If this reasoning is correct [continued Nehru], then India became the stumbling block to China in the furtherance of its wider policy. The removal of India as a power which has become an obstacle in the way of China becoming a great power, became the primary objective of Chinese policy, and the elimination of non-alignment became particularly important from China’s viewpoint. China wanted to show that Soviet policy was wrong. If this could be demonstrated then the Communist countries and those that followed them would veer round to the Chinese point of view and a hegemony of that bloc would be created. At the same time, the Asian and African countries would have to choose one way or the other. Many of them would be frightened of China. In this state of affairs, China would get much more help from the Soviet and allied countries and her industrialization would proceed more rapidly. If war comes, well and good. If it does not come, the strength of the Communist and allied bloc would grow and there would be interdependence of [the] Soviet Union and China.
This then was Nehru’s explanation for the war—that China hoped by its actions to thrust India into the American camp, and thus restore the clear, sharp boundaries that once separated the Russian bloc of nations from the American one, boundaries that however had become blurred and porous owing to the success of the Indian, or more specifically, Nehruvian, idea of non-alignment.
VI
I now move on to an analysis of how Indians, then and now, have written or spoken of Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies vis-à-vis the Chinese. There have been three distinct views on the subject. The first is empathetic. Affirmed by Nehruvians, supporters of the Congress party, and a large swathe of the middle-aged middle class, this holds Nehru to be a good and decent man betrayed by perfidious communists.
This point of view finds literary illustration in a novel by Rukun Advani called Beethoven among the Cows. A chapter entitled ‘Nehru’s Children’ is set in 1962, ‘the year the Chinese invaded India, a little before Nehru died of a broken heart’. The action, set in the northern Indian town of Lucknow (a town Nehru knew well, and visited often) takes place just before the war, when much sabre-rattling was going on. The people in Lucknow were spouting couplets ‘shot through with Nehru’s Shellyean idealism on the socialist Brotherhood of Man’ (a brotherhood now being violated by the perfidious Chinese). Drawing on his childhood memories, the novelist composed four couplets that reflect the mood of the times. Here they are, in Hindi:
Jaisé dood aur malai, Hindi–Chini bhai bhai
Hosh mé ao, hosh mé ao, Chou, Mao, hosh mé ao.
Jaisé noodle, vaisé pulao, Nehru saath chowmein khao
Chou, Mao, hosh mé ao, hosh mé ao aur chowmein khao.
Haath milao, gaal milao, Nehru saath haath milao
Chou, Mao, hosh mé ao, hosh mé ao aur haath milao.
Dono bhai Chou, Mao, Nehru saath baith jao
Baith jao aur chowmein khao, Chou, Mao, hosh mé ao.
I will not attempt here a literal translation of the couplets, but content myself with the one-line summary of the novelist, which is that these verses ‘asked the Chinese leaders to shake hands with Nehru, eat chowmein with him, and generally come to their senses’.
The second view, opposed to the first, is contemptuous of Nehru. It sees him as a foolish and vain man who betrayed the nation by encouraging China in its aggressive designs on the sacred soil of India. This viewpoint is associated with ideologues of the Hindu right, speaking for organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Jana Sangh, forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In the 1960s, the RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar wrote witheringly that ‘the slogans and paper compromise like “peaceful co-existence” and “Panchsheel” that our leaders are indulging in only serve as a camouflage for the self-seeking predatory countries of the world to pursue their own ulterior motives against our country. China, as we know, was most vociferous in its expression of faith in Panchsheel. China was extolled as our great neighbour and friend for the last two thousand years or more from the day it accepted Buddhism. Our leaders declared that they were determined to stick to China’s friendship “at all costs” … How much it has cost us in terms of our national integrity and honour is all too well known.’
Writing in 1998, the journalist M.V. Kamath named names. Saluting the nuclear tests overseen by the BJP, he recalled the ‘time, under Jawaharlal Nehru and V.K. Krishna Menon when a decision must have been taken not to engage in a “debilitating and criminally wasteful arms race”; it was very noble of the two gentlemen who taught us to sing Hindi–Chini-bhai–bhai in chorus. For our efforts China kicked us in the teeth.’
Kamath was writing decades after the conflict, but a contemporary expression of this point of view can be found in the writings of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, the leading ideologue of the BJP’s mother party, the Jana Sangh. When the first clashes broke out on the border in September 1959, Upadhyaya argued that ‘the present situation is the result of complacency on the part of the Prime Minister. It seems that he was reluctant to take any action till the situation became really grave.’ The Jana Sangh leader complained that Nehru had ‘more faith in his Panch Sheel perorations than in preparation and performance’. The prime minister was compared to the notoriously incompetent nineteenth-century ruler of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah. ‘Only he [Nehru] knows when a crisis is not a crisis,’ wrote Upadhyaya sarcastically; only Nehru knew ‘how to emit smoke without fire and how to arrest a conflagration in a Niagara of verbiage!’
Week after week, Upadhyaya excoriated Nehru’s China policy in the pages of the RSS journal, Organiser. ‘As usual the Prime Minister has exhibited his temperamental weakness in dealing with the issue of Chinese aggression,’ he remarked. ‘Why can’t he [the Prime Minister]—with equal justification, and more justice—accept Tibet’s case [over China’s], which is also in our national interest? What native impotence makes him willing to strike but afraid to wound? What confuses him into subverting all three aims of his Northern policy by his single misunderstanding of the position of Tibet? Is it plain ignorance? Is it simple cowardice? Or is it a simple national policy induced by military weakness, ideological ambiguities and weakening of nationalism?’
Upadhyaya accused Nehru of showing little serious intent in acting upon border transgressions by the Chinese. ‘While on the one hand, he [Nehru] had been declaring that India was firm in her stand, on the other he counselled forbearance in the Lok Sabha, saying that there were limits to firmness also. Of course there are limits to everything, but unfortunately the Prime Minister’s limits are set to startling points.’
The prime minister’s attitude to China, concluded Upadhyaya, was ‘characteristic of his weak and timid nature’.
The argument that India’s first prime minister was pusillanimous with regard to China was also articulated by that obsessive critic of all that Nehru stood for, the brilliant socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia. In a speech in Hyderabad in October 1959, Lohia asked Nehru and his government ‘to take back the territory the Chinese have captured by whatever means it thinks fit … Increase the country’s strength and might,’ he thundered; ‘then alone China’s challenge can be met.’ Then, when Zhou Enlai visited Delhi in April 1960 and was met with a hostile demonstration organized by the Jana Sangh, Lohia said that ‘if any one deserves a black flag demonstration, it is no one else but Mr. Nehru for extending an invitation to an outright aggressor’.
The third view of Nehru’s attitude to Chinese claims was perhaps the most interesting. Exuding pity rather than contempt, this held Nehru to be a naïve man misled by malign advisers and by his own idealism. Responding to the border clashes in the second half of 1959, C. Rajagopalachari wrote several essays urging Nehru to abandon his long held and deeply cherished policy of non-alignment. ‘Rajaji’ had once been a colleague of Nehru in party and government. Now, however, he was a political rival, as the founder of the Swatantra Party.
In the realm of domestic policy, Rajaji and the Swatantra Party which he headed criticized Nehru for his hostility to the
market. In the realm of foreign policy, they deplored his reluctance to identify more closely with the western bloc of nations, led by the United States. The growing tension between India and China provided, in Rajaji’s view, one more reason to abandon non-alignment. The change in creed, he said, was made necessary by the fact that ‘one of the nations engaged in the cold war makes aggression on an uninvolved nation …’ ‘The path of peace,’ wrote this other and equally remarkable disciple of Gandhi in the first week of December 1959, is ‘not always smooth. China has incontinently betrayed India and Nehru. He dare not resist Indian public resentment over China’s aggression and her attempt to sabotage India’s position in the Himalayan frontier. Whatever be China’s objective, this aggression and show of power have put an end to any meaning in non-alignment.’
Rajaji sympathized with Nehru’s desire to avoid full-scale war, which lay behind his reconciling attitude to the Chinese. Nor had he any illusions about the western powers, whose policies reflected a general unwillingness to accommodate the aspirations of the post-colonial world. Still, the border conflict had, wrote Rajaji in the last week of December 1959, called for ‘a complete revision of our attitude and activities in respect of foreign policy’. With China backed by the Soviet Union, India had no alternative but to seek support from the western powers. Rajaji found justification for this tilt in a verse of the ancient Tamil classic, the Kural of Tiruvalluvar, which, in his translation, read: ‘You have no allies. You are faced with two enemies. Make it up with one of them and make of him a good ally.’
In May 1960, after Zhou Enlai had come and gone, and Nehru himself had begun making noises about standing firm, Rajaji warned that it would be a mistake to seek to unilaterally evacuate the Chinese forces from the thousands of square miles of territory it controlled which were claimed by India. ‘Our armed forces can be used against this trespass,’ he wrote, ‘but no one can guarantee the localisation of conflict. It would be foolish to start an operation knowing fully well that it would be a leap in the dark. The only legitimate and wise course is to drop the isolationist policy which we have been hugging to our bosom, and get into closer bonds of alliance with the World Powers that are ranged against Communism.’ There was, he said, ‘no other way, and so it must be followed, for the rehabilitation of India’s prestige and gathering of moral power against the aggressor.’
There were, of course, points of overlap between the positions articulated by Rajaji, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and Lohia. This is not surprising, since all were opponents of Jawaharlal Nehru and the ruling Congress party. However, there were also points of divergence. Rajaji more clearly recognized that India did not have the military might to combat, still less overcome, the Chinese. Hindu ideologues like Upadhyaya suggested that India’s deficiencies in this regard could be made up by a mobilization of militantly spiritual energy; while socialists like Lohia thought that the gap could be filled by collective social action. Rajaji could see, however, that it was not merely a failure of nerve, but of capacity, which could be remedied only through the forging of a new strategic alliance, with the West.
VII
First articulated in the late 1950s, the three views outlined above found powerful expression in the immediate aftermath of the war. A debate in Parliament in November 1962 saw many members express solidarity with the prime minister. India’s leader had been betrayed, and it was time to close ranks and stand behind him. The debate ended with a resolution affirming ‘the firm resolve of the Indian people to drive off the aggressor from the sacred soil of India however long and hard this struggle may be’.
Ordinary citizens also rallied around Nehru, with young men lining up outside army recruitment centres and young women donating their jewels to the National Defence Fund. ‘Letters to the editor’ urged Opposition leaders to forget past differences and work in cooperation with the prime minister.
In the first weeks of the war, when it became clear that the Chinese advance had not and could not be stopped, there was much criticism of the defence minister, V.K. Krishna Menon. Menon was not new to controversy; in April 1961, in a polemic described at the time as ‘perhaps the greatest speech that has been made on the floor of [the Indian Parliament] since Independence’, J.B. Kripalani had attacked Krishna Menon for having ‘created cliques [and] lowered the morale of our [armed] forces’, by promoting incompetent officers congenial to ‘his political and ideological purpose’. Now, with the Indian defences disintegrating, there were loud calls for Menon to resign.
These criticisms usually stopped short of attacking Nehru himself. The respected editor of the Indian Express, Frank Moraes, wrote that it was ‘the Defence Minister who is most culpable for the deficiency of arms’. The lack of preparedness of the army under his leadership now made Menon look ‘like Cardinal Wolsey, left naked to his friends and enemies’. The readers of the newspaper agreed. The defence minister, said one G.R. Subbu, ‘should make room for another man. All our Defence losses spring from the policies of Mr Krishna Menon.’ When the prime minister at first resisted the calls for Menon’s head, Frank Moraes offered a very muted criticism of Nehru himself, remarking that ‘the Prime Minister’s loyalty to his colleagues is commendable provided it is not pushed to a point where it endangers the safety and unity of the country’.
A rare personal attack on Nehru came from N.G. Ranga of the Swatantra Party. Speaking in Parliament in the third week of November 1962, he noted that ‘the Prime Minister has also been good enough to make a number of admissions in regard to the failure of his dreams [as regards Asian solidarity]. We all dream, true. And our dreams do not come true. That is also true. But, at the same time it is very dangerous to go on dreaming and dreaming for years and years and over such a terrific crisis and problem as this with the result that not only our people but also people abroad have had to wonder how this country’s leadership has been guiding our people with all this atmosphere of dreaming.’
The three views of Nehru and China analysed above first became visible in the period 1959–62, as the border dispute was revealed to be serious, and as it resulted in war. These views have each been held and articulated these past fifty years, by politicians and by ordinary citizens alike. The first, empathetic, view, was probably dominant in the aftermath of the 1962 war. The second, contemptuous, view, has become more widespread in recent years, with the rise to political salience of the BJP and its ideology of Hindutva. The third, pitying, view, was energetically articulated in the 1950s and 1960s by Rajaji and some other associates of Nehru in the freedom movement (such as Acharya Kripalani, Jayaprakash Narayan and Minoo Masani). It may be now enjoying a sort of after-life, in the form of the argument, now quite common in the press and in policy circles in New Delhi, that India must actively pursue closer military and economic ties with the United States to thwart and combat an assertive China.
VIII
In retrospect, it is evident that in the years between the invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the war of 1962, Jawaharlal Nehru made a series of miscalculations in his dealings with China. These errors were of two kinds. The first were personal—his faith in officials who gave him wrong or foolish advice, or who executed the jobs assigned to them with carelessness or lack of foresight. Two men in particular appear to have been unworthy of his trust: the intelligence officer, B.N. Mullick, who advised Nehru to sanction the provocative forward posts; and Krishna Menon, who as defence minister refused to properly arm the military, and who promoted incompetent generals and otherwise damaged the morale of the armed forces.
A second set of miscalculations were political, namely, his ignorance or underestimation of the ideological dimensions of Chinese politics. Nehru did not, or could not, see beyond the professions of internationalism and Asian solidarity; had he done so, he would have more properly understood the reservations the Chinese had about the McMahon Line, and their irritation, and then anger, that India stood by an ‘imperialist’ demarcation that silently legitimized the case for Tibetan independence from China.
The most consequential question that divided the two countries concerned the status and future of Tibet. The Tibet factor in India–China relations had three dimensions—which we may gloss as the long-term dimension, the medium-term dimension and the short-term dimension respectively.
The long-term dimension had its origins in a conference held in 1913 in the British imperial summer capital, Simla. This was convened by the Government of India, and attended also by Chinese and Tibetan representatives (Tibet was then enjoying a period of substantial, indeed near-complete political autonomy from Chinese overlordship). A product of this conference was the McMahon Line, which sought to demarcate the frontiers of British India.
When India became independent in 1947 it recognized the McMahon Line, and adopted it as its own. The Chinese however had serious reservations about this Line, which intensified after the Communists came to power in 1950. The Chinese government said the border had been imposed by the British at a time when they were powerless; besides, they did not recognize that Tibet had a right to send a separate delegation of its own. All through the 1950s, while India insisted on the sanctity of the McMahon Line, the Chinese said that since it was a legacy of imperialism, the border question had to be negotiated afresh and a new boundary decided upon.
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