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Scars of 1962
FOUR decades since the October 1962 war ruptured India's relations with China, and set Asia's two principal powers on a course of rivalry and deep mistrust, the tragic memory continues to torment the country. Much effort has gone into improving and stabilising the relationship since 1976 when normalisation began after a hiatus of 15 years. But "the scar of 1962 runs through India's heart" — as a Chinese diplomat and scholar on India recently said with genuine feeling — and has not fully healed. Historical memories have a life of their own and injured national psyche is not easy to repair. What is crucial is to draw appropriate lessons so that the state is prepared to deal with such and more complex challenges in future.

Though the Chinese archives are still firmly closed and India is yet to release the official history of the war and other important internal reports, the Soviet documents — now available — throw considerable light on the surprising turn of events that brought the friendly Panchasheel phase to an abrupt end and led to the 1959-62 India-China crisis.

It is important to underline that India had invested heavily in its relations with China in the 1950s. It was one of the first states to initiate normal and friendly ties with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and had persistently backed its entry into the United Nations at a time when it was shunned by the world body. It also refused to join the United States-led alliance against China and the Soviet Union and instead sought to construct balanced ties with both blocks. Jawaharlal Nehru had made relations with China the corner stone of his vision of Asian unity and of a cooperative global order. At great risk to its core security interests and considerable internal misgivings, India had formally accepted Chinese sovereignty claims over Tibet in 1954.

In turn, the Government expected China to adhere to its promises of ensuring Tibetan autonomy and respecting Indian territorial limits, including Kashmir 's accession, and India's special security ties with Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim that had become a vital security periphery after Chinese occupation of Tibet.

That did not happen because of two reasons that brought the two into an open conflict of interest. The first flowed from the territorial consolidation of the new States as they shared an extensive common frontier as a result of China's occupation of Tibet. The second emerged from China's hostile rejection after 1957 of both Soviet and Indian support for mitigating the Cold War and a détente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the increasing militancy unleashed by Mao in domestic and external affairs.

Mao had rejected old treaties and customary rights with neighbouring states established since the 19th Century as an affront to China's aroused nationalism. Logically, his critique of British and European imperial policies as it adversely affected Qing territoriality could not be sustained in light of China's own vast territorial claims based on the Qing imperial acquisitions covering Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan. Qing imperial expansion was as problematic for the conquered people as British and Tsarist colonial expansion. But Mao and the Chinese nationalist conception of territoriality was not concerned with such inconsistencies. His aim was to construct a strong and unified China. In a famous essay written in 1939 Mao had backed China's claim to all areas over which the Qing had exercised direct rule at some point or exercised suzerainty. After the Communist Party seized power in 1949 he quickly set the People's Liberation Army to "liberate" these territories and merge them with China.

Clearly China's incorporation as sovereign territory what till then was a common and neutral Tibetan security periphery for both the countries fundamentally changed the strategic context. New territorial adjustments and claims followed in its wake. Aksai Chin came to be seen as an essential "traffic artery linking Xinjiang and western Tibet" for the Chinese PLA and therefore strategically important for securing the two outlying provinces.

Since India had not committed its forces to defend this vast but remote area — that had been historically part of Ladakh and had provided the trading route to Xinjiang and Central Asia, the PLA was ordered to take over vacant areas on the reasoning that the border was undemarcated. To exert further pressure on India to accept China's advancing claims in Ladakh and smaller claims in the central and eastern sectors, China then crudely laid claim to the whole of North East Frontier Agency although Zhou Enlai had affirmed to Nehru that the Chinese would respect the eastern boundary even though it could not ideologically accept the McMahon Line.

The warmth of the Panchasheel phase was an integral element of the moderate course adopted by the international communist movement following the death of Stalin and the rise of the reformist and moderate Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Communist Party. Mao rejected that line in 1957 and turned against détente and peaceful coexistence with the "imperialists" (the United States), the revisionists (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and the reactionaries (India and other non-aligned states). This radical turn was to set the ideological context in which China's India policy came to be crafted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The revolt in Tibet, the escape of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan elite to India in 1959, the rising tensions with the U.S. and the Soviet Union as China condemned `détente' and the resultant insecurity, along with the deepening threat to his leadership from the moderates in the ruling Communist Party as a result of the calamity of the Great Leap Forward convinced Mao to unleash the use of force against his opponents. Mao's decision to carry out a punitive attack was disastrous for India-China relations and for peace and stability in Asia but highly useful to his domestic and global strategy. Regime consolidation through calculated use of force and measured sharpening of conflict to make strategic and tactical gains was a typical Maoist strategy that was used against his domestic opponents through the decade of the Cultural Revolution, as it was against India.

The 31-day war itself was a walkover for China. The Indian leadership did not expect Chinese use of force across the Himalayas and was unprepared to adequately deal with it. India had an army of 3,50,000 in the mid-1950s — much of it deployed to deal with Pakistan — as against a 2.5 million battle-hardened Chinese PLA force. India did not have well equipped and trained mountain divisions to fight a war in the high Himalayas, and it surprisingly did not use the air force. It was simply a war India did not want and was not politically, militarily and diplomatically prepared to fight.
The acceptance of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet without seeking a concurrent boundary and security agreement regarding the management of the common periphery was a diplomatic disaster. The political class with its background in law and bureaucracy was clearly inexperienced in statecraft and had failed to grasp the dynamic interplay between power and diplomacy. It had no experience in military affairs or geopolitics, and had not created the integrated decision-making institutions that would weave together national security, economic development, diplomacy and political institution building. As the tensions grew, a proactive global and bilateral diplomacy was needed but was missing. China, on the other hand, was led by a motivated, tightly integrated politico-military leadership structure dominated by Mao who had set the war aims and had prepared for nearly five years for the showdown.

The war taught India that its extensive geopolitical interests cannot be secured without the backing of adequate national power, integrated and efficient decision-making institutions for ensuring national security, and extensive investments in understanding and constructing foreign relations. The Chinese Communist Party with its long experience in simultaneously conducting war and diplomacy understood this better, though it adopted many disastrous policies at home and abroad through the Maoist years. Forty years later, neither side desires a new military conflict over territorial limits though the boundary remains unsettled. The 1993 and 1996 agreements to maintain peace and tranquillity along the line of actual control and initiate military to military confidence building measures, and the efforts to deepen economic and political engagement underline this policy orientation. Both need security and stable external relations to rapidly modernise themselves and deal with the pressing tasks of internal political consolidation.

Yet there is a difference. The Chinese reformers are today engaged in modernisation and building comprehensive national power. There is urgency about it as China seeks to catch up with the West. This has enormous geopolitical and security implications for India, just as China's occupation of Tibet in 1950 did. China today has extensive ties all around India and deep strategic relations with Pakistan. Its ties with India are growing. It is not certain that the Indian political class, engaged in its domestic order of priorities, fully understands the challenges of ensuring national security in the era of complex interdependence.