1962 India-China War – 1: The reality of a military defeat

This is part of the series on the 1962 India-China border war that seeks to
debunk the myths, misinformation and politics spun around India’s debacle in
the North-East Frontier Agency.

Generations of Indians have grown up internalizing a standard narrative on the

1962 border war between India and China. India lost a huge chunk of its land that
it had historically held to the Chinese, due to a political and military disaster. And
this was brought on by the unspeakable blunders of the-then prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, and his defence minister, Krishna Menon. 
According to the conceptions, some of their blunders included:
 Nehru’s weakness towards China and “appeasement” of the Chinese.
 His neglect of the Indian military.
 His preference for “incompetent sycophants”, like Lieutenant General Brij Mohan Kaul, a fellow
Kashmiri pandit, after ignoring “legendary professionals”, like General Kodendera Subayya
Thimmayya and his “rightful successor” Lieutenant General Shankarrao Pandurang Patil Thorat.
Apart from Kaul, General Pran Nath Thapar, Brigadier DK “Monty” Palit and Lieutenant General
Lionel Protip “Bogey” Sen were also supposed to be “incompetent officers” who were patronized
by Nehru and Menon.
 The so-called suicidal and much-maligned “Forward Policy”, whereby Indian posts were pushed
forward aggressively, with no tactical considerations, purely for the show of flag – a politicians’
folly.
 The government’s interference in purely military decisions that led to ultimate disaster.

Has any of our readers heard anything outside the contours of the points stated
above? These do capture the essence and flavour of the story of our 1962 China
debacle, right?
So now come let’s examine each of these, keeping aside opinions or
predispositions, in the light of documented facts and events, rather than hearsay,
innuendo and personal anecdotes. Given the vast scope of the subject, we will limit
our focus on the following:

 The personality-based blame game.

 Documented policies, statements and memoirs related to relevant policies, decisions, and
pronouncements of these “personalities”.
 Military orders, instructions, reports, recommendations, and decisions.
 Key episodes, battles and defeats which have attained iconic status.
 Research work on various aspects of the India-China conflict and related matters by scholars.
Our scope of study and analysis will exclude the widely known and elaborately
described details of the actual battles unless those have a direct bearing on the
themes and findings of our study. There are, in fact, excellent published accounts
from officers who have fought in those actions. The likes of, then 7 Brigade
commander, Brigadier John Dalvi[M1], then CO of 4 Division Signals, Major
General KK Tiwari[M2] and then gun position officer (GPO), E Troop, 17 Para Field
Regiment (deployed on Tsangdhar ridge) Brigadier AJS Behl [M3].

Was Nehru and the Indian leadership ‘soft’ on China?

Let us give a wide berth to Indian political lore and partisan commentaries on this
subject and look at the facts as presented by international scholars [R1–9].
Our reading is that the Chinese, and particularly China’s chairman, Mao Zedong,
himself, were always deeply suspicious of Nehru personally due to his “elite class”
background. To doctrinaire Marxists, the “class” aspect is the fundamental prism
through which the world is viewed. Nehru was considered a “reactionary” dictated
to by the Indian and western, big bourgeoisie. All his actions, attitudes and
pronouncements on Tibet and China were viewed through this filter. Finally, the
real casus belli for the war were the conviction among Chairman Mao and the
Chinese leadership that Nehru had designs on Tibet.
Nehru viewed China as a huge landmass of fellow Asians, which had been
tormented and exploited for long by imperialists. Hence, he perceived a
commonality of interest between India and China in the early days. However, from
1949 onwards his perspective on China was pragmatic rather than “sentimental”.
The way he saw it, the People’s Republic of China, as a large neighbour, wasn’t
going any place else. They are here to stay, and we might as well accept them and
coexist on a friendly basis, to mutual benefit.
Taiwan was a tiny footnote to the Chinese story in real terms, irrespective of the
ideological intransigence of the US over the issue. All the talk of “Hindi-Chini
Bhai Bhai” (India-China are brothers) is akin to the “biryani and hugging”
bonhomie one has seen with our western neighbour from time to time, but
practiced on a larger, institutional scale.
On Tibet, Nehru knew and understood the legacy of China’s suzerainty over Tibet
since ancient times. He also recognized the reality of Tibet’s autonomous and
special status within the larger reality of China’s sovereign rights. He tried to
marry India’s special historical and “sentimental” relationship with Tibet with the
“special and autonomous” aspect of Tibet’s status within the People’s Republic of
China.

Nehru envisioned a compromise between Chinese and Indian interests regarding

Tibet, with Chinese respect for Tibetan autonomy combined with Indian respect
for Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. This accommodation would, Nehru believed,
provide a basis for a broad programme of cooperation between China and India
on behalf of the peoples of the developing countries and against the insanity of a
nuclear-armed bipolar Cold War. Nehru believed that by demonstrating India’s
acceptance of China’s ownership and military control of Tibet while
simultaneously befriending China on such issues as war in Korea, the PRC’s UN
admission, the peace treaty with Japan and transfer of Taiwan to the PRC,
Indochina, and decolonization and the Afro-Asian movement, China could be won
to cooperation with India. The two leading Asian powers would then create a new
axis in world politics. In terms of Tibet, Nehru hoped that China would repay
India’s friendship and consolidate the Sino-Indian partnership by granting Tibet a
significant degree of autonomy.”
However, China’s increasing interference in and coercive overlordship on Tibet
disappointed Nehru deeply. This is where his schism with the Chinese Communist
Party leadership began. And China’s later distrust and paranoia over the border
issue, emanated from their leadership’s deep resentment over Nehru’s stance on
Tibet. Mao read Nehru’s intentions towards Tibet as the quest for a buffer state
between India and China. He saw Nehru’s actions through the pedantic Marxist
paradigm of class sympathy for the “serf-owning oppressors” of the Dalai Lama’s
genre.
The Chinese leadership was infuriated that Nehru was apparently not recognizing
China’s absolute suzerainty over Tibet. According to them, Nehru was
continuously diluting China’s authority in Tibet through all the talk of autonomy
and special status. Apart from Nehru’s purported actions in encouraging
reactionary and “anti-progressive” sections of Tibet’s Buddhist theocracy.
To this was added the aspect of the Tibetan insurgency and India’s role in it. For
all the talk of passive and non-violent Tibetan resistance, which was publicly
professed by Nehru, he was in the know about, and condoned, the United States’
Central Intelligence Agency’s campaign of subversion and armed insurrection in
Tibet. Here, the Indian intelligence agencies covered its tracks very well. In period
pieces, written around that time, no author or analyst could prove India’s role in
armed Tibetan resistance. However, research into CIA’s archives and
sources[R10] show that the Indian intelligence agencies supported the CIA’s efforts
actively.
Did Nehru neglect the Indian military?
India was just getting on its feet after the widespread bloodshed and displacement
that happened during Partition and the first Kashmir war. The country was plagued
with a plethora of socio-economic problems. Indigenous capital formation was
low. There was a multitude of vital sectors crying for investment and outlay of
funds. Big powers were lying in wait to incorporate India into the armed camps of
the Cold War. Under those circumstances, peaceful nation building was the way to
go.
India’s defence spending was low until 1960, as the below graph illustrates. India
was surrounded by poor and unsettled neighbours, as we were. Any serious
military threat that could go beyond border clashes, was not on the radar.
However, as the graph below shows, 1962 (when the Forward Policy was in place)
changed all that. Nehru’s defence budget for 1962 was 2.75% of GDP.

Just for the context, India’s defence budget for 2018 and 2019 were 2.38% and
2.40% respectively. The current fiscal’s figure standing at 2.45%. And for
additional perspective, in the 3rd Plan (1961-66), the total allocation for the health
sector was 2.9% of the total planned expenditure. Yes, India was a poor, newly
independent, and a “third world” nation then. Therefore, it is difficult to
substantiate the proposition that Nehru’s India “neglected” its military and threw it
to the wolves wantonly.
So, how did we use and leverage those modest funds spent on defence, in 1962.
Analysing this, we would, sadly, find that Nehru expected many times more from
the military than what he could invest in it – for many years. And this obtuse
refusal on this part, to engage with realpolitik, brought the most bitter of all defeats
conceivable, personally to him, towards the end of his life and career.

WW2-vintage arms, command issues — why India was unprepared for 1962 China
war
Experts also cite Indian political leadership's miscalculation that China wouldn't
launch armed response to Nehru's 'Forward Policy' as a factor in India's
unpreparedness for war.

The range from flawed military plans, command and control issues, and
intelligence gaps, to the Indian political leadership’s miscalculation that Beijing
wouldn’t launch an armed response to Delhi’s ‘Forward Policy’, which involved
installing military outposts in areas claimed by the Chinese.
Often described as a “humiliating defeat” for India, the war in 1962 saw 10,000 to
20,000 Indian soldiers go up against roughly 80,000 Chinese troops.
Political commentator and strategic analyst Wasbir Hussain, in a 2014 piece for
New Delhi-based think tank Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), argues
that India’s unpreparedness in 1962 was underlined by the manner in which
Chinese forces entered Indian territory, seized Aksai Chin and almost reached “the
plains of Assam”.

“The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) came in on two separate

flanks — in the west in Ladakh, and in the east across the McMahon
Line in the then North-East Frontier Agency (Arunachal Pradesh).
China had successfully occupied Aksai Chin — a strategic corridor
linking Tibet to western China — the NEFA area, and had almost
reached the plains of Assam,” he wrote.

Further, military experts have pointed out that in certain battles

with the Chinese, such as the Battle of Rezang La, Indian soldiers
were at a disadvantage on account of three factors: the high crests of
the mountain tops deprived Indian troops of artillery support, they
weren’t acclimatised to the harsh winter conditions, and they had
inferior military equipment such as .303 bolt-action rifles dating
back to World War II.

India drew many lessons from the conflict, and even

acknowledged strategic mistakes such as not deploying the Indian
Air Force (IAF).

Command & control issues

To decode the Indian military’s unpreparedness for the war, scholar
Srinath Raghavan, in his book War and Peace in Modern India,
briefly looks at the transition the Indian Army underwent a decade
prior to the conflict.

“In retrospect it is clear that this transition was not unproblematic.

Not because Indian officers were in any way less capable than their
British counterparts, but because several of them had less than
adequate preparation for higher command particularly at the
strategic level,” Raghavan argues.

Experts such as Seshadri Chari have written of other structural

issues such as the setting up of the Defence Production Planning
Committee in 1957 and the Department of Research and
Development under the Ministry of Defence in 1958, which
according to Chari were “utterly sloppy and non-functional”. 

Such bodies deprived the armed forces of basic military hardware

and ammunition, he contends. 

Chari adds that three years before war broke out, the Army had
unresolved issues with the political leadership in New Delhi, which
he describes as “absence of political-military synchronisation”.
The resignation of the then Army chief, General K.S. Thimayya, was
a prime example. In September 1959, Thimayya submitted his
resignation letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru following a
disagreement with the defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, but
later withdrew it.

Malcolm MacDonald, then British high commissioner to India and

Thimayya’s neighbour, submitted a report on the incident to the
British government, based on his “long conversations” with
Thimayya.

Reportedly, MacDonald said Thimayya told him that Menon “was

perhaps trying deliberately to make himself the master of the armed
forces so that he might one day have their support in the
achievement of his political ambition to take Mr Nehru’s place
either after, or even before, Mr Nehru’s withdrawal from public
life”.

The Thimayya incident aside, experts have also written about

Menon’s attitude while interacting with Chinese officials in the
months before the war.

For example, international affairs expert John W. Garver wrote of

how on 23 July 1962, during a conference in Geneva, Chinese
foreign minister and PLA marshal Chen Yi was told to seek out
Menon, and urge him to find ways of preventing the border
situation from further deteriorating.  

Chinese accounts of the interaction claim Menon was “arrogant”

and turned down the prospect of a joint India-China communiqué
announcing future talks on the border conflict.
It was after this interaction that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai
concluded that Menon “showed no sincerity regarding peaceful
talks” and that Nehru wanted “a war” with the
Chinese, writes Garver.

Problems with Nehru’s Forward Policy

Experts have argued that Nehru’s ‘Forward Policy’ exacerbated
India’s unpreparedness in the war.

The policy, which was in effect from November 1961 to October

1962 and involved frontier patrolling on disputed areas, is believed
to have been driven by Nehru’s firm belief that the Chinese would
not respond with armed retaliation. Garver calls this assertion on
Nehru’s part an “egregious” miscalculation.

This policy was put in place despite the consideration that India,
compared to China, was at a disadvantage when it came to troop
capacity, soldiers’ acclimatisation to terrain and other
infrastructural factors.

According to Pakistani veteran Major (Retd) Qasim Hameedy,

officers of the PLA, from squad to division level, were acclimated to
the terrain in Tibet. “Three divisions of the PLA 18th Corps had
moved to Tibet as early as 1950,” he writes in a 2013 research paper
presented to the US Army Command and General Staff College
(CGSC).

Further, the classified 1963 Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report —

parts of which were released by Australian journalist Neville
Maxwell in 2021 — says Indian troops had little space to manoeuvre
on the battlefield compared to their Chinese counterparts.
“Our roads, even when fully developed, will not have the capacity to
sustain major operations… Accessibility to Daulat Beg Oldi and Hot
Spring Sectors in the Karakoram Mountains will always be
difficult,”

Snapshot of the book

 Shiv Kumar Verma’s  The War That Wasn’t  shows how India’s security was
compromised by Nehru and his ill-advised and incompetent coterie in the
lead up to the 1962 conflict.
 It truly was a war that wasn’t.
 Officially, neither China nor India ever declared war, and Chinese officials
express surprise when Indians keep referring to it as one.
 But while the battle in the high Himalayas in October-November 1962 might be
‘just another border skirmish’ for the Chinese, it was a bitter humiliation for India
that still deeply influences our perception of and relationship with our giant
neighbour.
 Over 2,000 Indian soldiers died in the month-long armed hostilities which began
October 21, 1962 with a massive two-pronged offensive by the People’s
Liberation Army in Ladakh and Arunachal, or the North East Frontier Agency
(NEFA) as it was then known.
 Over 4,000 were taken prisoners of war, and an entire division of over 15,000 ill-
equipped, ill-trained soldiers was routed in the face of the massive Chinese
onslaught.
 Much has been written on the subject, mostly blaming then Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru for ignoring the advice of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, who had
voiced his suspicions about the Chinese as early as 1950, when the People’s
Liberation Army ‘liberated’ Tibet.
 “Chinese ambitions in this respect not only cover the Himalayan slopes on our side
but also include the important part of Assam,”  Patel had warned in a letter to
Nehru dated November 7, 1950.
 Blame is also placed on Nehru’s defence minister Krishna Menon, his Intelligence
Bureau head BN Mullik, and Generals like Brij Mohan Kaul, who was appointed
as General officer Commanding (GOC) North east in 1962.
 Post the conflict, which ended when the Chinese unilaterally announced a
ceasefire beginning November 21, 1962, most of the world saw India as the
victim of Chinese belligerence and betrayal.
 But that perception soon changed.
 Brigadier John Parashuram Dalvi commanded India’s 7th Infantry Brigade, which
was decimated by the PLA on day one of the Chinese attack. Captured as a PoW
by the Chinese and released in May 1963, he went on to write Himalayan Blunder,
which categorically blamed the Indian political leadership –and some military top
brass, including himself--for ‘India’s most crushing military disaster.’
 The book was promptly banned. (the ban was lifted years later).
 In 1970, Australian journalist Neville Maxwell published India’s China War, which
aggressively toed the Chinese line that Nehru’s arrogant antics had left Beijing
with no other option but to ‘teach him a lesson.’
 Maxwell apparently had access to the Henderson-Brooks- Bhagat report,
commissioned by the Indian Army after the war, to analyse the reasons for the
border debacle. The report -- named after Lieutenant-General TB Henderson
Brooks and Brigadier Premindra Singh Bhagat, commandant of the Indian
Military Academy)-- squarely puts the blame on inept political and military
leadership.
 It was promptly classified as Top Secret, and remains so even today.
 Maxwell, however, uploaded volume I of the report on the Internet in March
2014. Despite frantic Indian attempts to block access, the report (which begins
with a quote from Sun Tzu’s Art of War) can still be found online. (Volume 2
reportedly just contains memos and other documents to back up the assertions
made in the first volume.)
 In July-August 1962, young Captain Ashok Kalyan Verma was transferred from 2
Rajput Battalion to the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun as instructional
staff. Barely three months later, the entire battalion was decimated in the fierce
Chinese attack on the banks of the Nam Ka Chu River in the NEFA Valley. Captain
Verma, who went to fight in the 1971 war with Pakistan as a Lt Colonel
 commanding the 18th Battalion of the Rajput regiment, retired in 1991 as a
Major General.
 His book, Rivers of Silence, (Disaster on River Nam Ka Chu, 1962, and the Dash to
Dhaka across River Meghna during 1971) spans two wars with very different
results.
 Describing the events of 1962 as a ‘national disaster,’ the first part of the book
pays tribute to his unit, which was decimated in the first Chinese attack 20
October morning on an unknown Himalayan stream – Nam Ka Chu.
 It vividly recounts how despite lack of political and military leadership,
outnumbered, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, his comrades from 2 Rajput
displayed exemplary bravery in the face of certain defeat and death.
 General Verma’s son, filmmaker and military historian Shiv Kunal Verma, draws
extensively from his father’s book, as well as his memories, diaries, friends and
references, to write what is perhaps one of the most extraordinary book on the
conflict in the Himalayas.
 “At the time when rest of the world was exhausted from the Second World War
and attention was focused on the Cold war, Chinese supremo Mao Tse-Tung
(Mao Zedong) pulled off one of the greatest real estate coups of all time……..The
Chinese played their cards in such a manner that the Indians lost what should
have been at best a defensive war by not fighting it at all,” he says.
 After setting the historical background, Verma brutally dissects how India’s
security was compromised by Nehru and his ill-advised and incompetent coterie.
The matter of fact recounting of how Nehru and Menon abominably betrayed
one of India’s finest army chiefs, General KS Thimayya, in 1959, does not reflect a
flattering image of India’s first Prime Minister.
 Verma brilliantly balances the hair-raising heroism and courage displayed by our
soldiers on the ground, against the ignorance, ineptitude and sheer cowardice
shown by politicians and senior army leadership.
 There’s the heart rending tale of Subedar Dashrath Singh, captured after an
entire AK-47 magazine was emptied into his stomach, and saved by a Chinese
military nurse ---who had once studied in Allahabad.
 And then there’s the stories of how frightened and frantic generals ran from the
battlefield at the first sign of the Chinese onslaught.
 The crisp narrative echoes and reinforces the Henderson-Brooks report
indictment: “comparatively, the mistakes and lapses of the staff sitting in Delhi
without the stress and strain of battle are more heinous than the errors made by
commanders in the field of battle”.
 But 1962, the War that Wasn’t  does more than just that.