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Looking for Closure on 1962

18 Tue Mar 2014

Posted by in India, Security, South Asia

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On March 17, someone noticed that the Henderson Brooks Bhagat Report had been posted online and announced it on social media. The site, claiming to be Australian journalist Neville Maxwell’s blog, was immediately inundated by visitors who wanted to download the 126 MB PDF file that appeared to have been posted on February 07. Download was excruciatingly slow and the site went offline within hours, rumoured to have been blocked by the Indian government.

Nonetheless, the report – apparently only the first volume had been uploaded and the second volume and annexures were still missing – appeared on several other websites the next morning. The Government of India has so far refused to comment on the leaked document, reminding everyone that it remains a classified report. In the meanwhile, the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party has demanded that the file be declassified and promised to do so if it comes to power in May.

Ironically, there is little that the public does not already know in the Henderson Brooks Report. The only thing that makes the report interesting is that it is still classified, over half a century after the events have passed. It is speculated that the only reason for it to remain so is to avoid confirmation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s role in India’s humiliating defeat in 1962; after all, his Party and family have been at the helm of affairs for most of the years since.

Anyone genuinely interested in the Henderson Brooks Report would have arrived at a very good idea of its findings through works like Neville Maxwell’s India’s China War (also read K Subrahmanyam’s scathing review of the book) or Brigadier John Dalvi’s memoir, Himalayan Blunder, which was banned by GoI immediately after its publication in 1968. There are also available some of Nehru’s papers from the time and the White Paper Delhi put out in 1960 that carried some of the Indian and Chinese diplomatic exchanges on the border issue.

By October 1960, Chinese troops held close to what their government claimed along the border except at Demchok. Beijing was consolidating its position in Tibet as well as along the border with India, building roads and deploying troops into the region under the pretext of the Tibetan Uprising in 1959. In fact, Indian military intelligence had noted that the number of Chinese troops present in Tibet were noticeably more than what might be needed to quell an uprising and could be rapidly supplemented with three more divisions if necessary.

Indian soldiers were plagued by poor logistics and routes difficult to traverse even by mules. Airlift capability was small, manpower was insufficient to patrol a troublesome border, and there was no artillery, mortars, or even medium machine guns. In fact, Indian soldiers did not even have proper shelter and ran short of food and medicine at several stations in the North East Frontier Agency.

Nehru’s Forward Policy on the border has come under heavy fire from all sides – while Maxwell accuses the policy of instigating conflict with China, Indian observers fault Nehru for enforcing a policy for which no material preparation had been made. Western Command had asked for an extra division to maintain effective patrols of the border area as early as 1960 but were ignored. By mid-1962, Western Command had warned Delhi that at least five divisions would be needed in any serious conflict with China – India would need to hold Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim in such an eventuality.

The fatal flaw in Nehru’s planning was that he based the Forward Policy on the faulty advice from his Intelligence Bureau, Defence Minister, and Foreign Secretary that China would not respond with force to the Indian Army establishing forward posts closer and up to the McMahon Line. As India learned at great cost, it is unwise to base a strategy on the premise that the enemy will not respond rather than on a worst case scenario. However, the Forward Policy directed the Army not to clash with Chinese soldiers as it set up camps near the international border – any instigation the Chinese felt would not be due to firearms. The Indian forward camps would then be supported by larger camps further behind.

By July 1962, some 60 forward posts had been established but there had been no augmentation of manpower on the border. This meant that the Indian Army was further stretched logistically and depleted of manpower; most Indian posts had a platoon or less. Army Headquarters did not agree with Western Command’s assessment that the Chinese would open fire if Indian soldiers kept up their forward patrolling and thought that the soldiers on the front were scared to see action.

The political framework Delhi had constructed for China forced bad military decisions on the ground. Western Command warned repeatedly that defending the far-flung and isolated forward posts was tactical suicide and they should be sacrificed to gain tactical advantage but the orders were to “throw them out.” With what, it was not clear. Worse, there had been no preparation for a war with China – the Army was unfamiliar with Chinese tactics, equipment, capabilities, weapons, or the psychology of the field commanders. The operational and advisory performance of Lieutenant General BM Kaul has also come into question – while some claim there was a clash of personalities, it is hard to fathom why given that he had appointed most of the senior members of the General Staff. The Forward Policy, a political rather than military decision, turned disciplined men into a mob in retreat.

There is little the Henderson Brooks Report can add to this picture. It has been quite clear that the failure was entirely political in not reading Chinese intentions accurately and failing to prepare for a worst case scenario. The reasons for the political failure were kept outside the purview of the Henderson Brooks Report – not even Lieutenant General TB Henderson Brooks and Brigadier PS Bhagat were given access to political files or Army HQ records when compiling their study of the failures of 1962. In this context, the BJP’s promise to declassify the Henderson Brooks Report if it comes to power sounds ill-informed or politically opportunistic. If the BJP is genuinely concerned about learning from the country’s past mistakes, the declassification of the Report should be part of a concerted effort to throw open the National Archives in keeping with the 30-year-rule and democratic principles.

The question remains, however, why was there such a major political snafu at the top of the chain of command? Many are content with blaming Nehru, who certainly should bear part of the blame, but that hardly answers any questions. The fact was that Nehru was fully aware of the Chinese menace on his northeastern border. As his correspondence shows, he correctly ascribed it not to Beijing’s communism but to its expansionist nationalism. However, a quick look at the state of India’s economy reveals that the sort of defence outlays required to sufficiently shore up the Himalayan border was not within India’s means – a fact that even the Army’s Western Command acknowledged. “We were in a very weak position compared to them,” Nehru had confessed to the New Statesman once. In this position of weakness, Nehru had adopted a Churchillian strategy – Churchill had once said, “I proclaim my belief in the good faith of the Russians in the hope of procuring that good faith.”

Non-alignment, another scapegoat in discussions of Nehru’s failure to defend India, is not a factor – US records show that it was unwilling to take on the burden of building and modernising India via another Marshall Plan as it had done for Europe. US diplomats were instructed to make the case for the Western Bloc and offer little more than sympathy to woo India away from the Soviet Union. Yet to be fair to Washington, the United States was India’s largest aid partner until the late 1970s when Japan took over that role.

Instead of confrontation, Nehru relied on diplomacy. He courted Beijing and initially, it seemed he had struck upon the right approach. China carefully maintained India’s faith in diplomacy throughout the 1950s and early 1960; praise of Delhi’s role in the Korean War peace talks, the warmth Mao showed towards Nehru, and the signing of the Panchsheel Treaty between the two Asian giants were markers of a positive relationship. Chou Enlai had explicitly stated that China had no territorial claims against India in 1951, a claim that was seconded by other senior officials repeated even as late as 1960. In a high-level meeting between the two countries in April 1960, Marshall Chen Yi and Chou Enlai assured India’s Ambassador to Beijing, RK Nehru, that war between India and China was inconceivable. In another meeting, Chou Enlai repeated to the Indian Vice President, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, his earlier assertion that China had no claims south of the McMahon Line and that China had no intention of laying claim either.

However, there was also evidence to the contrary. Chinese troops were encroaching on Indian territory from Ladakh to NEFA, and military intelligence was worried about the unfavourable ratio of troops on the border. While the defence Minister, VK Krishna Menon, and the foreign secretary, Morarji Desai, were downplaying the risk of a Chinese attack, the Indian embassy in Beijing was sending warnings that the India-China dispute might be playing on a broader canvas than Delhi realised.  “In their ideological battle with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),” the embassy wrote, “India’s non-alignment had become a target for the [Chinese Communist Party].” While Chou Enlai opposed the aggressive tone of Chinese policy towards India, Liu Shaoqi pursued it relentlessly. These “leftist dogmatists” in the CCP saw Nehru not as a nationalist leader but as a reactionary bourgeoisie. Therefore, they argued, non-alignment was just a ploy and it was only a matter of time before India joined the Western Bloc. Chinese brinkmanship in the Himalayas was, thus, meant to expose the weakness of Indian neutrality and the duplicity of Soviet peaceful coexistence.

Nehru had diplomatic prognoses that argued that China would not use military force against India, more diplomatic advice that predicted a conflict with China over an issue irrelevant to any India-China disputes, and military intelligence showing a strengthening of Chinese war-fighting capabilities in southern Tibet. The country could not afford the defence spending required to repel China, a country that had fought a superpower to a stalemate just a decade earlier, and Nehru hoped, not unreasonably, that the terrain of the Himalayas would offer some succour against invasion. In hindsight, the choice seems obvious but intelligence can only be evaluated forward; it is not difficult to understand why the urgency of the situation eluded Indian leaders.

This is not to say that Nehru’s record is unblemished. Undeniably, there were lapses, both political and military. To hold Nehru solely responsible, however, seems an ideological grump or a political ploy. The tragedy of 1962 is compounded by the fact that most of the failures from half a century ago continue to plague India’s defence preparedness. GoI’s response to the Chinese incursion in April 2013 is depressing proof of that. Defence infrastructure at the border is still inadequate, as is the equipment and training of troops in the region. Existential nuclear deterrence is not a full spectrum response. Civil-military relations remain abysmal – the fear of the coup in January 2013 is evidence – and there is still a foreign policy vacuum in South Block.

If India wants closure on 1962, it will not be achieved by merely publishing one report – a massive declassification programme across ministries must be initiated. Complete closure will be realised, however, only when the faults of 1962 have been rectified, in the planning rooms as well as along the border.

The Prickly Indian

09 Tue Jul 2013

Posted by in India, South Asia

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Had Graham Greene written his 1955 bestseller on India instead of the United States, it would have been titled, The Prickly Indian. Made into a film twice, once in 1958 (Audie Murphy, Michael Redgrave) and again in 2002 (Brendan Fraser, Michael Caine), Greene’s The Quiet American tells the story of a British journalist, Thomas Fowler, and an American undercover CIA agent, Alden Pyle, in Vietnam. Pyle, the quiet American, has little “real world” experience and has learned everything he knows about Southeast Asia from books. While Pyle’s story is about a young and idealistic American brimming with superpower hubris and itching to introduce a strange and ancient culture to a better way of life, the American dream, the Indian version of the saga would be of a middle-aged man with a veneer of warmth but aloof, arrogant, and quick to take offence. As one journalist wrote, Oscar Wilde’s observation about the United States, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening stage of civilisation, can be adapted to India thus, that the Indian went from abject humility to outright arrogance without the usual interval of healthy self-esteem.

India’s founding fathers made up in idealism what they lacked in ambition in matters of foreign policy. The continuity of this trend has been amply reflected by their successors in their slavish loyalty to moribund ideology and doctrine, and the lack of strategic vision has provided abundant cover for deeper failings of Indian diplomats. Even after 65 years of independence, India has neither developed close and strategic relations with any country (US-UK, US-Israel) nor has it fostered a coterie of like-minded states (EU, GCC) in furtherance of its national interests.

Most analysts of India’s foreign relations assume the cool and formal tone South Block oozes to be a combination of the cultural importance Indians give to protocol and the failure of strategic thinking. There is some truth to this, but a third and often-overlooked ingredient to Delhi’s aloofness, apparent more to practitioners of diplomacy rather than its scholars, is prickliness or arrogance. This personal shortcoming in many of India’s top politicians and bureaucrats has done irredeemable damage to the country’s interests over the years.

Among the more famous and early examples of Indian arrogance is recorded by the US ambassador to India (1948-1951), Loy Henderson, who wrote of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister,

“Nehru has had an anti-American bias since his school days in England. There he obtained the idea that the United Sates was an overgrown, blundering, uncultured, and somewhat crass nation, and that Americans in general were an ill-mannered and immature people, more interested in such toys as could be produced by modern technique and in satisfaction of their creature comforts than in endeavouring to understanding great moral and social trends of this age.”

Even if one dismisses Washington’s perspective on Nehru because of its disagreement over India’s non-alignment, Nepali Prime Minister Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala’s similar assessment is harder to ignore. In a conversation with an American diplomat, Koirala said that Nehru’s impatience often alienated him, and that Chinese diplomats were more refined than their Indian counterparts. Koirala’s words are still echoed in Nepal to this day.

Were the sentiment reserved to just one Indian official, even the prime minister, international exasperation with India might have been less. Yet this was not to be so. Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, arguably India’s most controversial defence minister, has been described as vitriolic, intolerant, arrogant, and abrasive by British as well as American officials. Another Menon, this time India’s ambassador to China, Kumara Padmanabha Sivasankara Menon, was also described by the PRC foreign minister, Chen Yi, as arrogant during discussions on the border issue on the eve of the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

Moving on to the next decade, it should come as no surprise that India’s ambassador to the United States, Triloki Nath Kaul, a man hand-picked by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, found it difficult to get along with officials from his host state. In a cable written by Washington’s man in Delhi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US State Department was warned not to accept Kaul as India’s ambassador. The telegramme relates the opinion of several western diplomats about Kaul – sly, opportunistic, arrogant, and with a propensity for misconstruing cleverness for sophistication. Moynihan himself wrote, “Kaul, like [the] Nehru family, is a Kashmiri Brahmin, self-assured to point of arrogance by birth.”

The more popular story from the 1970s is of Indira Gandhi’s interaction with US president Richard Nixon and his famous National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger on the eve of the South Asia Crisis of 1971. The Americans found Indira Gandhi intolerable, and declassified US documents reveal the colourful language Nixon and Kissinger used to describe the Indian prime minister. However, unlike Kaul, Indira Gandhi did not earn the ire of almost everyone she met – while cool and aloof to the White House, she charmed other leaders in her whirlwind tour of major international capitals, drumming up support for India’s position on the flood of Bengali refugees from the east and the West Pakistan’s campaign of genocide against their  hapless, ethnically different countrymen.

Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, reiterates this image of the prickly Indian in India as a World Power but is far more understanding than others in the foreign service community. Finding the excessive moral hectoring and arrogance of Indian diplomats and politicians as off-putting as his international colleagues do, he nevertheless asks that we understand the “defensive arrogance and acute sensitivity to real and perceived slights” in the context of India’s history and experience with the outside world.

Despite the urge to be defensive, there have been a few – very few – in Delhi who have lamented the poor standard of Indian officials and understood its multiplier effect on all aspects of international relations. In his autobiography, A Call to Honour: In Service of an Emerging India, former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh acknowledges the problem: “In diplomatic discourse and conduct, India has tended to carry many chips on its shoulder, almost always moralistic, needlessly arrogant, argumentative, mistaking such attitude as being an assertion of national pride.” Echoing Cohen, Singh writes that the “weight of so many centuries of servitude” has created in Indians “such an acute sense of hearing that quite often it hears insults where none exist or are even implied.”

It is not that India is the only country plagued with an arrogant foreign service corps; the United States is notorious for its share of Alden Pyles too. However, US arrogance comes backed by military and economic power, while India is yet to embrace machtpolitik. However, for most smaller states, it is easier to put up with arrogance that also promises aid than with paupered prickliness.

In a study that interviewed many US and Indian officials, one US military officer said, “Indians can be accused of having many cockeyed views,” but “they always have a substantive knowledge of the historical interactions, which makes it difficult to counter their arguments. They always raise the history of events during meetings.” This view was echoed by many others., that while the United States had an arrogance of power, the Indians had an intellectual arrogance. The study concluded,

“The Indian elites are quintessential intellectuals. They thrive on fine-tuned arguments and logic. But US military officers and businessmen are not interested in intellectual arguments—they are interested in practical issues. Consequently, they find India’s intellectual arrogance off-putting and counter-productive.”

As one US official framed it, it was American Calvinist arrogance versus Indian Brahminical arrogance, and as Thucydides reminds us, men’s indignation is more excited by a legal or intellectual wrong than by a violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

Unfortunately, many Indian scholars have imbibed their diplomats’ prickliness. India has failed to produce sufficient numbers of qualified foreign policy analysts on its own, and the government’s paranoia regarding declassification of state records has forced scholars to work from foreign sources and cultivate privileged access, not all of which is kosher. Usually due to widely varying sources (for example, the British Archives versus an interview with a former Indian bureaucrat), Indian foreign policy wonks have reacted harshly to “outsiders” like William Dalrymple, Bruce Riedel, Francine Frankel, and George Perkovich, oftentimes unfairly or for perceived intentions rather than their scholarly output. This attitude does not further understanding of Delhi’s thinking and only creates polarised minefields where there ought to be research.

To be clear, an arrogant disposition does not lower the merit of one’s case but merely the likelihood of it being heard favourably. Nixon’s relations with the subcontinent serve as the best example of the power of personal charm in diplomacy. The US president could never warm up to the Nehru-Gandhi family or other top Indian officials such as Morarji Desai (when he was Vice President), but got along famously with Pakistan’s military dictators even when President Dwight Eisenhower had already begun to express doubts about the wisdom of CENTO. Even if foreign officials perceive an arrogance that is not there, the impact on India’s national interests can be costly.

Diplomacy is a human activity, dictated as much by personality and psychology as by the hard-headed realism of rational actors. Arrogance might be a tool in the diplomat’s arsenal whose skilled use might goad one’s interlocutor towards a desired behaviour. However, Delhi has been too liberal with its dispensation, approaching international partners as a precocious teenage debating champion than as a seducer par excellence. Little wonder, then, that the Pakistan lobby has a stronger presence in Washington and other Great Power capitals than India’s idiot savants do despite the latter’s greater economic and military potential. Perhaps it is time these learned men of Hindustan applied that ancient counsel from the Manu Smriti: सत्यं ब्रूयात्प्रियं ब्रूयान्न ब्रूयात्सत्यमप्रियम् । (satyam bruyat priyam bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam)

China’s Cat and Mouse Game

22 Mon Apr 2013

Posted by in India, Security, South Asia

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On April 15, Chinese troops of about a platoon’s strength crossed the Line of Actual Control that separates India from Tibet and penetrated 10 kms into India with helicopter support and set up a frontier post. Not surprisingly, China has denied the entire incident, accusing India instead of “aggressive patrolling.” The pattern is familiar, seen around China’s peripheries in its conflicts with Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India.

This pattern is played out not only geographically but also chronologically. China has always raised tensions along its border to keep other powers off-balance in their relationship with Beijing. This habit serves a dual purpose in that it also diverts its people from internal dissatisfaction. While Chinese territorial claims remain outrageous, the actual incursions on the ground are always small enough to tempt observers into arguing that the change from status quo is insignificant.

It is this seeming insignificance that is most worrisome. The Chinese leadership has  mastered the art of creating small incidents at the most opportune time – the 1962 Sino-Indian War, for example, started in the midst of a very tense Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Second Taiwan Crisis in 1958 took place in the middle of US intervention in Lebanon. Chinese motives for continually stoking the tension along its borders has rarely had anything to do with actual possession of territory and more to do with creating leverage, both domestically and internationally.

One incident in this pattern, the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958, was orchestrated by China to signal its arrival upon the world stage – after living in the shadow of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Beijing took the opportunity of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation to set itself up as another locus in the communist brotherhood and non-aligned world. While Beijing’s commitment to a single China may be serious, its posture over Taiwan in 1958 certainly was not. Diplomatic documents reveal that “Chairman Mao said that the bombardment of Jinmen [Quemoy], frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time?” In another meeting, Mao explained, “[Our bombardment] was merely aimed at testing and scaring the Americans, but we would land if circumstances allowed. Why should we not take over Jinmen-Mazu [Quemoy-Matsu] if there came an opportunity?”

This is not to imply that China had little concern over US shipment of state-of-the-art military hardware to Chiang Kai-shek from 1955 to 1958. Mao was certainly reacting to American attempts to redress the balance of power situation in Taiwan, but the bombings were merely meant as a probing of American attitudes given that the United States had not signed a formal treaty obligating it to come to the defence of Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion.

A similar modus operandi is seen in another event in the pattern, the prelude to China’s invasion of India in 1962. New Delhi’s stubborn refusal to declassify diplomatic documents has made an already difficult issue controversial as well, with some scholars heaping the blame for the conflict on Jawaharlal Nehru and India. Nonetheless, China’s behaviour with India has interesting parallels with the Taiwan crisis. As Nehru saw the Himalayan Crisis, the question of a few square miles of barren wasteland was not merely a question of sovereignty or international prestige but one of whether Chinese belligerence could be allowed to intimidate smaller, non-aligned countries, whether they could survive free from a mantle of Chinese leadership.

Beijing carefully maintained Nehru’s faith in diplomacy throughout the 1950s and early 1960s; Chinese praise of India’s role in the Korean War, the warmth Mao showed towards Nehru, and the signing of the Panchsheel Treaty between the two Asian giants were markers of a positive relationship. Chou Enlai had explicitly stated that China had no territorial claims against India in 1951, a claim that was seconded by other senior officials repeated even as late as 1960. In a high-level meeting between the two countries in April 1960, Marshall Chen Yi and Chou Enlai assured India’s Ambassador to Beijing, RK Nehru, that war between India and China was inconceivable. In another meeting, Chou Enlai repeated to the Indian Vice President, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, his earlier assertion that China had no claims south of the MacMahon Line and that China had no intention of laying claim either. However, the very next day, both Chen Yi and Chou Enlai told the Indian Finance Minister, Morarji Desai, that they had no intention of ever accepting the McMahon Line.

As the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office noted, “It looks as if the Chinese intended one day to challenge the McMahon Line, quite apart from the Tibetan disturbances. Otherwise why did not Chou ever let Mr. Nehru have anything in writing recognising the Line and why did not the Chinese Government do anything about the maps? It seemed…that this was deliberate, that Chou’s reassurances to Mr. Nehru about the Line were purely tactical.”

There is another dimension to the Sino-Indian War that is usually over looked in India – the contribution of Sino-Soviet rivalry. The Indian Embassy in Beijing reported back to New Delhi in late 1960 that “in their ideological battle with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), India’s non-alignment had become a target for the [Chinese Communist Party].” While Chou Enlai opposed the aggressive tone of Chinese policy towards India, Liu Shaoqi pursued it relentlessly. These “leftist dogmatists” in the CCP saw Nehru not as a nationalist leader but as a reactionary bourgeoisie. Therefore, they argued, non-alignment was just a ploy and it was only a matter of time before India joined the Western Bloc. Chinese brinkmanship in the Himalayas was, thus, meant to expose the weakness of Indian neutrality and the duplicity of Soviet peaceful coexistence and had much less to do with Nehru’s “aggressive forward patrolling” or Tibet as many believe.

The same pattern is observed in 1965 and 1971 (albeit with some US encouragement) when China threatened the use of force against India’s “aggressive patrolling” of the border region, and in 1979 during the Third Sino-Vietnamese War when the supposed and actual reason for the initiation of hostilities didn’t line up.

Returning to 2013, these patterns from the past are immediately visible – proclamations of the desire for peaceful coexistence, feigned anger at a supposed slight, ambiguous diplomatic positioning, and military risk-taking with the hope of usurping territory and rights undefended. Enough ink has already been spilled on how the Indian military might better defend the country’s frontiers, how India lacks a coherent China policy, and how Indians need to calm down about an incident that is more routine than one would like. However, it might also behoove policy makers to take a step back and see the larger pattern of Chinese behaviour with its neighbours: duplicity, opacity, and belligerence when they can get away with it. The present border skirmish is not an isolated incident but fits uncomfortably well with Chinese strategy over the past few decades. India needs to consider the entirety of Chinese strategy and not restrict its response to a singular event but develop a range of options by which to undermine China’s game.

This post appeared on Tehelka Blogs on April 27, 2013, and on Fair Observer on August 04, 2013.