10Arthur Lall, The Emergence of Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 119.
11Wells Hangen, After Nehru, Who? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), chapter 9. Kaul’s alleged closeness to Nehru is also extensively advertised in his memoirs, where he claims that he was a sort of confidant and sounding-board for the prime minister. See Lt. Gen. B. M. Kaul, The Untold Story (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1967), pp. ix–x, 81–2, 86fn, 87, 97, 114, 118 etc.
12Maj. Gen. D. K. Palit, War in High Himalaya (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1991), p. 76.
13See Thimayya to Nehru, letters of 31 August and 3 September 1959, Thimayya Papers, NMML.
14Press Clippings File 16, Thimayya Papers, NMML. This file has a cover note, almost certainly in the general’s own hand, summarizing its contents thus: ‘If a poll was to be taken outside Parliament, opinion both inside and outside would have found favour with Thimayya’.
15Letters of Ashutosh Lahiri and Sheodatt, Subject File 15, Thimayya Papers, NMML.
16H. V. Kamath, ‘The Sino-Indian Border Dispute’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 18 October 1959.
17The Current, 14 and 28 October 1959.
18Shiva Rao to Nehru, 3 December 1959, B. Shiva Rao Papers, NMML.
19Chou to Nehru, 8 September 1959, and Nehru to Chou, 26 September 1959, in WP II, pp. 27–46.
20The ‘forward policy’ is described in the memoirs of one of its chief architects, B. N. Mullik. See his My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1971), esp. chapters 14 and 19. Mullick was the chief of the Intelligence Bureau, and privy to most crucial decisions taken with regard to the border dispute.
21Latifi to Nehru, 27 November 1959, copy in Subject File 423, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML (emphasis in original).
22Quoted in Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 152.
23The Hindu, quoted in Dorothy Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers: A Political Review of British, Chinese, Indian and Russian Rivalries (London: Barrie and Rockcliff, 1969), p. 245.
24Steven A. Hoffman, India and the China Crisis (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 67, 73, 82–3 etc. The origins and trajectory of the India–China dispute are, as one can imagine, the subject of a huge and very motivated literature. On the one side are the various self-serving memoirs by Indian generals and officials, which seek to blame China for ‘betraying’ India’s trust. These are collectively answered by Neville Maxwell’s India’s China War, a well-documented book but one that sees everything, big and small, from the Chinese point of view. Hoffman’s is an admirably detached and comprehensive account of the dispute, perhaps the best there is.
25Chou to Nehru, letters of 7 November and 17 December 1959; Nehru to Chou, letters of 16 November and 21 December 1959, in WP III, pp. 45–59.
26Owen Lattimore, ‘India–Tibet–China: Starting Principle for Frontier Demarcation’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1960. Steven Hoffman explains that Chou’s ‘barter’ offer could not be acceptable to India because ‘it was being asked to accept the clandestine and forceful seizure of parts of its territory [in the west], in return for a worthless assurance that another part of the frontier [in the east] would not be menaced’ (India and the China Crisis, pp. 86–7).
27‘Pragmatist’, ‘The Political Economy of Defence’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1960.
28Presidential address of Pitambar Das, reproduced in Girja Kumar and V. K. Arora, eds, Documents on Indian Affairs, 1960 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965), pp. 22f.
29See Gyanvati Darbar, Portrait of a President: Letters of Dr Rajendra Prasad, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976), pp. 85–6.
30Unless otherwise stated, this and the following paragraphs are based on reports and comments in the Indian Express, various issues of 10 March to 27 April 1960.
31Kumar and Arora, Documents, pp. 493–4. The signatories to this letter included J. B. Kripalani, M. R. Masani, A. B. Vajpayee, and N. G. Goray.
32The Current, 27 April 1960.
33‘Record of Talks between Prime Minister of India and Prime Minister of China, 20th to 25th April 1960’, in Subject File 24, P. N. Haksar Papers, First and Second Instalments, NMML. The transcripts of the talks run to over a hundred foolscap pages.
34Copies of the transcripts of Chou En-lai’s talks with Desai, Pant, Radhakrishnan and other leaders are in Subject File 26, P. N. Haksar Papers, First and Second Instalments, NMML. Desai was right in spirit if not in substance, for it was Karl Marx who sought asylum in the UK, whereas Lenin lived in exile in that other bourgeois nation, Switzerland.
35This paragraph is based on Margaret W. Fisher, Leo E. Rose and Robert A. Huttenback, Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), esp. chapter 11.
36The transcripts of the talks are reproduced in Appendix XI of Parshotam Mehra, Negotiating with the Chinese, 1846–1987 (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 1989).
37Interview in Look magazine, 18 October 1960, reproduced in Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 762–3.
38Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 248–60; the Current, 16 August and 23 August 1961; correspondence between Nehru, Rajaji and Tara Singh in Subject File 82, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.
39Nehru to Jayaprakash Narayan, 10 October 1961, Brahmanand Papers, NMML.
40See E. N. Mangat Rai, Commitment My Style (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973), chapter 10. Mangat Rai was Kairon’s chief secretary for five of his eight years in power.
41The Current, 9 December 1959, 6 January 1960 and 14 September 1963.
42A. G. Noorani, Ministers’ Misconduct (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973), p. 42.
43Nirmal Nibedon, Nagaland: The Night of the Guerillas (New Delhi: Lancer, 1983), pp. 88–90.
44A. Z. Phizo, The Fate of the Naga People: An Appeal to the World (London: privately published, July 1960).
45See, for example, the clippings in the W. G. Archer Papers, Mss Eur F236, OIOC.
46Anon., The Naga Problem (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 1960). As many as 2,000 copies of this pamphlet were printed.
47This memorandum is reproduced in Kumar and Arora, Documents, pp. 91–5.
48Ibid., pp. 101–5.
49Clipping from The Times, 21 September 1962, in Mss Eur F158/239, OIOC.
50Daniel Thorner, ‘Ploughing the Plan Under: Ford Team Report on Food “Crisis”’, Economic Weekly, special issue, July 1959.
51See Report of Non-Official Enquiry Commission on Cachar (Calcutta: N. Chatterjee, 1961); L. P. Singh, Portrait of Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Quintessential Gandhian (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996), chapter 3.
52The Current, 8 March 1961.
53Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
54See Grover Smith, ed., Letters of Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 926–7.
55Arthur Cook, ‘Nehru’, Daily Mail, 20 February 1962.
56For details, see WPs IV, V and VI, passim.
57Lok Sabha Debates, 11 April 1961.
58Ibid., 17 August and 28 November 1961, 14 August 1962.
59Ibid., 5 December 1961.
60P. D. Gaitonde, The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1987), chapter 18; Illustrated Weekly of India, special issue, 18 February 1962; D. R. Mankekar, The Goa Action (Bombay: The Popular Book Depot, 1962).
61See clippings and papers in File 8, Box XVI.18, Richard B. Russell Papers, University of Georgia, Athens; File 29, Penderel Moon Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur F230/29).
62New York Times, 18 and 19 December 1961. There is also a suggestion that sections within the Indian army welcomed the Goan adventure as a victory easily won. It was, recalled one officer, ‘light relief from the gloom and foreboding of the gen
eral strategic scene’ along the borders with China. See Maj. Gen. D. K. Palit, Musings and Memories, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Lancer, 2004), pp. 411–12.
63My account of the election is based on Aloo J. Dastur, Menon versus Kripalani: North Bombay Election, 1962 (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1967), supplemented by Norman D. Palmer, ‘The 1962 Election in North Bombay’, Pacific Affairs, vol. 30, no. 1, spring 1963. Cf. also A. D. Gorwala, Krishna Menon: Danger to India (Bombay: privately published, January 1962). The Hindi ditty was supplied by Nitya Ramakrishnan.
64‘Seminarist’, ‘Issues in the Election’, Seminar, July 1962.
65K. P. Subramania Menon, ‘The Ramifications’, and General K. S. Thimayya, ‘Adequate “Insurance”’, both in Seminar, July 1962. That, even in retirement, Thimayya was seriously worried about the Chinese threat is also indicated by a book that he once owned and which is now in my possession; written by a retired major, it provides a historical conspectus of the NEFA region that had become so central to the border conflict. My copy of the book – Major Sitaram Johri, Where India, China and Burma Meet (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1962) – has ‘K. S. Thimayya, 9 Feb. 62’ written on its flyleaf; I found it in a second-hand store in Bangalore, once the general’s home town, and now mine.
66As the spark that fuelled the Chinese invasion, the Thag La conflict has been widely written about. My account is based on, among other sources, Brigadier J. P. Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1970), chapters 7, 9–12; Maxwell, India’s China War, pp. 357 ff.; Hoffman, India and the China Crisis, pp. 130ff.
67Hoffman, India and the China Crisis, p. 149.
68Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder, pp. 262–3.
69New York Times, 21 October 1962.
70New York Times, 24 October 1962.
71Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder, pp. 80–1.
72Chou to Nehru, 24 October and 4 November 1962, Nehru to Chou, 27 October and 14 November 1962, printed with enclosures in WP VIII, pp. 1–17.
73John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 385.
74New York Times, 28 and 30 October 1962.
75Lok Sabha Debates, 8–14 November 1962. In his closing speech Nehru deplored the series of attacks on Chinese shopkeepers in New Delhi, which ‘brutalizes us and gives us a bad name’. Like his mentor, Gandhi, he knew how easily nationalism could shade into jingoism. To take revenge on innocent shopkeepers was deeply wrong-headed, for ‘we should always distinguish between governmental action and the people as a whole’.
76The Walong battle is vividly described in G. S. Bhargava, The Battle for NEFA (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), chapter 5.
77Hoffman, India and the China Crisis, pp. 180–1.
78Maxwell, India’s China War, pp. 398ff. In his memoirs, Kaul argues that Se La was a well-positioned and well-fortified garrison that could have held out for a week or more; he blames its fall and the flight of the troops on the failure of nerve of the man in charge, Major General A. S. Pathania. See Kaul, The Untold Story, pp. 413ff.
79As recalled in B. G. Verghese, ‘Unfinished Business in the North-East’, Mainstream, 15 June 2002.
80A. M. Rosenthal, ‘War Fever in India’, New York Times, 3 November 1962.
81D. R. Mankekar, The Guilty Men of 1962 (Bombay: Tulsi Shah Enterprises, 1968), pp. 88–90.
82Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers, p. 293.
83Maxwell, India’s China War, p. 465.
84Palit, War in High Himalaya, pp. 225, 231.
85As quoted in Snow, Other Side of the River, pp. 761–2 (emphases added).
86Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals: March 1962–May 1963 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1970), p. 50.
16. PEACE IN OUR TIME
1John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), pp. 405–12.
2Robert Sherrod, ‘Nehru: The Great Awakening’, Saturday Evening Post, 19 January 1963.
3Galbraith to Kennedy, 29 January 1963, copy in Dean Rusk Papers, University of Georgia, Athens. Perhaps it was the economist in Galbraith that provoked him to identify China rather than Russia as the greater long-term threat to American interests.
4Cf. Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 400.
5See clippings in Files 9 and 10, Box XVI.18, Richard B. Russell Papers, University of Georgia, Athens. The rest of this section is likewise based on material contained in these files.
6There was also a letter, too crazy to quote in the text perhaps, which urged a cheaper method of disposing of the Chinese threat than arming the Indians. S. B. Crowe of Sanford, Florida, recommended that the Americans drop boxes of atomic waste, each with an explosive charge, on the Chinese side of the Himalaya. The Reds would be told of this, so that they would ‘stay out of Tibet and India’. However, ‘if Mao wishes to conduct an experiment in genetics and send 150 million through this radiation hazard, it would be an interesting experiment’. Estimating that this would save the American taxpayer ‘about a billion dollars’, Mr Crowe signed off as follows: ‘Yours for more economy in Government. The barrel isn’t bottomless, in spite of Mr Keynes and his theories.’
7‘Transcript of Prime Minister’s Press Conference held on June 15, 1963, in New Delhi’, issued by Press Information Bureau, Government of India, copy in Subject File 189, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML. Cf. also The Statesman, 16 June 1963.
8See Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: The Dynamics of One-Party Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 79ff.
9Ibid., pp. 78–80.
10H. V. Kamath, Last Days of Jawaharlal Nehru (Calcutta: Jayashree Prakashan, 1977), pp. 1–2.
11Wells Hangen, After Nehru, Who? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963).
12These quotes are from an article by Tom Stacey, originally published in the Sunday Times of London and reprinted under a different title in the Current, 1 January 1964.
13Indira Gandhi to Mridula Sarabhai, 4 September 1963, Reel 57, Mridula Sarabhai Papers, on microfilm, NMML.
14Cf. Kanji Dwarkadas to Lord Scarborough, 16 January 1964, Mss Eur F253/53 (Lord Lumley Papers), OIOC.
15For the different ways in which the creation of the state was received, see P. N. Luthra, Nagaland: From a District to a State (Shillong: Directorate of Information and Public Relations, 1974), pp. 1–16; A. Lanunungsang Ao, From Phizo to Muivah: The Naga National Question in North-east India (New Delhi: Mittal Publications), pp. 81–2.
16The Current, 4 January 1964.
17Cf. report in the Current, 20 April 1963.
18C. P. Srivastava, Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Life of Truth in Politics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 71–4; Rajeshwar Prasad, Days with Lal Bahadur Shastri: Glimpses from the Last Seven Years (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1991), pp. 27–9.
19Mountbatten’s conversations with Nehru are reported in the correspondence contained in Subject File 52, T. T. Krishnamachari Papers, NMML.
20Aparna Basu, Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 9, ‘Kashmir’; Hindustan Times (hereafter HT), 9 April 1964.
21Dawn, 18 November 1960.
22Nehru to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 3 October 1953, Vijayalakshmi Pandit Papers, NMML.
23Nehru to Tikaram Paliwal, 17 July 1955, in SWJN2, vol. 29, pp. 452–3.
24These paragraphs on Abdullah’s release and his triumphant return to the Valley are based principally on the HT, issues of 6–24 April 1964.
25See letters and papers in Subject File 28 (‘Indo-Pakistan Conciliation Group’), Brahmanand Papers, NMML.
26Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘Our Great Opportunity in Kashmir’, HT, 20 April 1964.
27C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Am I Wrong?’, Swarajya, 25 April 1964.
28See report in HT, 23 April 1964. In the rest of this section, quotes not given specific attributions come from this newspaper.
29Telegram dated 29 April 1964, in
Subject File 92, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.
30Letter of 29 April 1964, ibid. As some other letters in this file show, most Swatantra Party members opposed Masani and Rajaji in their support of the Nehru–Abdullah talks. K. M. Munshi said that the Sheikh should be put back in jail. Dahyabhai Patel (son of Vallabhbhai Patel) said that the only solution to the Kashmir problem was to settle the Valley with Hindu refugees from East Pakistan.
31Abdullah to Minoo Masani, 16 April 1964, ibid.
32Shastri to Rajaji, 4 May 1964, ibid.
33‘Kashmir – Talk with Sheikh Abdullah on 8th May, 1964, at PM’s House’, Subject File 4, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.
34Shiva Rao to Rajaji, 10 May 1964; Rajaji to Shiva Rao, 12 May 1964; both in Subject File 92, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.
35HT, 23 May 1964.
36Y. D. Gundevia to V. K. T. Chari (Attorney-General, Madras), 13 May 1964, Subject File 4, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.
The confederal solution to the Kashmir problem was apparently first proposed by the journalist Arthur Moore as early as January 1948. Moore believed that ‘India, Pakistan and Kashmir should become a federated commonwealth state, with common foreign affairs, common defence, and such finance as concerned these subjects, but otherwise all three to be self-governing States’. He spoke about it to Mahatma Gandhi before he died, and later also appears to have broached the topic with the prime minister. Moore also wrote about the idea in a volume of tributes to Nehru on his 70th birthday, where he called this the ‘greatest test for Nehru’s statesmanship . . . [for] there will never be satisfactory relations between India and Pakistan till the Kashmir issue is settled’. See Arthur Moore, ‘My Friend’s Son’, in Rafiq Zakaria, ed., A Study of Nehru (1959; 2nd edn Bombay: The Times of India Press, 1960), esp. pp. 175–6. It seems very likely, considering where it appeared, that Nehru had read Moore’s article.
37Letter of 20 May 1964, in Subject File 92, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML. Within Parliament, Masani was one of the fiercest critics of the prime minister. But, like his mentor Rajaji, he saw that in progress on Kashmir lay the future of the subcontinent. On this subject at least he was willing to bat for Nehru.
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