(EPW Article by NEVILLE MAXWELL, April, 2001)
Henderson Brooks Report:
An Introduction
It seems likely now that the Henderson Brooks Report on
the debacle in the border war with China, completed in 1963, will never be
released. Furthermore, even if one day a stable, confident and relaxed
government in New Delhi should, miraculously, appear and decide to publish it,
the text would be largely incomprehensible, the context, well known to the
authors and therefore not spelled out, being now forgotten. The report would need
an introduction and gloss – a first draft of which this essay attempts to
provide, drawing upon the author’s research in India in the 1960s and material
published later.
NEVILLE MAXWELL
When the Army’s
report into its debacle in the border war was completed in 1963 the Indian government
had good reason
to keep it Top Secret and give only the vaguest, and largely misleading,
indications of its contents. At that time the government’s effort, ultimately
successful, to convince the political public that the Chinese, with a sudden
‘unprovoked aggression’, had caught India unawares in a sort of Himalayan Pearl
Harbour was in its early stages, and the report’s cool and detailed analysis,
if made public, would have shown that to be self-exculpatory mendacity. But a
series of studies, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1990s,1
revealed to any serious enquirer the full story of how the Indian Army was
ordered to challenge the Chinese military to a conflict it could only lose. So
by now only bureaucratic inertia, combined with the natural fading of any
public interest, can explain the continued non-publication – the report includes
no surprises, and its publication would be of little significance but for the
fact that so many in India still cling to the soothing fantasy of a 1962
Chinese ‘aggression’. It seems likely now that the report will never be
released. Furthermore, if one day a stable, confident and relaxed government in
New Delhi should, miraculously, appear and decide to clear out the cupboard and
publish it, the text would be largely incomprehensible, the context, well known
to the authors and therefore not spelled out, being now forgotten. The report
would need an introduction and gloss – a first draft of which this paper
attempts to provide, drawing upon the writer’s research in India in the 1960s
and material published later.
Two preambles
are required, one briefly recalling the cause and course of the border war, the
second to describe the fault-line, which the border dispute turned into a
schism, within the Army’s officer corps, which was a key factor in the disaster
– and of which the Henderson Brooks Report can be seen as an expression.
Origins of
Border Conflict
India at the
time of independence can be said have faced no external threats. True, it was
born into a relationship of permanent belligerency with its weaker Siamese twin
Pakistan, left by the British inseparably conjoined to India by the
member of
Kashmir, vital to both new national organisms; but that may be seen as
essentially an internal dispute, an untreatable complication left by the crude,
cruel surgery of partition. In 1947 China, wracked by civil war, was in what
appeared to be death throes, and no conceivable threat to anyone. That changed
with astonishing speed, and by 1950, when the newborn People’s Republic
re-established in Tibet the central authority which had lapsed in 1911, the
Indian government will have made its initial assessment of the possibility and
potential of a threat from China, and found those to be minimal, if not
non-extent. First, there were geographic and topographical factors, the great
mountain chains which lay between the two neighbours and appeared to make
large-scale troop movements impractical.
More important,
the leadership of the Indian government – which is to say, Jawaharlal Nehru –
had for years proclaimed that the unshakable friendship between India and China
would be the key to both their futures, and therefore Asia’s, even the world’s.
The new leaders in Beijing were more chary, viewing India through their Marxist
prism as a potentially hostile bourgeois state. But in the Indian political
perspective war with China was deemed unthinkable, and through the
1950s New
Delhi’s defence planning and expenditure expressed that confidence. By the
early 1950s, however, the Indian government, which is to say Nehru and his
acolyte officials, had shaped and adopted a policy whose implementation would
make armed conflict with China not only ‘thinkable’ but inevitable.
From the first
days of India’s independence it was appreciated that the Sino-Indian borders
had been left undefined by the departing British, and that territorial disputes
with China were part of India’s inheritance. China’s other neighbours faced
similar problems, and over the succeeding decades of the century almost all of
those were to settle their borders satisfactorily through the normal process of
diplomatic negotiation with Beijing. The Nehru government decided upon the opposite
approach. India would through its own research determine the appropriate
alignments of the Sino-Indian borders, extend its administration to make those
good on the ground, and then refuse to negotiate the result. Barring the
inconceivable – that Beijing would allow India to impose China’s borders
unilaterally and annex territory at will – Nehru’s policy thus willed conflict
without foreseeing it.
Through the
1950s that policy generated friction along the borders and so bred and steadily
increased distrust, growing into hostility, between the neighbours. By 1958
Beijing was urgently calling for a standstill agreement to prevent patrol
clashes and negotiations to agree boundary alignments. India refused any
standstill agreement, since such would be an impediment to intended advances,
and insisted that there was nothing to negotiate, the Sino-Indian borders being
already settled on the alignments claimed by India, through blind historical
process. Then it began accusing China of committing ‘aggression’ by refusing to
surrender to Indian claims. From 1961 the Indian attempt to establish an armed
presence in all the territory it claimed and then extrude the Chinese was being
exerted by the Army, and Beijing was warning that if India did not desist from
its expansionist thrust Chinese forces would have to hit back. On October 12,
1962 Nehru
proclaimed India’s intention to drive the Chinese out of areas India claimed.
That bravado had by then been forced upon him by the public expectations which
his charges of ‘Chinese aggression’ had aroused, but Beijing took it as in
effect a declaration of war. The unfortunate Indian troops on the front line, under
orders to sweep superior Chinese forces out of their impregnable, dominating positions,
instantly appreciated the implications: “If Nehru had declared his intention to
attack, then the Chinese were not going to wait to be attacked”.2 On
October 20 the Chinese launched a pre-emptive offensive all along the borders, overwhelming
the feeble – but in this first instance determined – resistance of the Indian
troops and advancing some distance in the eastern sector. On October 24 Beijing
offered a ceasefire and Chinese withdrawal on condition India agreed to open
negotiations: Nehru refused the offer even before the text was officially
received. Both sides built up over the next three weeks, and the Indians
launched a local counter-attack on November 15, arousing in India fresh
expectations of total victory.3The Chinese then renewed their
offensive. Now many units of the once crack Indian 4th Division dissolved into
rout without giving battle, and by November 20 there was no organised Indian
resistance anywhere in the disputed territories. On that day Beijing announced
a unilateral
ceasefire and
intention to withdraw its forces: Nehru this time tacitly accepted.4
Naturally the Indian political public demanded to know what had brought about he
shameful debacle suffered by their Army, and on December 14 a new Army Commander,
Lt General J N Chaudhuri, instituted an Operations Review for that purpose,
assigning the task of enquiry to Lt General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P S
Bhagat.
Factionalisation
of the Army
All colonial
armies are liable to suffer from the tugs of contradictory allegiance, and in
the case of India’s that fissure was opened in the second world war by Japan’s recruitment
from prisoners of war of the ‘Indian National Army’ to fight against their
former fellows. By the beginning of
the 1950s two
factions were emerging in the officer corps, one patriotic but above all
professional and apolitical, and orthodox in adherence to the regimental
traditions established in the century of the raj; the other nationalist, ready
to respond unquestioningly to the political requirements of their civilian
masters, and scorning their rivals as fuddy-duddies still aping the departed
rulers, and suspected as being of doubtful loyalty to the new ones. The latter
faction soon took on eponymous identification from its leader, B M Kaul.
At the time of
independence Kaul appeared to be a failed officer, if not disgraced. Although
Sandhurst-trained for infantry service he had eased through the war without
serving on any front line, and ended it in a humble and obscure post in public
relations. But his courtier wiles, irrelevant or damning until then, were to serve
him brilliantly in the new order that independence brought, after he came to
the notice of Nehru, a fellow Kashmiri Brahmin and indeed distant kinsman.
Boosted by the prime minister’s steady favouritism, Kaul rocketed up through
the army structure to emerge in 1961 at the very summit of Army HQ. Not only
did he hold the key appointment of chief of the general staff (CGS) but the
Army Commander, Thapar, was in effect his client. Kaul had of course by then
acquired a significant following, disparaged by the other side as ‘Kaul boys’ (‘call
girls’ had just entered usage), and his appointment as CGS opened a putsch in
HQ, an eviction of the old guard, with his rivals, until then his superiors,
being not only pushed out, but often hounded thereafter with charges of
disloyalty. The struggle between those factions both fed on and fed into the
strains placed on the Army by the government’s contradictory and hypocritical
policies – on the one hand proclaiming China an eternal friend against whom it
was unnecessary to arm, on the other using armed force to seize territory it
knew China regarded as its own.
Through the
early 1950s Nehru’s covertly expansionist policy had been implemented by armed
border police under the intelligence bureau (IB), whose director, N B Mullik,
was another favourite and confidant of the prime minister. The Army high
command, knowing its forces to be too weak to risk conflict with China, would have
nothing to do with it. Indeed when the potential for Sino-Indian conflict
inherent in Mullik’s aggressive forward patrolling was demonstrated in the
serious clash at the Kongka Pass in October 1959, Army HQ and the ministry of
external affairs united to denounce him as a provocateur insist that control
over all activities on the border be assumed by the Army, which thus could
insulate China from Mullik’s jabs.5 The takeover by Kaul and his
‘boys’ at Army HQ in 1961 reversed that. Now regular infantry would takeover
from Mullik’s border police in implementing what was formally designated a
‘forward policy’, one conceived to extrude the Chinese presence from all
territory claimed by India. Field commanders receiving orders to move troops
forward into territory the Chinese both held and regarded as their own warned
that they had no resources or reserves to meet the forceful reaction they knew
must be the ultimate outcome: they were told to keep quiet and obey orders.
That may suggest that those driving the forward policy saw it in kamikaze terms
and were reconciled to its ending in gunfire and blood – but the opposite was
true. They were totally and unshakably convinced that it would end not with a
bang but a whimper – from Beijing. The psychological bedrock upon which the
forward policy rested was the belief that in the last resort the Chinese military,
snuffling from a bloody nose, would pack up and quit the territory India
claimed. The source of that faith was Mullik, who from beginning to end
proclaimed as oracular truth that, whatever the Indians did, there need be no
fear of a violent Chinese reaction. The record shows no one squarely challenging
that mantra, at higher levels than the field commanders who throughout knew it
to be dangerous nonsense: there were civilian ‘Kaul boys’ in external affairs
and the defence ministry too, and they basked happily in Mullik’s fantasy.
Perhaps the explanation for the credulousness lay in Nehru’s dependent relationship
with his IB chief: since the prime minister placed such faith in Mullik, it
would be at the least lese-majesty, and even heresy, to deny him a kind of
papal infallibility.
If it be taken
that Mullik was not just deluded, what other explanation could there be for the
unwavering consistency with which he urged his country forward on a course
which in rational perception could lead only to war with a greatly superior military
power, and therefore defeat? Another question arises: who, in those years,
would most have welcomed the great falling-out which saw India shift in a few years
from strong international support for the People’s Republic of China to enmity and
armed conflict with it? From founding and leading the non-aligned movement to tacit
enlistment in the hostile encirclement of China which was Washington’s aim?
Mullik
maintained close links with the CIA station head in New Delhi, Harry Rossitsky.
Answers may lie in the agency’s archives. China’s stunning and humiliating
victory brought about an immediate reversal of fortune between the Army
factions. Out went Kaul, out went Thapar, out went many of their adherents –
but by no means all. General Chaudhuri, appointed to replace Thapar as Army
Chief, chose not to launch a counter-putsch. He and his colleagues of the
restored old guard knew full well what had caused the debacle: political interference
in promotions and appointments by the prime minister and Krishna Menon, defence
minister, followed by clownish ineptitude in Army HQ as the ‘Kaul boys’
scurried to force the troops to carry out the mad tactics and strategy laid down
by the government. It was clear that the trail back from the broken remnants of
4 Division limping onto the plains in the north-east, up through intermediate commands
to Army HQ in New Delhi and then on to the source of political direction, would
have ended at the prime minister’s door – a destination which, understandably,
Chaudhuri had no
desire to reach. (Mullik was anyway to tarnish him with the charge that he was
plotting to overthrow the discredited civil order but in fact Chaudhuri was a
dedicated constitutionalist – ironically, Kaul was the only one of the generals
who harboured Caesarist ambitions.6)
The
Investigation
While the
outraged humiliation of the political class left Chaudhuri with no choice but
to order an enquiry into the Army’s collapse, it was up to him to decide its range
and focus, indeed its temper. The choice of Lt General Henderson Brooks to run
an Operations Review (rather than a broader and more searching board of enquiry)
was indicative of a wish not to reheat the already bubbling stew of
recriminations. Henderson Brooks (until then in command of a corps facing
Pakistan) was a steady, competent but not outstanding officer, whose
appointments and personality had kept him entirely outside the broils stirred
up by Kaul’s rise and fall. That could be said too of the officer Chaudhuri
appointed to assist Henderson Brooks, Brigadier P S Baghat (holder of a WWII
Victoria Cross and commandant of the military academy). But the latter complemented
his senior by being a no nonsense, fighting soldier, widely respected in the
Army, and the taut, unforgiving analysis in the report bespeaks the asperity of
his approach.
There is further
evidence that Chaudhuri did not wish the enquiry to dig too deep, range too
widely, or excoriate those it faulted. These were the terms of reference he
set: training; equipment; system of command; physical fitness of troops;
capacity of commanders at all levels to influence the men under their command. The
first four of those smacked of an enquiry into the sinking of the titanic looking
into the management of the shipyard where it was built and the health of the deck
crew; only the last term has any immediacy; and there the wording was
distinctly odd – commanders do not usually ‘influence’ those they command, they
issue orders and expect instant obedience.
But Henderson
Brooks and Baghat (henceforth HB/B) in effect ignored the constraints of their
terms of reference, and kicked against other limits Chaudhuri had laid upon
their investigation, especially his ruling that the functioning of Army HQ during
the crisis lay outside their purview. “It would have been convenient and
logical”, they note, “to trace the events [beginning with] Army HQ, and then
move down to Commands for more details, ...ending up with field formations for
the battle itself ”. Forbidden that approach, they would, nevertheless, try to
discern what had happened at Army HQ from documents found at lower levels,
although those could not throw any light on one crucial aspect of the story –
the political directions given to the Army by the civil authorities.
As HB/B began
their enquiry they immediately discovered that the short rein kept upon them by
the Army Chief was by no means their least handicap. They found themselves
facing determined obstruction in Army HQ, where one of the leading lights of
the Kaul faction had survived in the key post of Director of Military
Operations (DMO) – Brigadier D K Palit. Kaul had exerted his powers to have
Palit made DMO in 1961 although others senior to him were listed for the post,
and Palit, as he was himself to admit, was “one of the least qualified among
[his] contemporaries for this crucial General Staff appointment”7
Palit had thereafter acted as enforcer for Kaul and the civilian protagonists
of the ‘forward policy’, Mullik foremost among the latter, issuing the orders and
deflecting or overruling the protests of field commanders who reported up their
strategic imbecility or operational impossibility. Why Chaudhuri left Palit in
this post is puzzling: the Henderson Brooks Report was to make quite clear what
a prominent and destructive role he had played throughout the Army high command’s
politicisation, and, through
inappropriate
meddling in command decisions, even in bringing about the debacle in the
north-east. Palit, though, would immediately have recognised that the HB/B
enquiry posed a grave threat to his career, and so did all that he could
undermine and obstruct it.
After
consultation with Mullik, Palit took it upon himself to rule that HB/B should not
have access to any documents emanating from the civil side – in other words, he
blindfolded the enquiry, as far as he could, as to the nexus between the civil and
military. As Palit smugly recounts his story, in an autobiography published in 1991,
he personally faced down both Henderson Brooks and Baghat, rode out their
formal complaints about his obstructionism, and prevented them from prying into
the “high level policies and decsions” which he maintained were none of their business.8
In fact, however, the last word lies with HB/B – or will do if their report is
ever published. In spite of Palit’s efforts, they discovered a great deal that
the Kaul camp and the government would have preferred to keep hidden; and their
report shows that Palit’s self-admiring and mockmodest autobiography grossly
misrepresents the role he played.
The Henderson
Brooks Report is long (its main section, excluding recommendations and many
annexures, covers nearly 200 foolscap pages), detailed and far-ranging. This
introduction will touch only upon some salient points, to give the flavour of the
whole (a full account of the subject they covered is in the writer’s 1970
study, India’s China War).
The Forward
Policy
This was born
and named at a meeting chaired by Nehru on November 2, 1961, but had been alive
and kicking in the womb for years before that – indeed its conception dated
back to 1954, when Nehru issued an instruction for posts to be set up all along
India’s claim lines, “especially in such places as might be disputed”. What happened
at this 1961 meeting was that the freeze on provocative forward patrolling, instituted
at the Army’s insistence after Mullik had engineered the Kongka Pass clash, was
ended – with the Army, now under the courtier leadership of Thapar and Kaul,
eagerly assuming the task which Mullik’s armed border police had carried out
until the Army stopped them. HB/B note that no minutes of this meeting had been
obtained, but were able to quote Mullik as saying that “the Chinese would not
react to our establishing new posts and that they were not likely to use
force against any of our posts even if they were in a position to do so”
(HB/B’s emphasis). That opinion contradicted the conclusion Army Intelligence
had reached 12 months before: that the Chinese would resist by force any
attempts to take back territory held by them.
HB/B then trace
a contradictory duet between Army HQ and Western Army Command, with HQ ordering
the establishment of ‘penny-packet’ forward posts in Ladakh, specifying their
location and strength, and Western Command protesting that it lacked the forces
to carry out the allotted task, still less to face the grimly foreseeable
consequences. Kaul and Palit “time and again ordered in furtherance of the
‘forward policy’ the establishment of individual posts, overruling protests
made by Western Command”. By August 1962 about 60 posts had been set up, most manned
with less than a dozen soldiers, all under close threat by overwhelmingly superior
Chinese forces. Western Command submitted another request for heavy reinforcements,
accompanying it with this admonition:
[I]t is imperative that political
direction is based on military means. If the two are not co-related there is a
danger of creating a situation where we may lose both in the material and moral
sense much more than we already have. Thus, there is no short cut to military preparedness
to enable us to pursue effectively our present policy...
That warning was
ignored, reinforcements were denied, orders were affirmed and, although the
Chinese were making every effort, diplomatic, political and military, to prove
their determination to resist by force, again it was asserted that no forceful reaction
by the Chinese was to be expected. HB/B quote Field Marshall Roberts: “The art
of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy not coming, but in
our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather
on the fact that we have made our position unassailable”. But in this instance troops
were being put in dire jeopardy in pursuit of a strategy based upon an
assumption – that the Chinese would not resist with force – which the strategy
would itself inevitably prove wrong. HB/B note that from the beginning of 1961,
when the Kaulist putsch reshaped Army HQ, crucial professional military
practice was abandoned:
This lapse in Staff Duties on the part
of the CGS [Kaul], his deputy, the DMO [Palit] and other Staff Directors is
inexcusable. From this stemmed the unpreparedness and the unbalance of our
forces. These appointments in General Staff are key appointments, and officers
were handpicked by General Kaul to fill them. There was therefore no question
of clash of personalities. General Staff appointments are stepping stones to
high command, and correspondingly carry heavy responsibility. When, however,
these appointments are looked upon as adjuncts to a successful career and the
responsibility is not taken seriously, the results, as is only too clear, are
disastrous. This should never be allowed to be repeated and the Staff as of old
must be made to bear the consequences of their lapses and mistakes.
Comparatively, the mistakes and lapses of the Staff sitting in Delhi without
the stress and strain of battle are more heinous than the errors made by
commanders in the field of battle.
War and Debacle
While the main
thrust of the Forward Policy was exerted in the western sector it was applied
also in the east from December 1961. There the Army was ordered to set up new
posts along the McMahon Line (which China treated – and treats – as the de
facto boundary), and, in some sectors, beyond it. One of these trans-Line posts
named Dhola Post, was invested by a superior Chinese force on September 8,
1962, the Chinese thus reacting there exactly as they had been doing for a year
in the western sector. In this instance, however, and although Dhola Post was known
to be north of the McMahon Line, the Indian government reacted aggressively,
deciding that the Chinese force threatening Dhola must be attacked forthwith,
and thrown back.
Now again the
duet of contradiction began, Army HQ and, in this case, Eastern Command (headed
by Lt General L P Sen) united against the commands below:
XXXIII Corps (Lt
General Umrao Singh), 4 Division (Major General Niranjan Prasad) and 7 Brigade
(Brigadier John Dalvi). The latter three stood together in reporting that the
‘attack and evict’ order was militarily impossible to execute. The point of
confrontation, below Thagla Ridge at the western extremity of the McMahon Line,
presented immense logistical difficulties
to the Indian
side and none to the Chinese, so whatever concentration of troops could
painfully be mustered by the Indians could instantly be outnumbered and
outweighed in weaponry. Tacticly, again the irreversible advantage lay with the
Chinese, who held well-supplied, fortified
positions on a
commanding ridge feature.
The demand for
military action, and victory, was political, generated at top level meetings in
Delhi. “The Defence Minister [Krishna Menon] categorically stated that in view
of the top secret nature of conferences no minutes would be kept [and] this
practice was followed at all the conferences that were held by the defence minister
in connection with these operations”. HB/B commented: “This is a surprising decision
and one which could and did lead to grave consequences. It absolved in the
ultimate analysis anyone of the responsibility for any major decision. Thus it could
and did lead to decisions being taken without careful and considered thought on
the consequences of those decisions”.
Army HQ by no
means restricted itself to the big picture. In mid-September it issued an order
to troops beneath Thagla Ridge to “(a) capture a Chinese post 1,000 yards
north-east of Dhola Post; (b) contain the Chinese concentration south of
Thagla.” HB/B comment: “The General Staff, sitting in Delhi, ordering an action
against a position 1,000 yards north-east of Dhola Post is astounding. The
country was not known, the enemy situation vague, and for all that there may
have been a ravine in between [the troops and their objective], but yet the
order was given. This order could go down in the annals of History as being as
incredible as the order for ‘the Charge of the Light Brigade’ ”. Worse was to
follow.
Underlying all
the meetings in Delhi was still the conviction, or by now perhaps prayer, that
even when frontally attacked the Chinese would put up no serious resistance, still
less react aggressively elsewhere. Thus it came to be believed that the problem
lay in weakness, even cowardice, at lower levels of command. General Umrao
Singh (XXXIII Corps) was seen as the nub of the problem, since he was backing
his divisional and brigade commanders in their insistence that the eviction
operation was impossible. “It was obvious that Lt General Umrao Singh would not
be hustled into an operation, without proper planning and logistical support.
The defence ministry and, for that matter, the general staff and Eastern Command
were prepared for a gamble on the basis of the Chinese not reacting to any great
extent”. So the political leadership and Army HQ decided that if Umrao Singh could
be replaced by a commander with
fire in his
belly all would come right, and victory be assured. Such a commander was available
– General Kaul. A straight switch, Kaul relinquishing the CGS post to takeover from
Umrao Singh would have raised too many questions, so it was decided instead
that Umrao Singh would simply be moved aside, retaining his corps command but
no longer having anything to do with the eviction operation. That would become the
responsibility of a new formation, IV Corps, whose sole task would be to attack
and drive the Chinese off Thagla Ridge. General Kaul would command the new
corps.
HB/B noted how
even the most secret of government’s decisions were swiftly reported in the
press, and called for a thorough probe into the sources of the leaks. Many
years later Palit, in his autobiography, described the transmission procedure.
Palit had hurried to see Kaul on learning of the latter’s appointment to command
the notional new corps: “I found him in the little bedsitter den where he usually
worked when at home. I was startled to see, sitting beside him on the divan, Prem
Bhatia editor of The Times of India, looking like the proverbial cat who has
just swallowed a large yellow songbird. He got up as I arrived, wished [Kaul]
good luck and left, still with a greatly pleased smirk on his face”.9 Bhatia’s
scoop led his paper next morning. The ‘spin’ therein was the suggestion that
whereas in the western sector Indian troops faced extreme logistical problems,
in the east that situation was reversed and therefore, with the dashing Kaul in
command of a fresh ‘task force’, victory was imminent. The truth was exactly
the contrary, those in the North- East Frontier Agency (NEFA) faced even worse
difficulties than their fellows in the west, and victory was a chimera.
Those
difficulties were compounded by persistent interference from Army HQ. On orders
from Delhi, “troops of [the entire 7 Brigade] were dispersed to outposts that were
militarily unsound and logistically unsupportable”. Once Kaul took over as corps
commander the troops were driven forward to their fate in what HB/B called “wanton
disregard of the elementary principles
of war”.
Even in the dry,
numbered paragraphs of their report, HB/B’s account of the moves that preceded
the final Chinese assault is dramatic and riveting, with the scene of action
shifting from the banks of the Namka Chu, beneath the menacing loom of Thagla
Ridge, to Nehru’s house in
Delhi – whither
Kaul rushed back to report when a rash foray he had ordered was crushed by a
fierce Chinese reaction on October 10. To follow those events, and on into the
greater drama of the ensuing debacle is tempting, but would add only greater detail
to the account already published.
Given the nature
of the dramatic events they were investigating, it is not surprising that
HB/B’s cast of characters consisted in the main of fools and/or knaves on the one
hand, their victims on the other. But they singled out a few heroes too,
especially the jawans, who fought whenever their senior commanders gave them
the necessary leadership, and suffered miserably from the latter’s often gross
incompetence. As for the debacle itself, “Efforts of a few officers,
particularly those of Capt N N Rawat” to organise a fighting retreat, “could
not replace a disintegrated command”, nor could the cool-headed Brigadier
Gurbax Singh do more than keep his 48 Brigade in action as a cohesive combat
unit until it was liquidated by the joint efforts of higher command and the
Chinese. HB/B place the immediate cause of the collapse of resistance in NEFA in
the panicky, fumbling and contradictory orders issued from corps HQ in Tezpur
by a ‘triumvirate’ of officers they judge to be grossly culpable: General Sen,
General Kaul and Brigadier Palit. Those were, however, only the immediate
agents of disaster: its responsible planners and architects were another
triumvirate, comprised of Nehru, Mullik and, again, Kaul, together with all
those who confronted and overcome through guile and puny force.
Notes
1 The series
began with Himalayan Blunder, Brigadier John Dalvi’s account of the
sacrifice of his 7 Brigade on the Namka Chu, a classic of military literature,
continuing with the relatively worthless Untold Story by General Kaul.
In 1970 this writer’s India’s China War told the full military story in
political and diplomatic context. In 1979 Colonel Saigal published a
well-researched account of the collapse of 4 Division in the North-East
Frontier Agency; two years later General Niranjan Prasad complemented Dalvi’s
study with his own fine account of The Fall of owang 1962 ; and in 1991 General Palit,
who as a brigadier had been director of military operations in 1962, followed
up with War in High Himalaya – like Kaul’s book self-exculpatory, but
much more successfully so because by then very few were left with the knowledge
that could challenge Palit’s version of events and his role in them.
2 Major General
Niranjan Prasad, The Fall of Towang, Palit and Palit, New Delhi, 1981, p
69.
3 With
near-criminal disregard for military considerations, this attack was launched,
near Walong in the eastern sector, to obtain a ‘birthday’ victory for Nehru! It
failed.
4 He might well
have aspired to another act of Churchillian defiance but the American
ambassador, J K Galbraith, up betimes, got to the prime minister in time to
persuade him that discretion would serve India better than a hollow show of
valour. Thirty years later the Chinese expressed their appreciation with a
banquet in Galbraith’s honour in Beijing.
5 The government
misrepresented the Army’s takeover as evidence of the seriousness of the
‘Chinese threat’. In fact it was a measure to try to insulate China from the
steady pinprick provocations Mullik had been organising. The truth emerged only
years later, in Mullik’s autobiography, My Years with Nehru: The Chinese
Betrayal, Allied Publishers, New Delhi, 1971, pp 243-45.
6 Welles Hangen, After
Nehru, Who?, Harte-Davis, London, 1963, p 272.
7 D K Palit, War
in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis,1962, Hurst and Co, London,
1991, p 71.
8 Ibid, pp
390-92.
9 Ibid, p 220.
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