The unpalatable story of a lost war

Bruce Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA, and The Sino-Indian War — “forgotten” because the Americans were busy having a showdown with the USSR over the Cuban Missile Crisis at the same time as the war between India and China during October-November 1962 — is excellent for a variety of reasons. First is his mining of the Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) — the morning report that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gives the President — from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. This trove was released to the public in 2015, as was the centre-piece of the book, the second of two letters that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Kennedy on November 19, 1962, after the two worst days in the Indian Army’s history. This letter’s existence was denied by India for years — Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri even denied it officially — but the US made it public in 2010. This letter asked the US to join the war against China. Positively inclined, Kennedy despatched his envoy, Averell Harriman, to study Nehru’s request. Events overtook them the next day however, when Chinese supremo Mao Zedong, near midnight, declared a unilateral cease-fire and pulled his troops back to the McMahon Line in the Northeast while keeping Aksai Chin in Jammu and Kashmir — exactly what Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai had been offering Nehru since 1959, and on the basis of which the India-China border dispute will be settled, if ever. That letter could have been the basis for closer India-US relations after the war but events never aligned: Days before a $500 million aid package to India was to be finalised, Kennedy was assassinated; and days before the rescheduled meeting, Nehru passed away. Shastri wanted no delay on a major jet fighter purchase and promptly bought it from the USSR. For decades after that, the world’s two largest democracies were estranged (as Dennis Kux put it), a situation that rectified only after the USSR’s demise. Ironically, India still hasn’t released its official postmortem of the war, the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, an excerpt of which was leaked (with a significant gap) in 2014 by Neville Maxwell, the Australian whose book, India’s China War, blamed Nehru for the war. Maxwell in particular faulted Nehru’s “Forward Policy”, which was less a policy than a piecemeal reaction to the Chinese digging their heels in Aksai Chin — Indian troops, as ill-equipped and logistically-handicapped as they were in treacherous terrain, were to set up posts behind Chinese positions. (This blame was pooh-poohed by Brigadier John P. Dalvi, who was held prisoner behind Chinese lines when India’s Fourth Division disintegrated in the November 17 onslaught. Dalvi pointed to China’s massive preparations since May 1962, when it built up forces, prepared supply depots for arms, gasoline and ammunition, constructed roads, and even camps for Indian PoWs.) Maxwell’s book was held up as evidence of Indian duplicity by Zhou Enlai to Henry Kissinger, who was quietly working out President Richard Nixon’s detente with China. The second reason Riedel’s book is excellent is the portrait of an old and tired Nehru who could not reciprocate Kennedy’s obvious enthusiasm to improve relations. A variety of sources, including the CIA’s PDBs and John Kenneth Galbraith’s memoir, Ambassador’s Journal, among others, ruefully note what a disaster Nehru’s visit in November 1961 was: the jet-lagged Prime Minister was bored and taciturn throughout the visit, conversing in only monosyllables. Kennedy saw India and China as Asia’s showcases for democracy and communism, and wanted India to emerge on top. He even sent his photogenic wife Jackie on a solo visit to Asia, including India — the first solo trip by an American First Lady. It was not enough: Nehru’s fear of looking like a non-aligned hypocrite was certainly a factor, but he might have diplomatically manoeuvered had he not been exhausted with life (though Nehru, the Americans noted, came alive when interacting with Kennedy’s sister Pat, and with Jackie). It is not certain that another Prime Minister would have responded better to Kennedy given that Shastri inked the MiG-21 deal in August 1964, less than three months after taking over. But it is certain that the military defeat to China in 1962 left Nehru a broken man, his death coming just a year-and-a-half later. The third reason Riedel’s book is excellent is that it contextualises the US’ Tibet activities and the US state department’s internal conflicts between the Near East division (which handled India) and the Far East division (which handled China). Riedel makes use of NDBs and his CIA colleague John Kenneth Knaus’ (who headed covert activities in Tibet) book, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival. Besides wanting to teach the self-righteous Nehru a lesson, and besides wanting to settle the border dispute to his advantage, Mao was provoked to war by a Tibetan insurgency against Chinese occupation that had driven out the Dalai Lama. Ironically, India initially had nothing to do with the arms-supply and airdrops to the rebels; this was done out of East Pakistan in secret arrangement with President Ayub Khan, who also allowed secret use of a Peshawar airbase for U2 reconnaissance flights. After the war, India set up Establishment 22, which later became the Special Frontier Force (SFF), for such activities. But, finally, the real reason to read this book is because it is so well-written. It may surprise the Indian reader that Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, wrote this as a paper for the Brookings Institution. The writing is clear, crisp and to the point; especially compared to turgid accounts by our retired officials of what are merely vanity projects. In India, we are still afraid of revealing how we lost a war over half a century ago. So we must read Riedel instead.

Aditya Sinha is the co-author of the recent bestseller, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years