Sixty Two years on Wither lessons of Sino-Indian border war?
By Col Satish Singh Lalotra
To secure ourselves lies in our hands, but the opportunity to defeat the enemy is provided by the enemy itself’—-Sun Tzu..
Georges Clemenceau the famous French prime minister cum statesman who led France during the First WW was one of the wittiest PMs European continent ever had in its recorded history.
One of the principal architects of the ‘Treaty of Versailles’ at the ‘Paris peace conference’ that was the harbinger for outbreak of 2WW for having slighted the Germans, exclaimed after learning of a bloody and futile offensive on the western front-‘War is too important to be left to the Generals’.
Least realizing that he himself was one of the chief protagonists in architecting the infamous ‘Treaty of Versailles’ which had a bevy of politicians on its rolls as its signatories.
Does it mean that both the Generals & politicians failed the French nation and its people as had happened with India too way back sixty two years when on 20 th October 1962 the notion of impregnability of our northern frontiers-‘Himalayas’ lay torn asunder under the Chinese onslaught of its armed forces?
To an erudite reader of the events leading up to the Sino-Indian war as well as to a layman on the streets of India the above statement was not a mere postulation , but a naked truth when both ( Politicians & Generals)failed the country’s carefully preserved reputation.
This 20 th October 2024, as India quietly transits into sixty second year of its inglorious past of Sino-Indian border war, isn’t it time to cast a re-look at the events and their connected decisions leading up to the high altitude war that still has seeds to erupt yet into an another confrontation?
The ‘Jinn’ of Chinese depredations hasn’t’ been bottled up in the Indian context which keeps rearing its ugly head since that cold wintery morning of 20th October 1962 in myriad ways than one right till the ‘Galwan valley clash’ of May/ June 2020 reminding us of the centuries old prophecy of the Chinese master tactician Sun Tzu quote-‘To secure ourselves lies in our hands, but the opportunity to defeat the enemy is provided by the enemy itself’ unquote.
Has India been offering such opportunities to its bête noire (Read China) in South Asia to undo its very being? What are the unfinished lessons of that national ignominy that befell us on the autumn of 1962?
Have those lessons withered under the dynamics of new Geo-political alignments as found in our Asian continent? That precisely is the central theme of this article of mine.
Though it is not possible to lay bare the long lost lessons of Sino -Indian war of 1962 over here to do a comparison between that time and the present one, a small attempt though has been made over here all the same.
The Sino-Indian border war did for India , what was seemingly impossible to imagine just a year prior i.e in 1961 when discordant notes were flying thick and fast between the GOI and the opposition parties backed up by a heightened ‘Citizen’s activism’ of the country to take China head on.
It united the country in her darkest moments and gave birth to an India who at least temporarily, developed the will and the resilience for introspection.
The two wars fought by independent India within a short span of 15 years of independence had revealed a fatal flaw in the Indian national psyche which unfortunately prevails even today after more than 75 years of independence.
This fatal flaw was of lack of strategic vision, perspective planning and maintaining the required consistency in evolving and nurturing of twin objectives of a definite national strategic aim backed up by a concrete threshold of the ‘Thus far and no further’ line of thinking in our strategic thinkers.
The fact that national sovereignty and territorial integrity are closely intertwined with the above mentioned ‘Thus far and no further’ thinking which had been routinely violated in the Indian context by both our western and northern adversaries with impunity since independence forced us to think beyond the immediate and work for a collective future.
This ‘collective’ had its underpinnings during the liberation war of 1971 when the ruling elite, the populace of the country, the opposition, and the armed forces resonated with the same frequency which fructified on 16 th December 1971 with the balkanization of Pakistan under its own weight of wrong doings albeit given a push by India to finish an unfinished agenda of partition.
The other biggest lesson drawn from the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict pertained to the ‘lack of Jointness between the army and the air force’ which prevails even today albeit with few flashes in the pan viz the 1971 liberation war and a delayed reaction by the air force during the 1999 Kargil war when it launched its ‘OP Safed Sagar’ that too when the then COAS threatened to go alone during the crucial cabinet meeting on security.
The British had left a rich legacy of jointness between the army and the air force which proved the major battle winning factor in the first Kashmir war of 1947/48. After the departure of Field Marshal Claude Auchinlek, the appointment of supreme military commander had lapsed by default.
Thus the onus for joint planning fell on the chiefs of staff committee ( COSC) and again by default , the committee became the de-facto advisors to the DCC ( Defence coordination committee).
Unfortunately after the first Kashmir war, the system of the DCC itself was never revived, hence even the COSC had not met even since 1959 and her two sub-committees including the JIC (Joint intelligence committee) had become defunct.
It went to the charismatic personalities of both air chief Marshal Arjun singh in 1965 and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw in 1971 to pull off that proverbial glue of jointness of command to see India through those twin crisis with aplomb.
But in a highly complex hybrid warfare that seems to be the new normal of world conflicts, can the ‘Personality syndrome’ be enough for a nation- state to see it through in times of war?
The fact that the post of CDS (Chief of defence staff) of the fourth largest army was lying vacant for decades to no end shows the barometer of country’s interest in matters of security.
As if this was not enough the so called ‘Boots on ground” (JIC) Joint intelligence committee which was once the eyes and ears of the NSA (National security advisor) formed immediately after the Kargil war of 1999 by the then PM Mr Vajpayee got into a mode of oblivion when it was removed from the this august body in 2018 in the second term of PM Modi under a refurbished NSCS (National security council secretariat).
Now the plate of current NSA Mr Ajit Doval is too full to have any worthwhile/ meaningful inputs from the erstwhile JIC to ponder over and analyze them in their entirety.
The removal of JIC had its echoes felt on the LAC at Galwan in May/ June 20202 when actionable intelligence from across the TAR (Tibetan autonomous region) was not made available to the ground troops despite being present in all their manifestation/s and also corroborated by the locals of Ladakh .
Something of a similar nature had happened as a prelude to the 1962 Sino-Indian border war when the IB (Intelligence bureau) under the then IB chief Mr Bhola Nath Mullick down played the Chinese threat constantly and fed Nehru government with hordes of filibuster which was not in tune with the ground situation.
Irrespective of the violent clashes that erupted between the CRPF and the PLA at Hotsprings in the year 1959 as also at Longju in the same year in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh respectively, a relative misconception about Chinese intentions prevailed in the minds of Nehru dispensation.
From advocating the short lived ‘Panchsheel agreement’ in 1954/55 to the illogical ‘Forward policy’ all along from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh bore the firm imprint of Indian Geo-political naivety and its failure to read the Chinese intentions which had BN Mullick as its main protagonist.
Cut to the present times when PM Modi went all-out to spread a red carpet welcome to the Chinese president XI Jinping in September 2014 in India barely 4 months after having taken over as the new PM of India; the ‘spectre’ of Galwan clash loomed large on the collective psyche of India in 2020.
This seeming incongruity in Sino-Indian relations has been very well read by our northern neighbour but for us, thus personifying the saying of ‘Sun Tzu’ quote -‘The opportunity to defeat the enemy has been provided by the enemy himself’-unquote.
The ‘Missing higher direction of war’ in the autumn of 1962 unfortunately has found its echoes even today after more than 62 years of that national ignominy.
This is the bitterest lesson of 1962 which keeps visiting India with sickening regularity as and when any threat of national importance knocks on either the LC or the LAC. Wars are not fought by military leaders; they merely prosecute war within the defined strategic aims of the nation.
Military commanders may influence the direction, but their primary task is to prepare their forces and strive for achieving the desired end state and in the most cost effective manner.
It is axiomatic that in a democratic nation a great deal of mutual trust and professional respect is required between the political and the military leadership.
The first Kashmir war of 1947/48 had proved that the political leadership had split loyalties and hence worked towards divergent goals, leading the nation to a precipice. The leadership in 1962 had learnt little from that fiasco.
Similarly in 2017 during the height of Doklam crisis the iconic of opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi had the temerity cum naivety to visit the Chinese (read enemy) embassy at Delhi to get the first hand narrative of the unfolding of military eventualities on the Doklam plateau.
As if own nation’s top military brass had fallen short of the leader’s expectations of giving an impartial view of the crisis.
In the similar vein when the then eastern army commander Lt Gen SSP Thorat in 1961 gave his assessment of the Chinese threat to the then Defence minister Mr VK Krishna Menon , the latter dismissed him saying that he was capable of tackling the Chinese all by himself on the diplomatic front.
Can bombast be an alternative for the cold threat manifesting on the borders? Military forces must be structured and nurtured to achieve the national aim that has been set forth for them.
What the armed forces were required to do from 1959 onwards, was operationally unachievable. It is well within the political domain of a country to decide the nature , quality and quantity of its military forces.
The rapid decline in shoring up of our defence capability at the expense of other pressing needs of the nation should have been an anathema for the Nehru government more so when things started sliding down the’ trust ladder’ between India and China and on the ‘escalatory ladder’ all along the Himalayan frontier.
Similarly putting a stop on army recruitment in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic and unleashing of the so called ‘Agniveer Scheme’ has a parallel with Nehru government’s attempts to cut defence expenditure in the era of 1950s.
Lastly the timing chosen by the Chinese of the 1962 border war just at the anvil of ‘Cuban missile crisis’ which divided the world attention can be compared with Galwan clash of May/June 2020 that coincided with the outbreak of the corona pandemic.
Though there are many lessons to be drawn parallel between what occurred on the icy heights of Himalayas in 1962 & the prevailing conditions, as I have mentioned earlier in this write up of mine space prohibits me from doing so.
Last but not the least would sum up that the prophetic words should not come true once again uttered by Mrs Barbara Tuchman in the ‘Guns of August’ —quote-‘Men who had fallen from high command , whether for cause or as scapegoats – wrote their private justifications.
As each account appeared, inevitably shifting responsibility or blame to someone else, another was provoked. Men who would otherwise have remained mute were stung to publish -books proliferatd unquote’.
The writer is a retired army officer.
