Vaishakh Shuklapaksha 11, Kaliyug Varsha 5115
By Sandhya Jain
As the Prime Minister tries to reassure the nation that he is taking up the sensitive border issue with the visiting Chinese premier Li Keqiang, it would be worth examining why Indian foreign policy often fails to robustly defend national interests against powerful nations.
One reason is that we deploy ‘experts’ who double up as apologists of the nation opposing us. For instance, in the run-up to the India-US Nuclear Agreement of 2008, which was rammed through despite apparent infirmities in the draft, the then Indian envoy to the US, Ronen Sen, publicly supported the deal. Sen memorably dubbed Members of Parliament opposed to the deal as ‘headless chickens’. When hauled before the privileges committee, he avoided censure by saying the remark was aimed at journalists!
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Sen was no isolated case; the MEA’s China desk has often been manned by pro-China ‘experts’. In last month’s 19-kilometre intrusion by the People’s Liberation Army into Ladakh, India looked weak only because of the ‘China experts’ in the foreign office and national security establishment.
This tradition goes back to the days of Jawaharlal Nehru. In the summer of 1962, American economist Alan Carlin met BK Desai (author, India, Tibet and China) and discussed the Chinese expansion (the conflict broke out on October 20, 1962). Carlin recorded the meeting and some pertinent observations in a letter dated July 17, 1962.
Desai, according to this missive, said that MEA’s China section was dominated by a pro-Chinese group led by RK Nehru. Indian policy vis-à-vis China rested on a fond belief that China did not want war as Communism did not believe in expansionism. The flip side of this was a “pacifist fear” that any war could become a major conflict, and “the hope that the Russians would come to the rescue if worse came to worse”. Moreover, Krishna Menon could not see beyond Pakistan. Desai believed that KM Panikkar, then ambassador to China, influenced Nehru’s decision to recognise Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.
Chinese aggression against India began within three months of the signing of the 1954 India-Chinese Treaty. The Army wanted to resist, but was overruled by Menon who insisted Pakistan was the real enemy. Instead, supplies were deliberately withheld from Indian troops in affected areas and they were ordered not to retaliate. Nor was training or equipment provided for mountain warfare. This provoked some rebellions in the Army and in 1960 Menon personally visited Ladakh to quell a revolt.
The American scholar noted that an effective Indian defense against China called for three military capabilities: Sufficient lightly equipped and highly mobile mountain troops to check Chinese expansion in the Himalayas by taking advantage of the terrain and the natural advantages this has for the defense if properly exploited. Present orders apparently do not permit active resistance, but even if they did, India may not be able to furnish supplies for a sufficient number of troops because of the limited food resources of the Himalayas, the inadequate roads, and the limitations of her military air transport service. The troops now stationed in Ladakh, for example, appear to be supplied largely from the air. The vulnerability of such air-dependent troops to the potential Chinese air-superiority would seem to be considerable. Interestingly enough, the Chinese are reported to be building a military airfield in Western Tibet and to be laying an oil pipeline to it from Sinkiang which runs partially through formerly Indian held parts of Ladakh!
This was in July 1962. That India’s defence preparedness on this vulnerable frontier remains virtually unchanged five decades later is a crying shame.
Carlin continued, Sufficient heavily armoured, motorised troops on the Indian plains to check any Chinese units which manage to break through the Himalayas. The Indian effort along these lines is of course limited by her shortage of foreign exchange since most of the equipment needed must be imported. The needs might not be too great, however, if is adequate because of the extreme difficulty the Chinese would have in bringing in and supplying such equipment themselves, despite their apparent assiduous attention to the construction of roads and airfields.
At a public meeting in Delhi recently, some local Ladakh leaders said Chinese soldiers rush to the Indian side of the border in heavy jeeps every time a villager moves in the vicinity and interrogate him. They showed photographs, and pointed out that Ladakh still has no roads.
Carlin concluded that India needs, Enough trained guerrilla units to harass China’s vulnerable lines of communication through Sinkiang and Tibet, and to tie down large numbers of Chinese troops in these areas and in Chinese occupied portions of India. Tibetan refugees and others who have suffered at the hands of the Chinese should be quite willing. The principal problem seems to be lack of interest on the part of the present Indian Government. Anti-guerrilla forces may also be needed in Indian-held border areas in the future.
The frustration of the Indian Army, which would surely think and feel the same way, is utterly understandable.
For good measure, Carlin quotes Dr Satyanarayan Sinha (The Chinese Aggression) :
“In the spring of 1960 Indian and Nepalese nationals returning home from Chinese-occupied areas reported heavy concentrations [sic] of troops right across some of the most strategic parts of the Indian border… Roughly assessed, there were more than a hundred thousand Chinese troops, suitably armed for Alpine warfare, in southern Tibet alone, having Yatung (in the Chumbi Valley east of Sikkim) as their most important divisional headquarters. … At this stage, in March 1960, a large number of revolts against the Chinese occupying forces flared up in several parts of Sinkiang. The long vulnerable line of communications of the Chinese forces stretching from northwest China to the northern borders of India snapped in a number of places. These breaches created by the Sinkiangese guerrilla nationalist forces, instigated and supported by Russian men and weapons, upset the whole plan of the Chinese attack on India”
Sinha quotes a Russian Kazakh who said Russia scuttled a Chinese offensive on Indian borders, planned for 1960, when it realised China was building up its strength on the Soviet-Sinkiang border, which would be detrimental to Soviet interests. This was the real reason for the souring of relations between Moscow and Beijing. The Kazakh warned, “India too will have to remain awake to such threats to her borders from the Chinese side. It was just by coincidence that the Soviet Union in its own interests realised the urgency and took measures to stop the Chinese advance, planned to cut deep into the Indian borders…”
Sinha opined that India was most vulnerable to a Chinese advance from the Chumbi Valley over Nathu La Pass into Sikkim. India (read Nehru) has partially handed over control over this and several other strategic passes to the Chinese.
Though China is vulnerable to attack on her Sinkiang bases, especially at Kashgar, this is best approached through Pakistan-held Kashmir. The Ladakh border was virtually unguarded until 1960 because India concentrated on trouble spots further south, with the result that Beijing coolly built a road and in 1959 took considerable territory without interference.
Source : Niti Central
