When the Steel Frame suffered a meltdown

Sixty years of the Chinese invasion of India is an apt occasion to revisit the role of the ‘culpabilis’ men of this national disaster. The Latin word ‘culpa’, wherefrom comes ‘culpabilis’, meaning culpable or guilty, thereby implies the moral blameworthiness for an avoidable happening. Nevertheless, whether the crushing defeat of the Indian Army in 1962 was avoidable or not is still the subject of a heated debate.

A key feature of the 1962 war is the indisputable centrality of the roles of the then Prime Minister Nehru and Defence Minister VK Krishna Menon, who are universally held culpable. The debate continues unabated as the debacle hasn’t yet been eclipsed by any fact-finding attempt to determine to what extent those whose job it was to prepare the fighting force to face the foe on the frontier proved themselves competent or incompetent.

Obviously, the question comes because collectively both civil and military policymakers of the day miserably failed and brought themselves to face the charge of being comprehensively culpable for the catastrophic outcome of the combat.

That the then PM and his close aide (Defence Minister) were prime custodians of the state’s security apparatus is beyond doubt.

However, the role of the bureaucracy has hardly been put under the lens. The military failed and is criticised, but why no one talks of the role of the top bureaucracy of the day? How come the famed British-formed Steel Frame can never be taken to task, however, turbulent the tempest? Didn’t the Defence Ministry always hold sway over the disposal of all proposals coming from the forces for government clearance — from bullets to bazookas, tanks to tankers, machine guns to manpower, mountain clothing to mapping positions of the Himalayan border through meetings and discussions on the high table of diplomats and ministry personnel? Didn’t the then PM have an abiding trust, faith and confidence in the capability and competence of India’s civil servants? Didn’t they constitute the eyes and ears of the political leadership?

To understand the reality in depth, one has to refer to a few chronicled lines of Brigadier John Dalvi, who spent six months and 12 days in Chinese captivity. On return to Delhi, and having an audience with the then Army Chief, Brigadier Dalvi referred to the former’s verbatim comments: “Write a report… To teach ourselves how not to hand over a brigade on a plate to the Chinese in future.” How strange! Why none appears to have asked the simple and basic questions: when, why and who ordered or decided to “hand over a brigade on a plate to the Chinese?” Was it done by the then Prime Minister or Defence Minister? Individually or collectively? Thereby, short-circuiting the entire chain of military command? In whose hand lies the command, control and communication pertaining to the deployment and disposition of the Army’s operational units?

Ironically, it came from the pen of Brigadier Dalvi, the prisoner of war who had brilliantly and with ruthless honesty summed up the entire 1962 perspective in just six lines: “1962 was a national failure of which every Indian is guilty. It was failure in the Higher Direction of War, failure of the Opposition, failure of the General Staff (myself included); it was a failure of Responsible Public Opinion and the Press. For the Government of India, it was a Himalayan Blunder at all levels.”

The war was an epilogue to the India-China bilateral. The prologue had begun to be scripted more than a decade earlier. Indian political bosses were genuinely naïve and well-meaning, not nasty, brutish and mean like the bloodthirsty dictator of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

India began its journey in the “tryst with destiny” mode, along with “I too have a dream”, thought in mind. Rightly or wrongly, volunteering political bloodshed has never been the way for the pioneer leaders of free India. And that’s exactly where the Indian weakness came to the fore in the realpolitik of territorial aggression and expansion. The penchant for non-violence and the diplomatic route of India didn’t gel with the battle-hardened CPC-People’s Liberation Army (PLA) duo, which had a record of over 20 million murders in a quarter of a century of a civil war.

Thus, the irony of 1962 is that till 1958, there didn’t appear any sign of Hindustan-Han hostility in the high Himalayas. New Delhi and the Dragon were on the best of terms. And, each knew that whereas the McMahon Line was the real border in the eastern sector, the CPC-PLA interest lay in targeting the west (the Tibet-Xinjiang corridor). Hence, all that was required on the part of both was a binding agreement on the diplomatic table to the mutual satisfaction of New Delhi and Beijing. But that was not to be. War followed.

A foreign correspondent, Neville Maxwell, had the audacity to access the ‘top-secret’ military inquiry report to come up with a bestseller, India’s China War. Nothing, though, could be more biased and obnoxiously subjective, castigating only the democratic polity of India without any access to Chinese papers, thanks to the Defence Ministry bureaucracy. Despite violations of the Official Secrets Act, 1923, none was brought to justice. None explained the irresponsible and criminal mens rea of the officials.

True, the buck stops with the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister. But, the same Prime Minister also had, on several occasions, informed the country of “malevolence and perfidy” of China and had the courage of his convictions to state on the floor of the Lok Sabha as early as on November 20, 1950 (after the CPC-PLA conquered and usurped independent Tibet): “Our maps show that the McMahon Line is our boundary and that is our boundary, map or no map. That fact remains and we stand by that boundary, and we will not let anybody come across the boundary.”

Nevertheless, what was boldly stated in November 1950 and what happened in October-November 1962 was a colossal collapse. A horrendous implementation of an honest intention. It takes one to the military adage: “There’s no bad combatant, only a bad commander.” In civilian jargon: “There are no bad subjects, only a bad ruler.” Either way, the failure of the civil-military combine to perform its duty is inescapable.