August 1947
It is rather surprising that the golden jubilee of India-China war in 1962 went almost unnoticed. Fifty years ago, on 20 October 1962, the Chinese army made inroads into the Indian territory, blowing to smithereens Pandit Nehru’s Panchasheel. The Chinese betrayal shocked India.
The one-sided war lasted for exactly a month until China unilaterally declared ceasefire on 20 November 1962. The war claimed nearly 4000 officers and soldiers. For India, it was a setback for its Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) that China was initially enthusiastic about.
In a way, the 1962 war was a legacy of the Raj as it left the borders undefined when they left the sub-continent in August 1947. The attack so brazen and shocking that within hours China captured a high-ranking officer like Brigadier John Dalvi, the leader of the doomed 7 Brigade. Six years later, Dalvi wrote ‘Himalayan Blunder’, the controversial war memoir.
For keen observers of Asian affairs, India‐China war was bound to happen. Brigadier Dalvi narrates an interesting story in his book. Dalvi was an officer-trainee in the DSSC, Wellington where a retired British officer was delivering a guest lecture. The British officer heard that Nehru had signed Panchsheel agreement with China in April 1954 and had decided to give up the post in Tibet that the British had maintained in Tibet to check Chinese advance.
He promptly predicted that India and China would soon be at war which was prophetic. The British had seen through the Chinese designs and had cultivated Tibet as a buffer state. Having attacked Tibet in 1950, China began constructing roads from Tibet leading to Aksai Chin near Ladakh. Since then, the Chinese had two major claims with respect to Indian territories. One is Aksai Chin, in the northeastern section of Ladakh and second is Arunachal Pradesh. Little surprise the Chinese attacked simultaneously on both the fronts, Ladakh area and
North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). They managed to win 11,000 km area in Aksai Chin and substantial area in NEFA now known as Arunachal Pradesh in India.
All along, China had blamed India for foisting the war on China. Even scholars like Neville Maxwell, the British journalist blamed India in his book ‘India’s China war’ published in 1970. Maxwell was granted unhindered access to secret files by the Government of India to write this book which later was banned in India.
The blame game apart, the point remains that the war of 1962 was a huge shock to Gandhi’s non-violent India. In its pacifist belief, India assumed that its natural affinity with Tibet would be respected by China. With China in no mood to oblige, war became inevitable and India was ill-prepared.
A quick look at the border dispute is called for. Aksai Chin is contiguous with Ladakh and was demarcated as part of Indian territory by British India in the mid-19th century through a tripartite meeting between British India, Tibet and China. Some 30 years later China rejected this demarcation. Thus, began border dispute between India and China in the North Western Frontier.
The story of the McMahon Line is a bit different. To the east of Bhutan lay a scattering of separate tribes, thinly populating a sixty-mile-broad belt of mountainous, densely jungled country. In 1915 a bilateral agreement between Tibet and Britain led to the McMahon line annexing some two 2000 square miles of Tibetan territory into India which is referred to as NEFA.
Came Independence in 1947, Indian government carried forward the policy of Britain about its borders, maintaining that the Sino-Indian borders had long been fixed by custom and tradition, and confirmed by treaty and agreement.
Back then the Tibetan government was seeking legal status and international recognition to the de facto independence it had enjoyed since 1911. Once the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in October 1949, Chinese army marched into Tibet and made it part of the PRC. This finally led to a show-down between India and China, two Asian giants. Here Indian forces faced its worst defeat so far. There were many discussions of this defeat, the prime being the underestimation of the strength of the Indian Air Force (IAF). Had the IAF put into action, the results would have been different. The use of fighter aircraft would have been a game-changer especially since the Chinese air force was severely handicapped due to high altitude of the airfields from which its aircraft would have had to operate.
It has been now 50 years that the humiliating defeat was inflicted on the Indian armed forces. So, how and why should we now remember this ignominy? One is the fabulous rise of China and its stated ambition of being world’s superpower No 1 by 2049, the centenary year of Chinese Communist revolution. Xi Jinping, the Chinese supremo, made no bones about the Chinese dream. Such an ambitious‚ aggressive country is our neighbour with whom we share nearly 3500 kilometres-long border which has been in dispute for the last five decades.
Secondly it is the all-weather friendship between Pakistan and China, cemented since March 1963. In the 21st century, this friendship is growing by leaps and bounds. On 1 November 2022, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had toured China. Pakistan and China are keen to strengthen the $ 60 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Since the inception of the CPEC, India has boycotted it as it runs through the Pak-Occupied Kashmir (POK) which India claims to be its territory. Like the CPEC, China is very keen on the success of the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) projects, a euphemism for economic imperialism.
Given this new reality, India has to keep a sharp eye on China as well as Pak-China axis. China very well knows that 2022 is not 1962 and is unlikely to use force to settle border-dispute, but then it always pays to be vigilant.