China’s 1962 attack to discredit Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru, who tried to build a bridge between democracy and communism and mediated in many world crises at the height of the Cold War between the two rival blocs led by the United States and the then Soviet Union, stood demoralised after the 1962 Chinese aggression on India. He never recovered from that shock, and eventually died on May 27, 1964 as a broken-hearted man. He was conditioned to think in terms of peace, and assumed his peace-loving country wouldn’t be a victim of aggression for “there are not many instances in history where one country, that is India, has gone out of her way to be friendly and cooperative with the Chinese government and people, and to plead their cause in the councils of the world”, as Nehru said in his broadcast to the nation on October 22, 1962. There is no parallel in history of such a trusted and reliable friend being stabbed in the back.

Nehru was not ignorant about the Chinese designs and the contradictions in his China policy. His nonalignment policy was meant to extend the area of peace and defuse war-like situations. Panchsheel — the five principles of peaceful coexistence — that was signed on April 29, 1954 between India and China, was a corollary of the nonalignment policy he pursued. Panchsheel was adapted by the Afro-Asian bloc at the 1955 Bandung Conference and by the United Nations as a code of international conduct among nations. Incidentally, it was Prime Minister Nehru who introduced Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai to the world at Bandung. His policy of befriending China was deliberate, as he felt there was no alternative to it. In his July 1, 1954 letter to chief ministers, Nehru wrote: “The uncommon factor is that China had adopted very largely the communist way and India the parliamentary democratic way... Another and major uncommonness in the two... was India’s stress on peaceful progress and China having followed a harsher and more violent course.” He realised this soon after the Communist revolution in China on October 1, 1949, with India one of the first countries to recognise the new regime headed by Mao Zedong.

In another letter to chief ministers on December 22, 1962, he wrote: “China has repudiated the doctrine of peaceful coexistence... It believes in the inevitability of war and, therefore, does not want tensions in the world to lessen. It dislikes nonalignment... It is not afraid even of a nuclear war...” because it could afford to lose a few hundred million people and yet survive as the most populated country. China did not like India and the Soviet Union befriending each other. It was on the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev that Nehru had launched the “greatest peace mission” of his life to rescue the UN in 1960, after the Congo crisis, when the Soviet Union threatened to withdraw from the world body and demanded the shifting of its headquarters from New York.

In spite of being no match for the major powers in military and economic power, China could not accept the growing stature of India internationally under Nehru. Nehru represented India’s best traditions — a true Buddhist and Gandhian at that — of exercising moral authority. With the Non-Aligned Conference in Belgrade in September 1961, nonalignment had become the world’s largest peace movement. Addressing the conference, Nehru spoke of the objectives of the movement: “At the present juncture one has to see how to lessen international tensions, how at least to remove some of the obstructions to peace, how at least to prevent war coming.” His prestige and position internationally reached new heights. India came to be regarded with respect in the community of nations. Non-alignment was showing results in defusing international crises — like the Korean war, the Indochina conflict, the Suez crisis and Congo — and bringing rapprochement between the two warring blocs.

What prompted China to attack India in 1962 V.K. Krishna Menon, in an interview with Nehru’s biographer Michael Brecher, said the main aim of the Chinese attack was to discredit Nehru. The success of India’s parliamentary democracy and its nonalignment policy was a serious challenge to China’s hegemony. As Bertrand Russell said in his Unarmed Victory, Nehru was more willing to negotiate the dispute than Mao’s China. He accepted the Colombo proposals to end the India-China conflict, but China did not accept them. According to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s biographer, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the Chinese attack was rooted in something bigger than a border dispute: “The Chinese had thought that non-alignment was just a passing phase... but when they discovered it was growing in strength and that the Soviet Union, with whom they were quarrelling, was strongly supporting the nonaligned countries, felt nonalignment had become a force to reckon with... the Chinese attacked India in the hope that Nehru’s socialist and nonaligned polices would be discredited, the right wing would take over and political feelings in India would (get) polarised between Right and Left.” The New York Times of October 22, 1962 echoed that the Chinese attack was meant to discredit Nehru as he wanted “to establish an Indian sphere of influence in Asia that would far surpass that of the colonialist system formally set up by the British Empire”. Nehru’s position was too envious for the Chinese to bear it.

However, if anything, the Chinese aggression had vindicated Nehru’s policy of nonalignment. When he appealed for military aid to some 80 heads of state, after the aggression, all expressed sympathy and support, including Pakistan, Israel, France, Britain, United States and the USSR, with Pope XXVIII openly expressing his sympathy and support for India. The fact that both the Western and Communist blocs were willing to give military aid was an indication of the strength of Nehru’s India. This had in fact isolated China all the more from the community of nations. The strong expression of indignation by several countries, cutting across political systems, against the Chinese aggression forced China to retreat unilaterally from Indian territory much before the arrival of arms supplies in India from foreign nations.

The writer is a professor of political science and retired principal, and founder-secretary of the Association of Indian College Principals. He is the author of Nehru and World Peace.