Former Foreign Secretary and former Ambassador to China, Nirupama Rao, when asked whether the primary responsibility and blame for the debacle India suffered at Chinese hands in 1962 lay with Jawaharlal Nehru, has answered “a qualified yes”.
In a 45-minute interview to discuss her recently published book on India-China relations from 1949 to 1962, titled The Fractured Himalaya, Rao said that Nehru was “no strategist” and compared him to Isaiah Berlin’s Fox i.e. someone “who knows many things but finds it difficult to deduce the core meaning of any of them fully”.
Although in her introduction Rao writes that the answer to the question “why did India and China stumble into war in 1962?” cannot be “the so-called follies of Jawaharlal Nehru” and adds that “cannot be the simple or default answer”, the overwhelming impression her book leaves is that the major share of the blame lies with the wrong assumptions behind Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies, his misreading of signals from China and his inexplicable belief that the two countries would never go to war.
In the interview this impression is put repeatedly and, at times, forcefully to Rao. She is first asked how she responds to the fact that the overwhelming impression her book creates is so very different to the intention stated in its introduction. Thereafter, when the discussion moves to details, many of the points made in her book, which corroborate and confirm the belief the primary responsibility was Nehru’s, are put to her one by one.
This is not an easy discussion to summarise. It’s often an argument where the impression her book creates is pitted against the intention the author has stated in its introduction.
However, the main issues raised are as follows.
First, with regard to the western border and Aksai Chin, the interview discusses the fact that India issued maps showing the boundary as defined and settled on the basis that, Nehru believed, this was the position since “before colonial times”. The Chinese, however, never accepted this but their silence was taken as acquiescence. China, as Nirpuama Rao points out, was simply waiting for the right time to raise the issue. So Nehru, in this instance, it seems, ended up accepting his own assumptions as facts. Rao agrees that this was an error of judgement.
Also read: ‘The Fractured Himalaya’ Rightly Returns Tibet to the Centre Stage of India-China Conflict
The interview also discusses the fact that Nehru ignored reports by Reuters in 1953 and, again, by the Indian Trade Agent in Gartok, Laxman Singh Jangpangi, in 1955, that China was building “at top speed a motor-road” in Aksai Chin in territory India believed was its own.
Third, as Rao puts it, “despite the decision … to show the external boundaries of India as firmly defined and delineated” Nehru did not “follow up with actual occupation of the areas”.
Fourth, in 1961, Nehru started to implement his forward policy and occupy territory in Aksai Chin that was neither under Chinese nor Indian control but did not realize that this was bound to provoke a Chinese response. Worse, the posts that were set up “were too small to withstand any attack”. So Nehru deliberately pushed a policy that was likely to provoke the Chinese and yet left the Indian posts without adequate defence.
Jawaharlal Nehru Interacting with Army officers at NEFA in 1962. Photo: Photo Division, GOI
Turning to the eastern boundary, the McMahon Line, the interview discusses the fact Nehru insisted on taking this as defined and settled even though he knew the Chinese did not accept it as a legal boundary and had repudiated the Simla Agreement where it was agreed to.
The interview also discusses the fact Zhou had indicated to India that China was prepared to accept India’s claim south of the McMahon Line but wanted a process of negotiation to agree to this so that the new line that would emerge (basically the same as the McMahon Line) would be a result of a joint agreement and not a British imposition. This is what China did in the case of the McMahon Line in Burma.
The interview further discusses two opportunities to resolve the border issue which Nehru seems to have failed to use. The first is the Tibet Agreement of 1954. The second is the Chinese offer, perhaps not made as clearly as it could have been, of a compromise solution where China would accept India’s position in the east in return for India accepting China’s in the west.
Finally, the interview discusses two lapses of judgement by Nehru. First, his failure to create a domestic consensus on a territorial settlement with China which, as Rao points out, meant that in the late 1950s and early 1960s he became a prisoner of public and, even, parliamentary opinion which were strongly against ceding any territory to China.
The second lapse of judgement is Nehru’s conviction China would never go to war and the associated decision to reduce the defence budget between 1957 and 1960 just when tensions were increasing.
Finally, the interview discusses the fact that from January 1962 onwards there were warnings from China that it might go to war, delivered through diplomats in third countries, which, again, were either misread or ignored.
Watch the full interview here.
