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Sino-India War, 50 tahun kemudian
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Indo-China war, 50 years on
Praful Bidwai
Friday, October 12, 2012
The Indian Air Force (IAF) chief of staff NAK Browne made the rather astounding claim last week that Indias use of offensive airpower would have averted its humiliating defeat in the China War of 1962. The Nehru government however restricted the IAFs role to providing transportation support to the Indian Army in the belief that use of airpower would have provoked China into bombing Indian cities. Air Chief Marshal Browne also contrasted Indias use of offensive airpower at Kargil, which brought the conflict to a rapid conclusion.
A similar view was expressed by Air Vice Marshal AK Tewary in 2006 where he quoted Lt Gen BM Kaul, the then army commander in todays Arunachal Pradesh, as saying we made a great mistake in not employing our air force ...
The crucial assumption here is that there was a relatively smaller asymmetry between the Indian and Chinese air forces, and the IAFs deployment would have reduced the overwhelming superiority of Chinas land forces.
These halfS E N S O Rforting speculative judgments are based on the what-if question, or what social scientists call counterfactuals. Its hard to prove or disprove counterfactuals. But one can assess their plausibility by considering their context and the then-known facts.
Using these criteria, it appears implausible that airpower would have changed the India-China military balance in a major way. Chinas airpower was, or then believed to be, far superior to Indias, with a 3:1 asymmetry in the total number of planes, and 5:1 in fighters.
The IAF offensive operations would have invited large-scale retaliation, including bombing of Indian cities, with extremely high civilian casualties, against which India would have little defence. Besides, no amount of airpower could have helped its army overcome its fundamental disadvantages. Indian soldiers were under-prepared for battle ill-clad and ill-shod for the weather, poorly armed, and for the most part, poorly led too. Their thrust was repulsed within the first fortnight.
Its only in Chushul in Ladakh and in Walong in the Northeast that Indian units put up significant resistance. But Indias great hope, the 12,000-strong 4th Division, disintegrated under attack. Gen Kaul ignominiously fled the field. On November 19, army chief PN Thapar was sacked. The next day, China declared a unilateral ceasefire.
Its hard to see how the IAF, which didnt then have a command/base close to Arunachal Pradesh, could have significantly altered the wars outcome given the overall strategic balance.
It was later revealed that with mounting Sino-Soviet tensions, the USSR refused to supply spares for the warplanes transferred to China, thus grounding much of its air force. But this wasnt known in 1962 to Indian leaders, who depended primarily on the CIA for intelligence. But that doesnt lend credibility to Brownes claims.
At any rate, having militarily humbled India, the Chinese voluntarily vacated the posts which they could have continued to occupy, and withdrew to their November 1959 positions. They didnt take prisoners of war although they could have easily done so. The Chinese could have marched all the way to Kolkata without meeting much resistance, but stopped well short of the border. The Peoples Liberation Army treated the surrendered Indian officers courteously and flew down some of the unfit ones to the border. In some instances, its soldiers even oiled and polished the firearms seized from Indian troops before returning them!
This doesnt argue that the Chinese were or are angels, but only that the primary purpose of their 1962 operation was to repulse Indias ill-conceived forward policy, of evicting them from disputed areas without seriously negotiating the border issue.
Many Indian leaders harboured the delusion that they could inflict a military defeat on China. Gen Kaul had declared that a few rounds fired at the Chinese would cause them to run away. The then home minister Lal Bahadur Shastri threatened to evict the Chinese from the disputed areas just as easily as India had thrown Portugal out of Goa.
As Indias rout became imminent, Jawaharlal Nehru panicked and begged the US for military help and air cover in the fight for the survival of freedom and independence in this subcontinent and rest of Asia. He wrote two desperate letters to President Kennedy on November 19, which were suppressed in India, and remained classified in the US until recently. They expose the depths to which Nehrus morale had sunk.
Confirming the IAFs weakness, Nehru wrote: We have repeatedly felt the need of using [our] air arm ..., but have been unable to do so as in the present state of our air and radar equipment we have no defence against retaliatory action .... To attack Chinese air bases, Nehru wanted two squadrons of B-47 bombers, for which Indian pilots and technicians would be trained in the US.
Arms poured in from the US, and Britain and Israel too. US ambassador JK Galbraith also recommended that elements of the Seventh Fleet be sent into the Bay of Bengal. Thus the aircraft carrier Enterprise arrived as a mark of solidarity with India. This manoeuvre was repeated during the Bangladesh war, when it was seen as menacing.
The 1962 war isnt even a distant memory in Beijing. But it continues to rankle in India although it claimed fewer casualties than the Indian Peace-Keeping Force operation in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. This is largely because its tied up with a much greater failure on Indias part namely, refusal to discuss the boundary question with China while asserting colonial-era claims to territory along an undemarcated border.
India demanded that the Chinese accept the McMahon Line (negotiated by the British in 1914 with Tibet, but which China never accepted) in the Northeast, and the Johnson map in the west, both part of the British policy of extending colonial domination. As the Indian National Congress recognised in the 1930s, the policy was guided by considerations more of holding India in subjection than of protecting her borders, and India as a self-governing country can have nothing to fear from her neighbouring states...
However, the rulers of independent India, contradictorily, behaved as heirs of the colonial state. Many claimed, citing the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, that the McMahon Line coincided with Indias borders as they had supposedly existed for 2,000 years, in which the striving of the Indian spirit was directed towards these Himalayan fastnesses.
They repeatedly spurned Chinese proposals for talks. In 1960, they rejected in Zhou Enlais offer, following a new boundary agreement accepting the McMahon Line where it abutted on Burma, of a similar agreement with India, in exchange for Indias acceptance that Aksai Chin in the west belonged to China. This would have been eminently practical because Aksai Chin matters to China, but not India, to whom Arunachal is important.
After 1959, Nehru came under domestic pressure to demonstrate firmness. The forward policy and the 1962 debacle followed. To cover that up, chauvinism was drummed up through the media, text-books and semi-official accounts.
The real lessons to be drawn here is that India must open negotiations with China on the border issue. The way forward lies in reconciliation and talks on the Chinese-proposed package deal, not hubristic claims about whether India could have won the war or can still avenge its defeat.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-New...ar-50-years-on
Praful Bidwai
Friday, October 12, 2012
The Indian Air Force (IAF) chief of staff NAK Browne made the rather astounding claim last week that Indias use of offensive airpower would have averted its humiliating defeat in the China War of 1962. The Nehru government however restricted the IAFs role to providing transportation support to the Indian Army in the belief that use of airpower would have provoked China into bombing Indian cities. Air Chief Marshal Browne also contrasted Indias use of offensive airpower at Kargil, which brought the conflict to a rapid conclusion.
A similar view was expressed by Air Vice Marshal AK Tewary in 2006 where he quoted Lt Gen BM Kaul, the then army commander in todays Arunachal Pradesh, as saying we made a great mistake in not employing our air force ...
The crucial assumption here is that there was a relatively smaller asymmetry between the Indian and Chinese air forces, and the IAFs deployment would have reduced the overwhelming superiority of Chinas land forces.
These halfS E N S O Rforting speculative judgments are based on the what-if question, or what social scientists call counterfactuals. Its hard to prove or disprove counterfactuals. But one can assess their plausibility by considering their context and the then-known facts.
Using these criteria, it appears implausible that airpower would have changed the India-China military balance in a major way. Chinas airpower was, or then believed to be, far superior to Indias, with a 3:1 asymmetry in the total number of planes, and 5:1 in fighters.
The IAF offensive operations would have invited large-scale retaliation, including bombing of Indian cities, with extremely high civilian casualties, against which India would have little defence. Besides, no amount of airpower could have helped its army overcome its fundamental disadvantages. Indian soldiers were under-prepared for battle ill-clad and ill-shod for the weather, poorly armed, and for the most part, poorly led too. Their thrust was repulsed within the first fortnight.
Its only in Chushul in Ladakh and in Walong in the Northeast that Indian units put up significant resistance. But Indias great hope, the 12,000-strong 4th Division, disintegrated under attack. Gen Kaul ignominiously fled the field. On November 19, army chief PN Thapar was sacked. The next day, China declared a unilateral ceasefire.
Its hard to see how the IAF, which didnt then have a command/base close to Arunachal Pradesh, could have significantly altered the wars outcome given the overall strategic balance.
It was later revealed that with mounting Sino-Soviet tensions, the USSR refused to supply spares for the warplanes transferred to China, thus grounding much of its air force. But this wasnt known in 1962 to Indian leaders, who depended primarily on the CIA for intelligence. But that doesnt lend credibility to Brownes claims.
At any rate, having militarily humbled India, the Chinese voluntarily vacated the posts which they could have continued to occupy, and withdrew to their November 1959 positions. They didnt take prisoners of war although they could have easily done so. The Chinese could have marched all the way to Kolkata without meeting much resistance, but stopped well short of the border. The Peoples Liberation Army treated the surrendered Indian officers courteously and flew down some of the unfit ones to the border. In some instances, its soldiers even oiled and polished the firearms seized from Indian troops before returning them!
This doesnt argue that the Chinese were or are angels, but only that the primary purpose of their 1962 operation was to repulse Indias ill-conceived forward policy, of evicting them from disputed areas without seriously negotiating the border issue.
Many Indian leaders harboured the delusion that they could inflict a military defeat on China. Gen Kaul had declared that a few rounds fired at the Chinese would cause them to run away. The then home minister Lal Bahadur Shastri threatened to evict the Chinese from the disputed areas just as easily as India had thrown Portugal out of Goa.
As Indias rout became imminent, Jawaharlal Nehru panicked and begged the US for military help and air cover in the fight for the survival of freedom and independence in this subcontinent and rest of Asia. He wrote two desperate letters to President Kennedy on November 19, which were suppressed in India, and remained classified in the US until recently. They expose the depths to which Nehrus morale had sunk.
Confirming the IAFs weakness, Nehru wrote: We have repeatedly felt the need of using [our] air arm ..., but have been unable to do so as in the present state of our air and radar equipment we have no defence against retaliatory action .... To attack Chinese air bases, Nehru wanted two squadrons of B-47 bombers, for which Indian pilots and technicians would be trained in the US.
Arms poured in from the US, and Britain and Israel too. US ambassador JK Galbraith also recommended that elements of the Seventh Fleet be sent into the Bay of Bengal. Thus the aircraft carrier Enterprise arrived as a mark of solidarity with India. This manoeuvre was repeated during the Bangladesh war, when it was seen as menacing.
The 1962 war isnt even a distant memory in Beijing. But it continues to rankle in India although it claimed fewer casualties than the Indian Peace-Keeping Force operation in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. This is largely because its tied up with a much greater failure on Indias part namely, refusal to discuss the boundary question with China while asserting colonial-era claims to territory along an undemarcated border.
India demanded that the Chinese accept the McMahon Line (negotiated by the British in 1914 with Tibet, but which China never accepted) in the Northeast, and the Johnson map in the west, both part of the British policy of extending colonial domination. As the Indian National Congress recognised in the 1930s, the policy was guided by considerations more of holding India in subjection than of protecting her borders, and India as a self-governing country can have nothing to fear from her neighbouring states...
However, the rulers of independent India, contradictorily, behaved as heirs of the colonial state. Many claimed, citing the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, that the McMahon Line coincided with Indias borders as they had supposedly existed for 2,000 years, in which the striving of the Indian spirit was directed towards these Himalayan fastnesses.
They repeatedly spurned Chinese proposals for talks. In 1960, they rejected in Zhou Enlais offer, following a new boundary agreement accepting the McMahon Line where it abutted on Burma, of a similar agreement with India, in exchange for Indias acceptance that Aksai Chin in the west belonged to China. This would have been eminently practical because Aksai Chin matters to China, but not India, to whom Arunachal is important.
After 1959, Nehru came under domestic pressure to demonstrate firmness. The forward policy and the 1962 debacle followed. To cover that up, chauvinism was drummed up through the media, text-books and semi-official accounts.
The real lessons to be drawn here is that India must open negotiations with China on the border issue. The way forward lies in reconciliation and talks on the Chinese-proposed package deal, not hubristic claims about whether India could have won the war or can still avenge its defeat.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in
http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-New...ar-50-years-on
udah 50 tahun, tapi luka di hati inspektur vijay keknya masih belum sembuh
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