Mumbai: Be it the 1962 war on India, or the recent military stand-off along the Ladakh border, a bellicose China has always used global crisis as a cover-up for its internal strife. In the run-up to the 1962 aggression on India, China knew pretty well that the whole world was busy, concerned over the Cuban missile crisis. It used it as a cover-up knowing fully well that none of the world powers would pay attention to its aggression on India. Internally the Cuban missile crisis and India were used to gloss over the great famine of 1958-62 that had 20 to 40 million Chinese losing their lives due to starvation. It was also used as a diversionary tactics to gloss over the failures of Chairman Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.
Today also, the belligerent military stand-off with India along the borders of Ladakh, China is using the same copy book tactics. With the whole world furious over its controversial role in the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, it needed something to deflect attention from its own growing internal discontent over economic slump and mounting death toll.
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But as Major Gaurav Arya (retd) puts it, the intention of China is to keep India engaged in the North or looking up the North, while in reality it (China) struggles to keep its shipping lanes in the Strait of Malacca and South China seas, from being chocked by anti-China Quad forces of India, Japan and Australia, soon to be joined in by the USA as well.
China did not restrict its duplicity in its action and words, but also used it in interpreting treaties, territorial maps and brought over sympathisers. It has used its ambiguous style of diplomacy to mislead and misguide the adversaries. In India’s case China quietly pushed the 1956 line of claim on the border to 1960 line of claim all along maintaining its maps were from an old Kuomintang era and it itself regarded them as inaccurate. It also paid lip-service by giving token acceptance to the McMahon line. Before rejecting the McMahon line and British era maps as symbols of British Imperialism, tugging at the hearts of the Indian’s who hated the British.
Sadly and ironically enough all these Indian version of accounts or turn of events as they happened that led to China’s aggression on India in 1962 are far and few between. Most of the western world accounts, like the declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents titled “Polo XVI” of that era are utterly Chinese and paint a different picture. The CIA documents of the era from 1961-63 were declassified in 2007.
The only authentic document of what exactly happened both on the political front and on the military front is the “Official History of The Conflict with China, 1962”, a report of 1992 penned by Dr P B Sinha and Col. A A Athale and edited by S N Prasad, History Division, Ministry of Defence. But for some strange reasons, 57 years later Government of India is still not declassifying the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report that investigated the 1962 war citing that the report contains operational details of the Army back then in 1962.
In reality the Brooks-Bhagat report had some scathing observations to make on the then political and top military leadership of India back then in 1962. Otherwise every other detail is there in the Col Athale’s report of November 20, 1992.The report deals with the military action on both the Ladakh front and as well as the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA, now known as Arunachal Pradesh).
The main protagonists of this era, from the Indian side were – Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Union Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon, then Army chief Lt Gen B M Kaul, Lt Gen Pran Nath Thapar or P N Thapar, Lt Gen L P Sen. Whereas on the Chinese side there were Chairman of Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong (or Chairman Mao) and Chinese Premier Chou (Zhou) En-lai.
