Sunday, July 19, 2009

Never Again the Same -- Printout -- TIME - Friday, Nov. 30, 1962

  • Never Again the Same -- Printout -- TIME

  • Friday, Nov. 30, 1962

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    • After a series of smashing victories in the border war with India.
    • Radio Peking announced that, "on its own initiative." Red China was ordering a cease-fire on all fronts. Further, by Dec. 1, Chinese troops would retire to positions 12½ miles behind the lines they occupied on Nov. 7. 1959.
    • On closer examination, the Chinese cease-fire proved to be a lot less mysterious. It did offer India's battered armies a badly needed respite. But it left the Chinese armies in position to resume their offensive if Nehru refuses the Peking terms. And it puts on India the onus of continuing the war. Said the Hindustan Times: "The latest Chinese proposals are not a peace offer but an ultimatum."
    • Barren Rock. In New Delhi illusions are dying fast. Gone is the belief that Chinese expansionism need not be taken seriously, that, in Nehru's words, China could not really want to wage a major war for "barren rock."
    • Nehru's policy of nonalignment, which was intended to free India from any concern with the cold war between the West and Communism, was ending in disaster.
    • The 73-year-old Nehru gave the impression of being swept along by this tumult, not of leading it.
    • While the Speaker asked repeatedly for order, Nehru sat chin in hand, obviously scornful of this display of Indian excitability, his abstracted gaze fixed on nothing.
    • Nehru was coming close to admitting that he had at last discovered who were India's friends. The neutral nations, which so often looked to India for leadership in the past, were mostly embarrassingly silent or unsympathetic
    • Nehru had obviously hoped for more, and was shocked when, instead of helping India, Moscow denounced India's border claims and urged Nehru to accept the Red Chinese terms.
    • India's catastrophic unreadiness for war stems directly from the policy of nonalignment which was devised by Nehru and implemented by his close confidant Krishna Menon. Says one Indian editor: "Nonalignment is no ideology. It is an idiosyncrasy."
    • Indians like to say that it resembles the isolationism formerly practiced by the U.S.. but it has moral overtones which, Nehru claims, grow out of "Indian culture and our philosophic outlook.'' Actually, it owes as much to Nehru's rather oldfashioned, stereotyped, left-wing attitudes acquired during the '20s and '30s ("He still remembers all those New Statesmen leaders." says one bitter critic) as it does to Gandhian notions of nonviolence. Nehru has never been able to rid himself of the disastrous cliche that holds Communism to be somehow progressive and less of a threat to emergent nations than "imperialism."
    • At the 1955 Bandung conference. Nehru and China's Premier Chou En-lai embraced Panch Shila, a five-point formula for peaceful coexistence. The same Indian crowds that now shout. "Wipe out Chink stink!" then roared "Hindi Chini bhai bhai" (Indians and Chinese are brothers). India refused to sign the peace treaty with Japan because Red China was not a party to it. At home, Menon harped on the theme that Pakistan was India's only enemy. Three years ago, when Pakistan proposed a joint defense pact with India, Nehru ingenuously asked, "Joint defense against whom?" Western warnings about China's ultimate intentions were brushed aside as obvious attempts to stir up trouble between peace-loving friends.
    • Even the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1951 had rung no alarm bells in New Delhi—and therein lie the real beginnings of the present war.
    • Initialed Map. Under the British raj, London played what Lord Curzon called "the great game." Its object was to protect India's northern borders from Russia by fostering semi-independent buffer states like Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. In those palmy colonial days, Tibet was militarily insignificant, and China, which claims overlordship of Tibet, was usually too weak to exercise it.
    • In 1956 and 1957 the Chinese built a paved road over the caravan trail, and so lightly did Indian border police patrol the area that New Delhi did not learn about the road until two years after it was built.
    • Firing off a belated protest to Peking, India rushed troops into the endangered area, where they at once collided with Chinese outposts.
    • For the past five years, the Indian army has also been plagued by Defense Minister Krishna Menon, who was both economy-minded and socialistically determined to supply the troops from state-run arsenals, most of which exist only as blueprints. Sharing Nehru's distrust of what he calls the "arms racket," Menon was reluctant to buy weapons abroad, and refused to let private Indian firms bid on defense contracts.
    • Skyward Zigzag. Before Kaul had a chance to try and "clear out" the Chinese in NEFA, the Chinese struck first on Oct. 20. Some 20,000 burp-gun-toting infantry stormed over Thag La ridge and swept away a 5,000-man Indian brigade strung out along the Kechilang River. The surprise was complete, and dazed survivors of the Chinese attack struggled over the pathless mountains, where hundreds died of exposure. In Ladakh the Chinese scored an even bigger victory, occupying the entire 14,000 square miles that Peking claims is Chinese territory.

    • Panic spread from the mountains into the plains. Officials in Tezpur burned their files, and bank managers even set fire to stacks of banknotes. Five hundred prisoners were set free from Tezpur jail. Refugees jammed aboard ferry boats to get across the Brahmaputra River. Even policemen joined the flight.

      Indian army headquarters was hastily moved from Tezpur to Gauhati, 100 miles to the southwest. Officers and men who had escaped from the fighting referred dazedly to the Chinese as swarming everywhere "like red ants." An Indian colonel admitted, "We just haven't been taught this kind of warfare."

    • Needed Intellect. Though India—like the U.S. after Pearl Harbor—could not yet afford scapegoats and recrimination, Defense Minister Krishna Menon was almost universally blamed for the inadequacy of Indian arms, the lack of equipment and even winter clothing.
    • The Prime Minister had tried to pacify critics by taking over the Defense Ministry and downgrading Menon to Minister of Defense Production, but Nehru's own supporters demanded Menon's complete dismissal.
    • Nehru was beaten and Menon thrown out of the Cabinet.
    • The Defense Department at once, but belatedly, got a new look and a firmer tone. Impatient of turgid oratory and military fumbling, all India turned with relief to the new Defense Minister, Y. B. Chavan.
    • Though a socialist and a onetime disciple of Nehru, Chavan is cast in a different mold. Once a terrorist against the British and a proud member of the Kshra-triya warrior caste, Chavan says: "There can be no negotiations with an aggressor." Unlike Nehru, who still maintains that China's attack is not necessarily connected with Communism, Chavan declared: "The first casualties of the unashamed aggression of the Chinese on India are Marxism and Leninism."
    • There has been some grumbling that Nehru is no wartime leader. At 73, he often seems physically and mentally spent.
    • One theory held by some leading Indian military men is that the Reds want eventually to drive as far as Calcutta, thereby outflanking all of Southeast Asia.
    • The prevailing theory now is that the Chinese had less ambitious aims to begin with: to take the high ground and the key military passes away from the Indians, and to finally establish, once and for all, Chinese control of the Aksai Chin plateau in Ladakh, so as to safeguard the vital military roads to Sinkiang province. The Chinese may have been unprepared to exploit the almost total collapse of India's armed forces and may even have been surprised by their swift success.
    • Viewed from Peking, the difficulties of supply through the Himalayas in dead of winter might make the Communists hesitate to try to occupy Assam, especially since India's determined show of national unity, and the West's evident willingness to support India to the hilt.
    • India's angry millions, armed, trained and aided by the U.S., must be a prospect that not even Mao Tse-tung relishes facing. Instead, by in effect quitting while they are ahead, the Chinese can play the peacemakers in the short-sighted eyes of the neutral nations, while having dramatically demonstrated their military superiority over India and without having to abandon the long-range threat.
    • To Americans it may sound like a peculiar way to win a war. But though India moves at a different pace and speaks with a different voice few could doubt last week the Indian determination to see that the Himalayan defeats were avenged, however long it may take.