New Delhi: The difference an alliance makes to outcomes is clear from a readout of the 1962 conflict with China and the 1971 ending of the Pakistan army genocide in Bangladesh. From 1947 onwards, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru focused obsessively on foreign policy, moulding it to his liking. India becoming the leader of the non-aligned movement was regarded by Nehru as a historic achievement. Fifteen years later, Marshal Lin Biao got the nod from Chairman Mao and ordered PLA soldiers to pour across the Tibetan border with India. There was no “non-aligned” country willing to come out in support of India and against China during the conflict. Even countries that had been courted avidly by the Prime Minister, such as Yugoslavia, Egypt and Sri Lanka, avoided giving offence to the People’s Republic of China. As for the US and the USSR, the only countries that could have made a difference in a conflict involving China, the first intervened too late and too insubstantially to alter the outcome, while Moscow adopted the same stance as is being taken by that capital now, which was to avoid taking sides while giving signals of friendship separately to both sides. Not just Congress, but BJP governments have protected the mistakes made in the past from entering the public domain, and even secretive Beijing has released more documents about past policies than has New Delhi. There has, therefore, been little discussion of the frantic cries for help from the leader of the non-aligned movement to the US once Chinese troops began crossing across the border in multiple points and in strength. General P.N. Thapar and Lt Gen B.M. Kaul had fashioned their military strategies on the border on the basis that anything other than dribbles and feints by the PLA was out of the question. Prime Minister Nehru and Defence Minister Krishna Menon took that assumption as an article of faith, exactly as Marshal Stalin had in 1941 when reports began to pour in that the German army was about to launch a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. At the precise moment when Hitler’s troops crossed into the USSR in force at 3 am on 22 June 1941, they came across a train loaded with grain from the USSR that was making its way on a bridge across the Bug river. The train was chugging on its way to Germany even as troops from that country had launched an invasion of the USSR. Fast forward to October 1962 and the refusal of key policymakers to understand what was soon coming India’s way across the border with China, despite more than a decade of incessant intrusions, and since the 1959 relocation of the Dalai Lama to India, increasingly bad-tempered commentary on the world’s most populous democracy from the world’s most populous authoritarian state. As in those days, in 2020 as well voices abound who believe that the next summit meeting, the next telephone call, the next expertly-drafted statement, will result in the Sino-Indian border situation moving away from the shadow of impending conflict.Read more…
