The
emergence of the Henderson-Brooks report during election season should have set
the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons in India. But clearly it has not. The
reason is that most people today simply don’t care.
It was
essentially a review of the Army operations in the Kameng Frontier division of
NEFA (where Tawang is located in modern day Arunachal Pradesh) where India
faced the biggest disaster to its arms in 1962, when IV Division collapsed
without a fight, and the Chinese forces reached the foothills of Assam. The
task of the two-man committee was to look at issues of training, equipment,
system of command, ability of commanders and so on.
It was
not a review of India’s China policy relating to the Sino-Indian border.
Indeed, it was not even a review of the functioning of the Army HQ, which
conveniently ordered that it be excluded from the scope of the Henderson-Brooks
inquiry.
So, the
inquiry officers, Lt Gen T B Henderson Brooks and Brigadier Prem Bhagat had no
access to the papers of the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defence Ministry or
the Army HQ. Whatever references they have made to these institutions came
through the papers available at the Eastern and Western Command headquarters.
Indian
troops being inspected before leaving their posts in northern India during the
border clash with China in 1962.
The
essential conclusion of the Henderson Brooks report was that the government
initiated a Forward Policy to check Chinese incursions into what it considered
Indian territory in Ladakh at the end of 1961.
Unfortunately,
the Army HQ failed to arrive at a correct military assessment of the situation
and correlate it to developments in NEFA. Had a proper assessment been made,
perhaps “we would not have precipitated matters till we were better prepared in
both sectors.” Instead Indian policies triggered a ferocious Chinese response
catching the Indian side completely off guard.
Unlike
NEFA where the McMahon Line defined the border, there was nothing in the West.
India had a notional claim, China had a strategic need. If the Indian case for
the Aksai Chin was weak, the Chinese one was weaker. But because the region was
vital for them, the Chinese backed up their claim by occupation and
consolidation between 1951-1959. And when India sought to restrict the Chinese
advance in 1961, a clash became inevitable.
The maps
attached to the White Paper on States published in 1948 and 1950 showed the
border in the region from Karakoram Pass to the UP-Nepal-Tibet trijunction as
undefined.
The
decision to include Aksai Chin firmly within India was only taken in 1953, and
in 1954, Prime Minister Nehru ordered that a hard line be drawn there outlining
the border. Older maps were withdrawn and new ones issued in their place. The
fact that this was done unilaterally, without consulting the other disputant,
China, set the stage for an inevitable clash.
There was
no problem here till the Chinese consolidated their authority in Tibet by the
mid-1950s. As part of this, they built a highway linking Xinjiang to Tibet
which traversed the Aksai Chin plateau.
This road
was very important for China as it was the only road that was open throughout
the year and not affected by either weather or the Khampa guerillas that
plagued the Sichuan route in the east and the central route via the Chinghai
plateau.
The
Indian case, scholar Steven Hoffman has pointed out, notes that the Indian case
for Aksai Chin rested on nationalistic assertions, backed by some legal claims.
While the Chinese claim was largely anchored on its strategic necessity.
In 1959,
Sino-Indian relations reached their turning point; there was a revolt against
Chinese authority in Tibet that resulted in the Dalai Lama escaping to India
and being given asylum there. In September, through a letter, Zhou also
declared that the Chinese did not recognise the McMahon Line and that in the
Chinese view, the entire border was subject to negotiation.
The
government now handed the border to the Army and suddenly became energetic in
pushing a policy to contain the Chinese who had been advancing in Aksai Chin
for the previous decade. Unfortunately, it did little to strengthen the Army to
undertake the tasks it was asking of them and the outcome was foreordained.
The
Henderson-Brooks report has focused on the Army’s faults in handling the border
issue. But, if we are to truly learn from the sorry history of the times, the
government needs to throw open the archives relating to the actions of Prime
Minister Nehru, his associates and the Ministries of External Affairs and
Defence. The Army was merely an instrumentality, a weak and in some areas
incompetent one at that, as the Henderson-Brooks report reveals.
Mid Day April 1, 2014
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