*This dust-up in the mountains is a precedent for a dust-up over islands.
*The old man narrating this was a dashing young reporter at the time. If there's a Spratley Island war five years from now, one wonders if there will be any such thing as "reporters."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Ne131012Coverstory.asp
(...)
"THAT WAS the most eerie night I have ever spent. Tezpur was a ghost town. We patrolled it by pale moonlight on the alert for any tell-tale signs or sounds. The State Bank of India had burned its currency chest and a few charred notes kept blowing in the wind as curious mental patients kept prodding the dying embers. Some stray dogs and alley cats were our only other companions.
"Nehru’s broadcast to the nation, particularly to “the people of Assam” to whom his “heart went out” did not sound like Churchillian defiance
"Around midnight, a transistor with one of our colleagues crackled to life as Peking Radio announced a unilateral ceasefire and pull back to the pre-October “line of actual control”, provided the Indian Army did not move forward. Relieved and weary, we retired to our billet at the abandoned Planter’s Club whose canned provisions of baked beans, tuna fish and beer (all on the house) had sustained us.
"Next morning, all the world carried the news, but AIR still had brave jawans gamely fighting the enemy as none had had the gumption to awaken Nehru and take his orders as the news was too big to handle otherwise! Indeed, during the preceding days, everyone from general to jawan to officials and the media was tuned into Radio Peking to find out what was going on in our own country.
"1962 was a politically-determined military disaster. President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan said it all when he indicted the government for its “credulity and negligence”. Nehru himself confessed, artfully using the plural, “We were getting out of touch with reality… and living in an artificial world of our own creation”. Yet he was reluctant to get rid of Krishna Menon, (making him first Minister for Defence Production and then Minister without Portfolio but brazenly carrying on much as before) until public anger compelled the PM to drop him altogether or risk losing his own job.
"Nehru was broken and bewildered. His letter to John F Kennedy seeking US military assistance after the fall of Bomdila was abject and pathetic. He feared that unless the tide was stemmed the Chinese would overrun the entire Northeast. The Chinese, he said, were massing troops in the Chumbi Valley and he apprehended another “invasion” from there. If Chushul was overrun, there was nothing to stop the Chinese before Leh. The IAF had not been used as India lacked air defence for its population centres. He therefore requested immediate air support by 12 squadrons of all-weather supersonic fighters with radar cover, all operated by US personnel. But US aircraft were not to intrude into Chinese air space. One does not know what inputs went into drafting Nehru’s letter to Kennedy. Non-alignment was certainly in tatters.
"Tezpur limped back to life. On 21 November, Lal Bahadur Shastri, then Home Minister, paid a flying visit on a mission of inquiry and reassurance. He was followed the next day by Indira Gandhi. Nehru had meanwhile broadcast to the nation, and more particularly to “the people of Assam” to whom his “heart went out” at this terrible hour of trial. He promised the struggle would continue and none should doubt its outcome. Hearing the broadcast in Tezpur, however, it did not sound like a Churchillian trumpet of defiance. Rather, it provided cold comfort to the Assamese, many of whom hold it against the Indian state to this day that Nehru had bidden them “farewell”.
"I remained in Tezpur for a month waiting day after day for the administration to return to Bomdila. This it did under the Political Officer (DM), Major KC Johorey just before Christmas. I accompanied him. The people of NEFA had stood solidly with India and Johorey received a warm welcome.
"THAPAR HAD been removed and Gen JN Chaudhuri appointed COAS. Kaul went into limbo. The Naga underground took no advantage of India’s plight. Pakistan had been urged by Iran and the US not to use India’s predicament to further its own cause and kept its word. But it developed a new relationship with China thereafter.
"The West and the US had been sympathetic to India and its Ambassador, John Kenneth Galbraith, had a direct line to Kennedy. However, the US was also preoccupied with growing Sino-Soviet divide and the major Cuban missile crisis that boiled over in October 1962.
"The COAS, Gen Chaudhuri ordered an internal inquiry into the debacle by Maj Gen Henderson Brooks and Brigadier PS Bhagat. The Henderson-Brooks Report remains a top-secret classified document though its substance was leaked and published by Neville Maxwell who served as The Times’ London correspondent in India in the 1960s, became a Sinophile and wrote a critical book titled India’s China War. The report brings out the political and military naiveté, muddle, contradictions and in-fighting that prevailed and failures of planning and command. There is no military secret to protect in the Henderson-Brooks Report; only political and military ego and folly to hide. But unless the country knows, the appropriate lessons will not be learnt...."
