The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  China emerged as the chief villain for both America and the Soviet Union when it refused to subscribe to the concept of “peaceful coexistence” between socialism and capitalism—as agreed to by US president Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at their meeting in Camp David, Maryland, in October 1959. Two months later Eisenhower received a rousing reception on the streets of Delhi against the background of rising tensions between India and China.

  To resolve the border dispute peacefully, Zhou spent almost a week in Delhi in April 1960. In the first of his meetings with Nehru he presented his case in six points, the most important being number 4.

  “Since we are going to have friendly negotiations, neither side should put forward claims to an area which is no longer under its administrative control,” it stated. “For example, we made no claim in the eastern sector to areas south of the McMahon Line, but India made such claims in the western sector. It is difficult to accept such claims and the best thing is that both sides do not make such territorial claims.” He suggested that each side should keep to the line of actual control in all sectors, eastern, western, and middle. Nehru disagreed. “Our accepting things as they are would mean that basically there is no dispute and the question ends there; that we are unable to do,” he argued. He proposed a radical alternative. “We should take each sector of the border and convince the other side of what it believes to be right.”22

  Such an approach in international diplomacy is unheard of. Instead, the two sides examine the differences that exist in their respective positions and then try to reduce the gaps until they reach a point of concurrence. In this case, each had its vital, nonnegotiable interest securely under its control. India held fast to the McMahon Line, while China had built the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway passing through Aksai Chin in Ladakh in 1957.

  Recalling his last meeting with Nehru on April 25, 1960, Zhou told the Soviet ambassador in Beijing on October 8, 1962, that Nehru rejected out of hand all his proposals. “We suggested that bilateral armed forces respectively retreat for 20 km on the borders and stop the patrols to escape conflicts. They did not accept the suggestion. Later, we unilaterally withdrew for 20 km and did not appoint troops to patrol in the area in order to evade conflicts and help negotiations develop smoothly. However, India perhaps had a wrong sense that we were showing our weakness and [we] feared conflicts. . . . India is taking advantage that we withdrew for 20 km and did not assign patrols, and has invaded as well as set up posts.”23

  It was this stalemate that led Nehru to raise the subject of Pakistan’s boundary with China with President Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan in September 1960. But instead of learning from the Pakistani leader’s successful handling of the issue with Beijing, Nehru mocked him by saying that the Pakistanis “were acting in a childish manner.”24

  In his conflict with China, Nehru found himself being cosseted by both Moscow and Washington. On the eve of the US presidential elections in early November 1960, the Democrat candidate Senator John F. Kennedy described India as representing “a great area for affirmative action by the Free World” in his interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News. “India started from about the same place that China did. The Chinese Communists have been moving ahead the last 10 years. India . . . has been making some progress, but if India does not succeed with her 450 million people, if she can’t make freedom work, then people around the world are going to determine, particularly in the underdeveloped world, that the only way they can develop their resources is through the Communist system.”25

  Nehru’s Clenched Fist: Forward Policy

  By July 1961 the Chinese had advanced 70 miles west of their Xinjiang-Tibet Highway passing through Aksai Chin, thus occupying 12,700 square miles of India’s claimed territory. Nehru’s resolve to implement his country’s territorial claims in the eastern and western sectors had turned the frontier areas into conflict tracts, resulting in periodic clashes.

  On November 2, 1961, a high-level meeting of Indian officials, chaired by Nehru, adopted the “Forward Policy” on the Sino-Indian border issue. That is, Delhi decided to establish forward military posts north of the McMahon Line in the eastern sector and behind the Chinese posts in the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh. It planned to set up five new all-weather posts of eighty to a hundred soldiers each behind nine existing forward Chinese posts in Ladakh. These outposts were to be located strategically to sever the supply lines of the targeted Chinese posts and starve their personnel with the aim of seizing these posts. From there Indian patrols planned to probe the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway.26

  From November 5 to 19, Nehru was away, touring America, Mexico, and Britain. He started his itinerary with a visit to the United States, where he was warmly welcomed by President Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island, where he maintained a family mansion.

  On his return home, Nehru presented his Forward Policy on the Chinese border issue to the Lok Sabha. “They [the Chinese] are still in areas which they occupied [in Ladakh] . . . but progressively the situation has been changing from the military point of view and from other points of view in our favor,” he told the chamber on November 28. “We shall continue to take steps to build up these things so that ultimately we may be in a position to take action to recover such territory as is [now] in their possession.” In other words, Nehru publicly declared his intention to achieve his aim by force. He seemed to rest his strategy on the hypothesis that an armed conflict between India and China would escalate into a world war. His thinking was dangerously flawed. Astonishingly, he was unfamiliar with Henry Kissinger’s groundbreaking book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy published in 1958. In it Kissinger argued that, given the “balance of terror” between nuclear-armed America and the Soviet Union—with its scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction—it was incumbent on Washington to develop the doctrine of limited wars. “Is it imaginable that a war between India and China will remain confined to these two countries?” Nehru asked rhetorically while addressing the Rajya Sabha (Hindi: States’ Council), the upper house of Parliament, on December 6. “It will be world war and nothing but a world war.”27

  In Beijing, Chairman Mao concluded that since India was rejecting his government’s repeated reiteration of a policy of peaceful coexistence, it should be given a taste of “armed coexistence.” When peaceful means deployed by China had failed to bring about a reversal in Delhi’s Forward Policy, Mao ordered that the PLA must “undertake a long period of armed coexistence.”28

  On June 26, 1962, during the clandestine talks between the ambassadors of the United States and China in Warsaw, Poland, the American envoy received instructions to secretly assure his Chinese counterpart that Washington would not support any attempt by the Nationalist government (of the Republic of China) based in Taiwan to invade the mainland.29 This allowed PLA generals to move some troops posted along the coastline to the Sino-Indian border. They added two divisions to the six already posted in Tibet to fight the local rebels.

  Along the disputed border the Dhola post had been held by the Indians since June. It lay opposite the Thagla Ridge north of the McMahon Line at its western extremity. On September 8 sixty Chinese soldiers appeared at the Thagla Ridge opposite this post with orders to use threats to induce the Indians’ withdrawal without engaging into a fight. Briefed by government officials, the Indian media inflated the size of the Chinese contingent by a factor of ten, to six hundred.

  Nehru, then attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in London, told the media that the British Indian Army had instructions to “free” India’s territory under Chinese occupation. On September 11 it was decided to give permission to all forward posts and patrols to fire on any armed Chinese who entered India’s claimed territory. Overall, India had established sixty forward posts, forty-three of them north of the McMahon Line, and occupied four thousand square miles of Chinese territory. Its eastern command upgraded this order on September 20 to “engage” any Chinese patrols with
in range of their weapons. This radical step was tantamount to a declaration of war.

  On October 3 China sent its final diplomatic warning coupled with a plea for immediate, unconditional negotiations. Nehru rejected the offer. Before leaving for a trip to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on October 12, he told the media he had ordered the armed forces to clear the Chinese from NEFA. Excepting the Communist Party of India (CPI), he had the unanimous and raucous backing of the opposition as well as the press.

  On the ground, however, Nehru’s lordly order resulted in two lightly armed and poorly clothed and shod India battalions posted in the plains marching through mud, mountains, and rains at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet to accomplish the mission. All the same, Nehru’s declaration was unambiguous. “We don’t want a war with India,” said Zhou. “But Nehru has closed all roads. This leaves us only with war.”30

  Addressing the meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China on October 18, Chairman Mao said, “Now that Nehru is determined to fight us, we have no way out but to keep him company. As the saying goes, ‘from an exchange of blows, friendship grows.’ Maybe we have to counter-fight them before we can have a stable border and a peaceful settlement of the boundary question. However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”31

  At the other end of the globe, October 18, 1962, marked the beginning of the thirteen-day-long crisis between the White House and the Kremlin on the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.

  Nehru Battles Mao; Kennedy Challenges Khrushchev

  On October 20, 1962, under cover of ear-splitting mortar fire, two heavily equipped Chinese divisions, armed with medium machine guns, launched simultaneous offensives in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line. In a rerun of their fight in the Korean War (1950–1953) against the American and South Korean troops, they attacked in waves. In NEFA they advanced on the Chumbi Valley between Sikkim and Bhutan, and further east to Tawang. Outnumbering the Indians by five to one, they quickly captured twenty of their outposts in NEFA and eight in Ladakh.

  Geography coupled with their military engagement in Tibet favored the Chinese. They approached the battle fronts from the fairly flat Tibetan plateau, which was conducive to road building and troop movement. They had also been fighting the armed rebels in Tibet since the mid-1950s and were used to combat in mountains. (India’s troops with high-altitude fighting experience were posted in Kashmir along the border with Pakistan.) By contrast, Indian soldiers had to ascend very steep hills covered with thick vegetation in wet weather. Their outmoded .303 rifles were no match for the Chinese troops’ automatic weapons.

  During the war, Zhou and Nehru corresponded daily. On October 24 Zhou offered a cease-fire package. In principle, each side should withdraw twelve miles from the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and disengage, he proposed. If India agreed to this, then China would withdraw its frontier guards in the Eastern Sector north of the LAC and disengage. Zhou offered to visit Delhi to seek a friendly settlement of the dispute. “What is the Line of Actual Control?” retorted Nehru. He rejected Zhou’s proposal.32 The next day the Chinese occupied Tawang and stopped there.

  Nehru sent off frantic appeals for military assistance to the leaders of America, Britain, and the Soviet Union. John Galbraith, the gangling, gaunt-faced US ambassador in Delhi, and Sir Paul Gore-Booth, the short, plump high commissioner of the United Kingdom—nicknamed Laurel and Hardy by the diplomatic corps—got frantically busy. In his memoirs, Ambassador’s Journal, Galbraith described the Indian leader on October 28 as “frail, brittle and seemed small and old. He was obviously desperately tired.”33 Washington and London rushed vital arms and ammunition to India by gigantic transport aircraft, to Pakistan’s distress.

  What concerned Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan—not to mention Nehru—was Pakistan opening a new front against India in Kashmir. “The Pakistanis continue to make pro-Chinese noises, and three Indian divisions are being kept along the Pakistani border,” noted Galbraith in his memoirs. “This upset the Indians.”34 His counterpart in Pakistan, Walter McConaughy, intervened, urging the Pakistani foreign minister Muhammad Ali Bogra that his country should not do anything to embarrass India.

  Unsurprisingly, President Ayub Khan spied a golden opportunity to squeeze Nehru on the Kashmir issue. He told McConaughy that Pakistani neutrality in the Sino-Indian War could be assured only by Delhi’s concessions on Kashmir. The unmistakable inference was that an Indian refusal would induct Pakistan into the war, thus forcing India to fight on two fronts. “My concern was about equally divided between helping the Indians against the Chinese and keeping peace between the Indians and the Pakistanis,” wrote Galbraith. “The latter had grievances against the Indians which they considered, not without reason, to have substance. The nightmare of a combined attack by Pakistan and China, with the possibility of defeat, collapse and even anarchy in India, was much on my mind.”35

  Later, when McConaughy was instructed to approach Ayub Khan to assure Nehru that “they wouldn’t do anything to embarrass the Indians in their time of trouble,” the Pakistani president preferred a letter to that effect from Kennedy.36 He received one soon after. At the same time Washington urged Nehru to provide Pakistan with data on Indian troop movements in Kashmir and send a friendly message to Ayub Khan. He complied.37 Only then did Ayub Khan finally give the assurance that Nehru sought anxiously.

  As for the more ominous superpower confrontation, to the relief of the world at large, Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved their eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation on October 29. The Kremlin agreed to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for the White House removing its Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Turkey. Nehru sent congratulatory letters to Kennedy and Khrushchev, hoping that they would both now pay greater attention to pulling India out of the quagmire it had fallen into.

  In Delhi, while a record 165 members participated in the parliamentary debate on the war from November 8 to 15, patriotic fervor gripped the nation. In the four leading Indian cities young men lined up at army recruitment centers. In normal times these offices were open only twice a week, and most volunteers failed the physical test. Now the lowering of the strict physical requirements induced by the national emergency drew multitudes of casual laborers, factory hands, and jobless graduates, who were attracted by the prospect of assured food and accommodation, not to mention a worthwhile purpose to their wayward existence that would come with a military uniform.

  The Chinese broke the lull on the battlefield on November 15 by assaulting Walong at the easternmost point of the McMahon Line. The Indian regiments retreated in disarray, many of their ranks getting mowed down by the enemy and others throwing away their arms and fleeing. The dazed Indian commanders could not decide where to make their last stand. Finally, they settled for the fourteen-thousand-foot-high Se-La Mountain Pass, fifteen miles south of Tawang. But their ranks failed to hold Tawang. This compelled their officers to order a withdrawal toward Bomdi La, ninety miles inside NEFA. The relentless advance of the Chinese continued, with Bomdi La being their latest prize. Panic gripped the adjoining Assam province. Its large Tezpur settlement turned into a ghost town.

  Consternation spread to Delhi and struck Nehru. “Late that night [November 20, 1962] Nehru made an urgent, open appeal for the intervention of the United States with bomber and fighter squadrons to go into action against the Chinese,” stated Neville Maxwell, a British journalist and author. “This appeal was detailed, even specifying the number of squadrons required—fifteen.”38 Nehru’s strategy was to bomb the supply lines of the Chinese as well as their gasoline dumps, with the warplanes of the US Seventh Fleet stationed in the Bay of Bengal to provide air cover for the major cities of India. The Indian embassy in Washington received this message at nine pm local time on November 19, after President Kennedy had retired for the
day. “So you couldn’t last out even two weeks,” mocked Kennedy’s special assistant. “Churchill fought the war without American weapons for two years.”39

  Suddenly the crisis passed. At midnight on November 20, having established its superiority in weaponry, strategy, communications, logistics, and planning, China declared a unilateral cease-fire, and added that after their withdrawal the Chinese frontier guards would be “far behind their positions prior to September 8, 1962.” Beijing’s decision was in line with what Mao had told the Politburo on October 18: “However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”40 India accepted the cease-fire without saying so explicitly. On November 22 the Chinese pulled back to the north of the McMahon Line and in Ladakh to the positions they held before the war.

  Overall, this was a limited war between Asia’s mega-nations. Neither side deployed its air force. China lost only 722 troops. And India’s loss of 3,100 soldiers included 1,700 who went missing—that is, froze to death in snow drifts or collapsed in wet forests.

  India’s defeat, illustrated by the humiliating disproportion in its battle­field fatalities, was implicitly dramatized in the Bollywood movie Haqeeqat (Hindi: Reality). During the Sino-Indian war in Ladakh, an Indian platoon, considered dead, is rescued by the locals. When it is ordered to retreat from its post, surrounded by the Chinese, an Indian captain and his Ladakhi girlfriend hold the enemy at bay to facilitate the platoon’s safe withdrawal. In the process, they die. But the retreating troops find themselves heavily outnumbered and get killed to the last man. The movie was meant to highlight the patriotic fervor that filled Indian soldiers. It was released in 1964 after the death of Nehru in May.41

  Nehru’s Obstinacy on Kashmir