Nehru's China war: How his naivete led us to defeat

As always, politics tends to generate more heat than light. The strategic leak of the Henderson Brooks report on the 1962 war with China yesterday (18 March) has led to the usual flurry of political tu-tu-main-main between Congress and BJP . It has also given rise to the Nehru versus Sardar Patel debate , with Nehru seen as a naive fool in his handling of India’s equations with China over Tibet, and Sardar as the iron man who foresaw things better. However, given the secrecy with which all Indian governments have handled Henderson Brooks, it would seem as if the “Top Secret” report has something politically earth-shattering to disclose. But the excerpts put out yesterday by Neville Maxwell, author of the China-biased India’s China War , do not show Nehru or the Indian government in particularly bad light. Even though it is well-known that Nehru’s “forward policy” ended up making the Chinese more belligerent, leading ultimately to a short war, the report faults the army brass more than the political leadership for this policy.[caption id=“attachment_1441267” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] Former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. AFP[/caption] The Indian Express quotes the Henderson Brooks report thus: “It is obvious that politically the forward policy was desirable and presumably the eviction of the Chinese from Ladakh must always be the eventual aim. For this, there can be no argument, but what is pertinent is whether we were militarily in a position at that time to implement the policy.” The report concludes: “The government who politically must have been keen to recover territory advocated a cautious policy whilst army HQ dictated a policy that was clearly militarily unsound.” The failure of Lt Gen Henderson Brooks, who wrote the report in association with Brig Prem Bhagat, to talk of Nehru’s role is not surprising, since he must have seen his job as getting into the military aspects of the defeat – the political objective of retrieving territory usurped by China through the “forward policy” being taken as a given. Does this mean all blame accrues to the army and not Nehru? Absolutely not. To get a complete picture one has to look at both the political handling of China’s belligerence by Nehru and his Defence Minister, VK Krishna Menon, and the army’s hamhanded efforts to put political directive into practice without proper planning. Henderson Brooks deals only with the latter. To get the full picture, Henderson Brooks should be read along with Neville Maxwell’s India’s China War (which goes along with China’s version of events, largely), and Arun Shourie’s book Self-Deception: India’s China Policies, which tells us in gory detail how Nehru was positively delusional when it came to dealing with China. There is little doubt that Nehru pursued a disastrous foreign policy on Tibet and China, and this attitude at the top led to the 1962 debacle. The problem with Nerhu was he got carried away by his own ego and international standing – which made him a very poor strategist. He had naïve ideas of what the Chinese may or may not do, and he assumed that no one would want to ruin his global reputation by going to war. By this Nehru was projecting his own preference for statesmanship over crude territorial power games, and failed to understand what stuff the Chinese were made of. Sardar Patel had no illusions about the Chinese. For starters, soon after India gained independence, Nehru took it upon himself to play global chaperone to the Chinese Communists, giving them more rope than they deserved. The Chinese not only took advantage of his naivete but also betrayed his excessive trust in them. Nehru misjudged Chinese intentions all along, believing that they would not spoil their reputation by taking him on. So even though it was Chiang Kai-Shek who supported India’s independence, Nehru took a benign view of the Communist seizure of China first, and Tibet later. In 1948, Shourie’s book notes, Nehru wrote that the Chinese “might be induced not to be hostile to us”. And why would that be? Because “I have some slight reputation with the leaders of Communist China because of the Medical Mission we had sent. I have corresponded with Mao Tse-Tung and other leaders in the past. This might help…”. That’s it: this is the basis of Nehru’s trust that China’s intentions were benign. This is what he wrote about Chinese attitudes to India and Tibet, which were becoming very clear in the 1950s. “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Tibet in relation to China, I think there is practically no chance of any military danger to India arising from any possible change in Tibet.” And why would one assume this? Because “geographically, this is very difficult and practically it would be a foolish adventure. If India is to be influenced or an attempt made to bring pressure on it, Tibet is not the route for it.” Again, there is no basis to this presumption, but since Nehru was Nehru, no one questioned it when he wrote this in 1949. In October 1950, China actually invaded Tibet, but Nehru still believed that due to the terrain, the Chinese invasion would not matter. Moreover, since the capital Lhasa was to the East of Tibet, he doubted whether this occupation would affect the situation in the “western areas of the country” which bordered India. In a letter to Rajaji, written after the Tibet invasion created an uproar in India, Nehru wrote: “Morally I find it difficult to say that the Chinese government has deliberately deceived us at any stage. We may have deceived ourselves.” That’s saying something. Notes Shourie: “Having been unable or unwilling to do anything to prevent the aggressor, the liberal is speaking up for the aggressor.” On another occasion, when West Bengal chief minister BC Roy sent Nehru a missive about Chinese activities on the border, Nehru says we should keep a close watch, and then goes on to rubbish fears about future Chinese aggression: “There appears to me, however, a tendency among our officers to get greatly excited and take an alarmist view of all kinds of dangers, some real, some imaginary.” Has anything changed since then? Isn’t this the same language taken by our current External Affairs Minister, Salman Khurshid, who described the Chinese incursion into Ladakh as mere “acne” on the face of the India-China relationship? Back to Nehru. At a cabinet meeting to discuss the Tibet events, Nehru tells his colleagues that India is safe since “the Himalayas are there”. KM Munshi timidly points out that the Tibetans had crossed the mountains and invaded Kanauj in the past, but Nehru’s views carried the day. He was the original candle-lightwallah walking towards Wagah. It is at this stage that the Sardar enters the picture. After reading all the correspondence between the government and its ambassador in Beijing, KM Panikkar, he told Nehru a few home-truths: that the Chinese had been fooling us on their intentions in Tibet; by raising a shindig about so-called “Anglo-American machinations” in Tibet to justify its invasion, China was essentially saying India was a pawn in the hands of the west; third, that we were too apologetic about explaining our views on Tibet to the Chinese; and four, by annexing Tibet, China was essentially at our borders and our assumptions that the border agreements with Tibet would stay relevant would be wrong. Sardar Patel concluded: “Even though we regard ourselves as the friends of China, the Chinese do not regard us as their friends. With the Communist mentality of ‘whoever is not with them is against them’, this is a significant pointer of which we have to take due notice.” Long before George W Bush spoke these words, the Sardar saw the Chinese as patent-holders to this philosophy: if you are not with us, you are against us. Patel’s most prophetic words to Nehru ran like this: “Recent and bitter history tells us that Communism is no shield against imperialism and that Communists are as good or as bad imperialists as any other. Chinese ambitions in this respect not only cover the Himalayan slopes on our side but also include important parts of Assam…”. This is what finally brought us into a war with China in 1962 – and a foolish “forward policy” unsupported by military might made things worse. It was not India’s China War, as Maxwell wrote, but it was China’s India Challenge that we consistently failed to understand. We deluded ourselves into believing that friendship with China was possible purely on the basis of good intentions. The truth is China respects strength – not pious intentions. This is the lesson Nehru forgot, and this is the lesson we have refused to learn even now. (Acknowledgement: The quotes attributed to Nehru and Patel in this article have been sourced from Arun Shourie’s book, Self-Deception: India’s China Policies _)_