11 Jul 2014

INDIA - CHINA 1962 WAR: AN OPEN SECRET

Wasbir Hussain


Fifty two years after India suffered an ignominious
defeat at the hands of the Chinese along the
Himalayan heights in the present Arunachal
Pradesh sector, one is amazed at the attempts by
successive Governments in New Delhi to keep the
war report authored by Lieutenant-General
Henderson Brooks and Brigadier PS Bhagat a state
secret. And this, after large parts of the so-called
classified document, locked up in the vaults of the
Defence Ministry and Army Headquarters, has been
made public by Australian journalist Neville
Maxwell in his blog in recent months and earlier in
his well known book India’s China War.
India’s new Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, who less
than four months ago authored an article making a
forceful plea for making the Henderson Brooks
report public to prevent “public opinion (from
being) influenced by unauthentic sources,” made a
U-turn to say the report cannot be declassified
because it would go against the “national interest.”
Now, this supposedly elusive report talks about the
biggest faux pas made by Nehru’s Congress
government and the military establishment of the
time. Militarily flawed plans, faulty assessment by
the Intelligence Bureau, a disruption in the chain of
command between Delhi and forward Army
formations coupled with a strange belief that there
would be no armed response from Beijing to
Nehru’s ‘Forward Policy’ forced India to face a war
it was not prepared for.
What is there in the report that New Delhi is so
wary about? Apparently, it was Nehru’s ‘Forward
Policy’ and orders to establish posts far into the
disputed border that acted as a catalyst for the war
although the conflict was described in India as
Chinese aggression across the Himalayas. This
unresolved question, as to the trigger for the war, is
largely believed to be at the root of the protracted
hostility and trust deficit among the two Asian
giants, and could well be the major source of the
conflict over border incursions and the developing
distrust over sharing the waters of the Yarlung
Tsangpo or the Brahmaputra.
Take a look at how the Chinese made their foray
into India, starting on 20 October 1962. 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.
In the war in these treacherous terrains, 722 PLA
soldiers were killed and around 1,400 wounded,
while the Indian death toll stood at 1,383, and
1,047 were wounded. Besides, 1,696 Indians went
missing and over 400 taken as prisoners of war.
Although Beijing caught most by surprise by calling
a unilateral ceasefire and retreating from India's
Northeast while retaining Aksai Chin, the defeat at
the hands of the Chinese is something Indians will
find hard to accept. In fact, this episode is seen as
a key reason affecting bilateral relations between
the two neighbours.
Surprisingly, India’s Defence Ministry seems to
think the report should remain a top secret “given
the extremely sensitive nature of the contents
which are of current operational value.” Well, the
argument of a 52-year-old report that is still
supposed to have”current operational value” is
unacceptable. Now, New Delhi is readying itself to
deploy the brand new Mountain Strike Force in the
Himalayan heights by 2017, a fighting-fit Army
facing the Chinese. Is New Delhi planning to model
this force on the 1962 formations or model its
strategy on the one used in 1962? If not, how is it
that the 1962 war report could have observations
of “current operational value”? These are silly
arguments, to say the least.
The Chinese on their part have made available a
considerable collection of documents related to the
war with India to the Cold War International History
Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in the US.
For India, this means that researchers, journalists
and foreign policy watchers will be able to see the
war better from a Chinese viewpoint rather than
the Indian point of view.
Year 2014 is not 1962, and, therefore, India must
gather the courage to declassify the report, put it
out in the public domain, let people analyse for
themselves the causes of the defeat. After all, if
there are lessons to be learnt from the 1962 defeat,
it is in India’s interest to let countrymen chip in
with their thoughts. As Arun Jaitley wrote as
recently as on 19 March 2014 on the BJP Website:
“...to keep these documents ‘top secret’ indefinitely
may not be in larger public interest. Any Nation is
entitled to learn from the mistakes of the past. The
security relevance of a document loses its
relevance in the long term future. Any society is
entitled to learn from the past mistakes and take
remedial action. With the wisdom of hind sight, I
am of the opinion that the report’s contents could
have been made public some decades ago.” Jaitley
obviously had no idea then that he was going to be
sitting in the hot seat of India’s Defence Minister!

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