The Longest August (26 page)

Geography coupled with their military engagement in Tibet favored the Chinese. They approached the battle fronts from the fairly flat Tibetan plateau, which was conducive to road building and troop movement. They had also been fighting the armed rebels in Tibet since the mid-1950s and were used to combat in mountains. (India's troops with high-altitude fighting experience were posted in Kashmir along the border with Pakistan.) By contrast, Indian soldiers had to ascend very steep hills covered with thick vegetation in wet weather. Their outmoded .303 rifles were no match for the Chinese troops' automatic weapons.

During the war, Zhou and Nehru corresponded daily. On October 24 Zhou offered a cease-fire package. In principle, each side should withdraw twelve miles from the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and disengage, he proposed. If India agreed to this, then China would withdraw its frontier guards in the Eastern Sector north of the LAC and disengage. Zhou offered to visit Delhi to seek a friendly settlement of the dispute. “What is the Line of Actual Control?” retorted Nehru. He rejected Zhou's proposal.
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The next day the Chinese occupied Tawang and stopped there.

Nehru sent off frantic appeals for military assistance to the leaders of America, Britain, and the Soviet Union. John Galbraith, the gangling, gaunt-faced US ambassador in Delhi, and Sir Paul Gore-Booth, the short, plump high commissioner of the United Kingdom—nicknamed Laurel and Hardy by the diplomatic corps—got frantically busy. In his memoirs,
Ambassador's Journal
, Galbraith described the Indian leader on October 28 as “frail, brittle and seemed small and old. He was obviously desperately tired.”
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Washington and London rushed vital arms and ammunition to India by gigantic transport aircraft, to Pakistan's distress.

What concerned Kennedy and British prime minister Harold Macmillan—not to mention Nehru—was Pakistan opening a new front against India in Kashmir. “The Pakistanis continue to make pro-Chinese noises, and three Indian divisions are being kept along the Pakistani border,” noted Galbraith in his memoirs. “This upset the Indians.”
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His counterpart in Pakistan, Walter McConaughy, intervened, urging the Pakistani foreign minister Muhammad Ali Bogra that his country should not do anything to embarrass India.

Unsurprisingly, President Ayub Khan spied a golden opportunity to squeeze Nehru on the Kashmir issue. He told McConaughy that Pakistani neutrality in the Sino-Indian War could be assured only by Delhi's concessions on Kashmir. The unmistakable inference was that an Indian refusal would induct Pakistan into the war, thus forcing India to fight on two fronts. “My concern was about equally divided between helping the Indians against the Chinese and keeping peace between the Indians and the Pakistanis,” wrote Galbraith. “The latter had grievances against the Indians which they considered, not without reason, to have substance. The nightmare of a combined attack by Pakistan and China, with the possibility of defeat, collapse and even anarchy in India, was much on my mind.”
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Later, when McConaughy was instructed to approach Ayub Khan to assure Nehru that “they wouldn't do anything to embarrass the Indians in their time of trouble,” the Pakistani president preferred a letter
to that effect from Kennedy.
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He received one soon after. At the same time Washington urged Nehru to provide Pakistan with data on Indian troop movements in Kashmir and send a friendly message to Ayub Khan. He complied.
37
Only then did Ayub Khan finally give the assurance that Nehru sought anxiously.

As for the more ominous superpower confrontation, to the relief of the world at large, Kennedy and Khrushchev resolved their eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation on October 29. The Kremlin agreed to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for the White House removing its Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Turkey. Nehru sent congratulatory letters to Kennedy and Khrushchev, hoping that they would both now pay greater attention to pulling India out of the quagmire it had fallen into.

In Delhi, while a record 165 members participated in the parliamentary debate on the war from November 8 to 15, patriotic fervor gripped the nation. In the four leading Indian cities young men lined up at army recruitment centers. In normal times these offices were open only twice a week, and most volunteers failed the physical test. Now the lowering of the strict physical requirements induced by the national emergency drew multitudes of casual laborers, factory hands, and jobless graduates, who were attracted by the prospect of assured food and accommodation, not to mention a worthwhile purpose to their wayward existence that would come with a military uniform.

The Chinese broke the lull on the battlefield on November 15 by assaulting Walong at the easternmost point of the McMahon Line. The Indian regiments retreated in disarray, many of their ranks getting mowed down by the enemy and others throwing away their arms and fleeing. The dazed Indian commanders could not decide where to make their last stand. Finally, they settled for the fourteen-thousand-foot-high Se-La Mountain Pass, fifteen miles south of Tawang. But their ranks failed to hold Tawang. This compelled their officers to order a withdrawal toward Bomdi La, ninety miles inside NEFA. The relentless advance of the Chinese continued, with Bomdi La being their latest prize. Panic gripped the adjoining Assam province. Its large Tezpur settlement turned into a ghost town.

Consternation spread to Delhi and struck Nehru. “Late that night [November 20, 1962] Nehru made an urgent, open appeal for the intervention of the United States with bomber and fighter squadrons to go into action against the Chinese,” stated Neville Maxwell, a British journalist and author. “This appeal was detailed, even specifying the number of
squadrons required—fifteen.”
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Nehru's strategy was to bomb the supply lines of the Chinese as well as their gasoline dumps, with the warplanes of the US Seventh Fleet stationed in the Bay of Bengal to provide air cover for the major cities of India. The Indian embassy in Washington received this message at nine
pm
local time on November 19, after President Kennedy had retired for the day. “So you couldn't last out even two weeks,” mocked Kennedy's special assistant. “Churchill fought the war without American weapons for two years.”
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Suddenly the crisis passed. At midnight on November 20, having established its superiority in weaponry, strategy, communications, logistics, and planning, China declared a unilateral cease-fire, and added that after their withdrawal the Chinese frontier guards would be “far behind their positions prior to September 8, 1962.” Beijing's decision was in line with what Mao had told the Politburo on October 18: “However, our counter-attack is only meant to serve a warning to Nehru and the Government of India that the boundary question cannot be resolved by military means.”
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India accepted the cease-fire without saying so explicitly. On November 22 the Chinese pulled back to the north of the McMahon Line and in Ladakh to the positions they held before the war.

Overall, this was a limited war between Asia's mega-nations. Neither side deployed its air force. China lost only 722 troops. And India's loss of 3,100 soldiers included 1,700 who went missing—that is, froze to death in snow drifts or collapsed in wet forests.

India's defeat, illustrated by the humiliating disproportion in its battle­field fatalities, was implicitly dramatized in the Bollywood movie
Haqeeqat
(Hindi: Reality). During the Sino-Indian war in Ladakh, an Indian platoon, considered dead, is rescued by the locals. When it is ordered to retreat from its post, surrounded by the Chinese, an Indian captain and his Ladakhi girlfriend hold the enemy at bay to facilitate the platoon's safe withdrawal. In the process, they die. But the retreating troops find themselves heavily outnumbered and get killed to the last man. The movie was meant to highlight the patriotic fervor that filled Indian soldiers. It was released in 1964 after the death of Nehru in May.
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Nehru's Obstinacy on Kashmir

Within a month of the end of the Sino-Indian War, Kennedy and Macmillan agreed to provide Delhi with $120 million worth of emergency
military aid. To fulfill the US-UK obligation to Ayub Khan for staying his hand during the Sino-Indian conflict, US special envoy Averell Harriman and British foreign minister Duncan Sandys urged Nehru to enter into talks with Pakistan.

At first Nehru refused to include Kashmir, but later he relented. On November 30 he and Ayub Khan issued a joint statement that effort must be made to resolve outstanding differences between the two countries on “Kashmir and other related matters.” But characteristically Nehru told the Lok Sabha the next day that to upset the present arrangements regarding Kashmir would be harmful to future Indo-Pakistan relations.
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The Indian delegation led by Foreign Minister Swaran Singh met its Pakistani counterpart led by Muhammad Ali Bogra in Rawalpindi in mid-December, with the resident US and British envoys monitoring the talks by staying in the same building. The two sides decided to hold a second round in Delhi in late January 1963. By then Bogra would be dead, and Zulfikar (aka Zulfi) Ali Bhutto would succeed him as Pakistan's foreign minister. The talks in Delhi led nowhere. Bhutto suggested third-party mediation to Galbraith and Gore-Booth. Nehru rejected this promptly.

On the eve of the next round in Karachi on February 8, 1963, Ayub Khan in his interview with an American reporter repeated his statement of March 22, 1961: Pakistan was open to a solution other than a plebiscite in Kashmir, but such a proposal should come from India.
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The latest session between the two delegations ended with a joint communiqué that referred to “various aspects relevant to the settlement of the Kashmir problem.”

On March 2, 1963, following two years of negotiations, the Ayub Khan government signed a border demarcation treaty with China that involved Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Unlike India, Pakistan renounced previous claims based on obsolete British India maps. China reciprocated by ceding 750 square miles of the territory it had been administering. Beijing acquired legitimacy over its control of the Khunjerab Pass in the Karakoram mountain range on the northern border of Pakistan's federally administered Gilgit-Baltistan. This mountain pass was of vital, strategic importance to the China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

When India objected to the Pakistan-China treaty, Bhutto asserted that his country had not ceded any territory to China. Responding to the pressure of Galbraith and Gore-Booth, the Indian and Pakistani delegations kept up the ritual of talking to each other. The Kennedy administration intervened directly. It referred Nehru to the growing demand by
the US Congress to tie its military aid to India to the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. Two more sessions followed in April and May. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.

Despite this lack of progress, after their meeting at Macmillan's country house in Sussex, Kennedy and Macmillan decided to give India an Anglo-American air umbrella to familiarize the Indian air force with super­sonic fighter bombers and draft plans to assist the bolstering of India's defenses against the threat of a renewed Chinese attack. The Pentagon agreed to modernize some mountain army divisions of India.
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The tightening of these defense ties alarmed Pakistani leaders, who could do no more than lodge written protests.

The Washington-London military aid enabled India to double its army divisions to twenty-two and expand its air force and navy.
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The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped India raise a secret Special Frontier Force (SFF) composed of dissident Tibetans under the command of Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban to harass the Chinese troops in Tibet.
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The SFF was renamed Establishment 22 (so called because Uban was the commander of 22 Mountain Regiment during World War II), located next to the headquarters of the Defense Ministry in Delhi.

The Anglo-American bounty to Delhi left Ayub Khan and the fiery Bhutto fuming. The goodwill Kennedy had generated among Pakistanis by welcoming Ayub Khan with grand gestures evaporated. In July 1961 Kennedy had honored the Pakistani president with a ticker-tape parade on New York's Fifth Avenue and a state dinner at Washington's Mount Vernon. In September 1962 the US president hosted him at his family mansion in Rhode Island and at his farm in Middleburg, Virginia.

But bolstered by the generous US-UK military aid to India, Nehru put the Kashmir question on the backburner, leaving Ayub Khan to wring his hands in frustration.

On the other hand, defeat at the hands of the Chinese left Nehru a shattered man. His health suffered. In the summer and autumn of 1963 he spent considerable time in the salubrious climate of Kashmir to repair his failing physical and mental powers.

The Prophet's Missing Hair: A Turning Point

The people in the troubled state were transfixed by the “Kashmir Conspiracy” case involving Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah and twenty-three others
accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Initiated in 1958, the case dragged on for years, against the background of the return to power of Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad's team. As a result of a glaringly rigged election in February–March 1962, his National Conference garnered 70 of the 75 Assembly seats. In September the special magistrate trying the accused transferred the case to a higher court.

Over the years, the corruption and tyranny of Muhammad's regime, mitigated somewhat by a generous food subsidy and rapid expansion in educational facilities funded by Delhi, had become unbearable. In October 1963, under the guise of implementing a plan to reinvigorate the Congress Party and its allies (which included the National Conference), Nehru got several chief ministers, including Muhammad, to resign and take up party work.