How the powers-that-be bungled '62 war

As Chinese troops continue their probing actions along the Sino-Indian boundary, the passive response of the government in New Delhi brings to
mind the experience of the 1962 border conflict with China, when slogans of Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai deluded the Indian leadership into allowing the Chinese to roll into the plains of Assam.

Subsequently, the leadership in New Delhi did everything to cover the debacle, but if Neville Maxwell’s (the author of India’s China War) comments are anything to go by, then the responsibility for the disaster of 1962, lies with both the political leadership and the military commanders of 1962. These have been highlighted by the Henderson Brooks Report, which remains a strongly guarded document in the vaults of South Block.

But to dispel the common belief, that the report exposes the blunders of the political leadership, and therefore is a closely guarded secret, it must be made clear that it, in fact, looks only at what went wrong militarily. The government of the day clearly did not wish this inquiry to look into high-level policies and plans.

In fact, Lieutenant General Henderson Brooks was clearly directed not to fix responsibility onto specific individuals but the investigation was to look at mundane tactical issues like training, equipment, physical fitness of troops and the role of military commanders! Even the functioning of Army Headquarters was beyond the purview of this investigation, that Brooks, a second-generation British army officer, domiciled in India, from the Maratha Light Infantry Regiment, was asked to undertake.

The report was an unforgiving analysis about the problems along the frontier, discovering along the way what Lieutenant General B M Kaul, regarded by many as a lackey of then defence minister Krishna Menon and the government of the day, would liked to have kept hidden. It laid the blame on Army Headquarters for its direct interference, by bypassing the established chains of command, with deployment of troops on the frontline against the Chinese. The example of the General Staff in Delhi giving orders to the Dhola Post on the Thagla Ridge in then NEFA and now Arunachal Pradesh, was seen as incredible as the order for the charge of light brigade.

But all in all, the report doesn’t have any surprises and the publication of its 200 pages would only undo the myth that the 1962 conflict was a Chinese aggression. A series of studies have, over the years, clearly shown that Indian soldiers were in fact ordered to challenge the Chinese in a military confrontation which it could only lose. And the culprits were at Army Headquarters who, time and again, ordered troops into a forward policy and gave them no hope for a fighting withdrawal, an operation of war — like Lieutenant General B M Kaul, then Chief of General Staff and Brigadier (later Major General) Monty Palit, VrC, then director of Military Operations.

But the investigation, even if it wanted to, had no access to records of meetings in the ministry of defence, since then defence minister Krishna Menon had categorically disallowed any notes or minutes to be kept of his conferences, saying these were top secret in nature.

While the Indian Army has clearly learned its lessons from 1962 debacle, the muted response of India’s politico-diplomatic establishments to China’s brazen muscle flexing from Aksai Chin to Arunachal Pradesh, clearly leaves a lot to be desired. In 1963, Y B Chavan, who took over from Krishna Menon, made a statement in Parliament ascribing the reasons for the debacle to the leadership failures in the Indian Army and the tactical mishandling of troops. He made no mention of the political fumbling that led to India’s humiliation.

Today, India’s military commanders would do well to answer the question: Are they prepared to take the blame for yet another fiasco if the Chinese walk across our frontline, not just to paint a few stones in Ladakh, but perhaps the walls of monastery in Tawang, which they have always claimed?

(Maroof Raza comments on security issues on Times Now)