedy’s beauty, as he had been by her envoy’s brains. But the thaw would not have become a
tilt
had it not been for the war with China. On 9 November, after the first wave of attacks, Galbraith was called in to meet the prime minister. He found him ‘deathly tired and I thought a little beaten’. (Earlier in the day, Nehru had made a speech in Parliament which was ‘a good deal less than Churchillian’.) A request was made for arms from America. This came at a cost that could never be measured in money alone. For, as Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy, all his life Nehru had

sought to avoid being dependent upon the United States and the United Kingdom – most of his personal reluctance to ask (or thank) for aid has been based on this pride ...Now nothing is so important to him, more personally than politically, than to maintain the semblance of this independence. His age no longer allows of readjustment. To a point we can, I feel, be generous on this.
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By late November the arms began arriving, carried in planes that also contained soldiers in uniform. As an American journalist wrote, this meant the ‘collapse of his [Nehru’s] non-alignment policy’; to many those dark blue uniforms carried ‘a special meaning , contained in one single word: ‘failure’.
²
For the American ambassador, however, those uniforms spelt the word ‘opportunity’. This might be the beginnings of
an entente to contain a communist power potentially more threatening than Soviet Russia itself. As Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy,

the Chinese are not quarreling with the Soviets over some academic points of doctrine. They are, one must assume, serious about their revolution. The natural area of expansion is in their part of the world. The only Asian country which really stands in their way is India and
pari passu
the only Western country that is assuming responsibility is the United States. It seems obvious to me [that] there should be some understanding between the two countries. We should expect to make use of India’s political position, geographical position, political power and manpower or anyhow ask.
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