Given the state of the media, we are bound to be subjected to a revival of the lies about Chinese aggression which the Coalition used to justify war against the peoples of Indo-China.
This review by a crusty Tory won’t hold-back the deluge but it will be useful as a sand-bag with which to whack the compradors in government, academe and the media., especially the Big Thinking ABC.
Humphrey McQueen
9 Oct 2022
WHEN NEHRU TOOK INDIA TO WAR
Sir Walter Crocker’s review The Age of India’s China War by Neville Maxwell. (Cape 1970; Pelican 1972).
This is a study in depth of India’s relations with China over their border leading up to the warfare of October-November 1962, one of the more dramatic turns in international relations in recent years.
The two most populous States of Asia, hitherto professing closest friendship, as far as India was concerned a friendship not untouched with anti-White racialism as well as anti-West ideology, fell out over tracts of territory, desolate, useless and largely unoccupied. Aksai Chin, for instance, the Western sector of the border, means ‘desert of white stones’ and is a plateau 17,000 feet high where nothing grows.
The author, an Australian, was correspondent in India for The Times during the eight years 1959-1967 and became noticeable for the informativeness of his despatches. He got so interested in the Sino-Indian border affair that on leaving India he spent two years entirely at it as a Senior Fellow of the London School of Oriental and African Studies.
This important and rather disturbing book is the result. While it is a relentless search after the truth, covering the historical and technical publications, the forbiddingly voluminous documentation (some of it not yet released but shown to the author by friendly officials) and personal interviews with many of the actors in the drama, it is fair-minded and cool. The text runs to 475 pages; there are 8 maps, 12 pages f notes, 4 pages of a Selected Bibliography, and 12 pages of index.
There are a few gaps in the evidence. Some of the leading actors, from Panikkar onwards, were not renowned for veracity. If Krishna Menon, for example, ever takes to recollecting his past in tranquillity, and also in truth fulness, he could fill in a gap or two. The big gap, naturally, is on the Chinese side, and this remains despite the section entitled ‘The View from Peking.’ But it is unlikely that anything will emerge to change the essentials of Mr Maxwell’s story.
So high was the reputation of Nehru’s India ‘for a pacific approach, so low the general opinion of China,’ writes Mr Maxwell that the Western world swallowed the Indian version, namely that a peace-loving India had suddenly become the victim of a brutal and unprovoked attack by China, remorselessly bellicose expansion and cunning as well as Communist. Hordes of her ferocious soldiery poured down over the Himalayas, and India was saved only American and British intervention. The truth, Mr Maxwell argues, is far otherwise. ‘No recent international incident has been so widely and totally misunderstood.’
The main feeling in the West at the time was gratification at getting India away from its policy of non-alignment and official brotherhood with China. Hindi Chini, Bhai Bhai and belief that India would now become a bastion against China. As far back as 1942 Nehru had expressed the wish that India would have with China ‘something almost something like union.’
The Russians also came out for the Indian version. But they had their own reasons. Their borders with China were as imprecise as India’s, and their conduct of their case was similar.
What was significant was that the Afro-Asian group, not its having been largely moulded by India or its being subjected to pressures from India, declined to accept the Indian version.
It is not possible in the space available to discuss the evidence marshalled by Mr Maxwell or his conclusions. I limit myself to the briefest outline and to a few comments. The book begins with the announcement as well as unilaterally, as India tried more than once. All along. Mr Maxwell contents, it was India which closed the door to a negotiated settlement and which was the aggressor. He uses strong words about India’s claims or stands: ‘disingenuous’ is not the strongest. In the hundred pages from Indian independence (in 1947) to 1958 he argues that Nehru’s India set a course which could only end in collision.
The mystery is, why even more than in the Kashmir affair, why Nehru took the line he did. By 1958-9 he was no longer free, being a prisoner of Indian nationalism. But until then, so closely guarded and been the secret, the Indian public, like foreign governments, had no inkling of the bickering going on between the two Hindi Chini brothers over the border.
Whatever the reason, Nehru was never frank or direct with Chou En-lai. He was devious and quibbling as well as inflexible. He would say one thing in public and another in private and was repeatedly clouding the issue of Kashmir. In thousands and thousands of words he proclaims his commitment to peace but in private he vowed himself to just that course which made peace unlikely. As in the Kashmir affair, he was always ready for talks but there could never be ‘negotiations.’ There was, he could maintain in the most disputatious way, no border dispute, just as he had been maintaining that there was no Kashmir dispute.
Chou En-lai, like Ayub, ended up by regarding Nehru as the most slippery of liars. The truth about Nehru’s character is of course less simple, and better, than that. But the fact that the several personal meetings between him and Chou En-lai in 1954-60 achieved no meaningful exchange. Both sides thus grew into more and more misunderstanding about the other.
The Forward Policy, decided upon by Nehru and a handful of close associates in 1958, the decision apparently kept secret even from the Cabinet, meant pushing Indian military posts into the disputed areas, which in turn meant a smarting provocation to the Chinese. By 1962 the Indians had set up 60 posts in Aksai Chin. Nehru, becoming more extremist, drew no less on from China’s settling its border with Burma though he used to exhort Burma to be pacific and compromising. It was explained to diplomats in Delhi that the Chinese had made the settlement in order to embarrass India. Mr Maxwell concludes on the Forward Policy that “at no time were its implications thought through’ and that it was legalistic, reckless and irrational. (p. 174)
The climax of the book is the 150 pages on the border fighting, the so-called Border War, which took place during a few days in mid-October and again in mid-November 1962.
Mr Maxwell says it was India which provoked the fighting (his choice of title for his book reflects this verdict) and that “militarily the Chinese victory was complete, the Indian defeat absolute.”
About 3000 Indians were killed or missing and about 4000 taken prisoners. As for the Chinese hordes, not a single Chinese was captured though the numbers, but not the equ8pment nor the training and still less the leadership, were not greatly dissimilar. The Indian soldiers generally fought well and some of the officers were good. The essential failure was the leadership of Kaul – a Nehru kinsman -, rocketed up through the favouritism of the Prime Minister and Krishna Menon from the non-combat services and chair-borne service to high command – and of the other courtiers around him, known in the Indian Army as the Kaul-boys.
If Brigadier Dalvi’s book on the campaign will be the military classic that Mr Maxwell claims, the story of Kaul will be a classic of the chocolate soldier and how to get to the top the sycophant’s way. Kaul, who was certain that the Chinese would not fight and that it would therefore be a military pushover leading to a Diplomatic settlement of the border and pending that to stand by the status quo.
Chou En-lai offered to come to Delhi. Well might Lord Caccia, former head of the British Foreign Office, say that there was never anything like this before. At no stage was there any exulting over the victory. In China itself it was played down. Such comment as there was in the Chinese press was long the lines of infantile Marxism-Leninism such as that Nehru had become the leader of the landlords and the bourgeoisie.
Chou En-lai comes out of the story well but the picture of Nehru is painful, especially his ignorance of essentials, his bad judgement of both situations and persons, the fog of wordiness, the splitting of straws, the twisting of meanings, and at time the misrepresentation. He seemed to turn his back on his past. In fairness to him it must be remembered that in these years he and his government had several great matters, not only the Sino-Indian border, to harass them, such as relations with Pakistan, the Goa affair, Panch Shil, and disarray and tensions within India itself.
The year 1962 was fateful above average from Sukarno’s sabre-rattling over Dutch New Guinea and Malaysia up to the Cuban Crisis and the risk of thermo-nuclear war. And Nehru himself, rapidly ageing, was tired and ailing. Yet judgement on him is bound to be affected by the facts which came out in this book. Similar exposures would come out of a similar study in depth of the Kashmir or Goa affairs. Great men are not always great, especially under the merciless pressures of running government.
The picture of Indian nationalism, which at times was hysterical as well as militaristic, in Parliament as in the press, is equally painful. Indian nationalism, which has similarities with Israeli nationalism, does not surprise those who know India, but the world, ignoring Gandhi and his non-violence group wee a tiny unrepresentative minority, can take no solace from it. Before long India will probably have the bomb.
Mr Maxwell would do a good service by publishing a year or two hence the Indian reviews and articles on his book. They are likely to confirm his points about nationalism. The Indian press has fallen to a sad state of nationalistic subjectivity. No less a paper than the Statesman writing on the debacle, could compare the Indian performance to Britain’s Dunkirk and to say that “it will surely be regarded buy future historians as a great page in military history.” (p. 437)
China has done little to remove misgivings and fears in recent years, especially during the Great Cultural Revolution, but here handling of the Indian border affair was marked throughout by caution, conciliatoriness and responsibility as well as by high military qualities. Mr Maxwell’s book teaches several unpleasant lessons which we would do well to ponder, not least India’s methods and style of diplomacy, but it also illustrates our need to find out the facts about China and to supplement our cliches with them.
The Age, January 1971.
(Sir) Walter Crocker was Australian High Commissioner to India in 1952-55 and again in 1958-62. He is the author of a biography of Nehru.