Horemheb's Musings

During the recently concluded Budget session of Indian Parliament Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned a particular book that he suggested would enlighten the historical sensibilities of a certain quinquagenarian ( between the ages of 50 and 59) youth leader of the opposition party. The book is “JFK’s Forgotten Crisis – Tibet, The CIA, and the Sino-Indian War,” by Bruce Riedel. It was quite an illuminating and educational read for me.

While I was aware of the United States of America supplying India with arms during the Sino Indian War of 1962, US assistance in creating the Establishment 22/Special Frontier Force and the joint Indo-US surveillance of Chinese nuclear testing at Lop Nur in Xinjiang, this was the first time I am hearing about how the United States Air Force, Royal Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force were almost deployed to India to defend against People’s Liberation Army Air Force.

Thanks to the Himalayan incompetence of the Nehru, VKK Menon, General PN Thapar and Lt Gen BM Kaul the poorly equipped and improperly Indian Army units in NEFA ( Arunachal Pradesh) and Aksai Chin were routed. PLA crossed Bomdila and were days away from entering the Assam plains while a reserve PLA formation was waiting near Doklam to cut off the Siliguri Corridor. The fear of losing the entire North East had caused Nehru and Kaul to panic and finally seek US assistance through Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith. There were two letters sent on the 19th of November, 1962 from Nehru to Kennedy when Nehru explicitly asked for direct military intervention from USAF to defend Indian skies against a potential PLAAF air attack so that Indian Air Force could conduct offensive operations in Tibet.

Jawaharlal Nehru and VKK Menon already had to swallow a bitter pill in late October when PRC attacked when they had to swallow their high principled Anti Americanism and had to ask US for military aid which Americans obliged in their Cold War quest to oppose Communist China. Now after a tactical withdrawal PLA was hitting India hard again and India was at the verge of catastrophe. So Nehru resorted to his final resort – On 19th of November, 1962 he wrote two letters to US seeking military intervention. The two letters were written hours apart, the second one necessitated by the incoming flow of bad news from NEFA. Nehru basically asked US to take over India’s air defence and deploy US, UK and Australian air forces to defend India.

These letters were long denied by successive governments of India, US and UK. The letters were finally declassified into public domain by the US State Department and JFK Presidential Library in 2010.

US immediately sent a delegation led by Ambassador Averell Harriman to assess the units required to be deployed and US Pacific Fleet was ordered to send a Carrier Battle Group to Bay of Bengal.

On the 21st of November, 1962 PRC unilaterally declared a ceasefire and withdrew to its Line of Actual Control in NEFA while retaining the territories it had captured in Aksai Chin.

After the conflict though US and UK continued their discussions for a military alliance with India which a now chastened Nehru was quite amicable towards. Unfortunately Macmillan chose to push in his Kashmir agenda as a precondition for the military alliance. A weakened, paranoid but correctly outraged Nehru refused to discuss Kashmir while it was facing an existential threat from China. The momentum squandered by UK was regained only by the November of 1963 however Kennedy was assassinated days before the talks could be resumed. By the time Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B Johnson was appraised of the talks, Nehru passed away in May of 1964. By the time Lal Bahadur Shastri could be brought up to speed events across the globe started spiralling in different directions with Vietnam War and 1965 war with Pakistan.

The fact that an Indo-US military alliance was almost on the table in 1963 is quite remarkable! Had not Harold Macmillan sought to push in the Kashmir agenda by blackmailing India and had not John F Kennedy been assassinated how different the world would have looked today?

Instead of the Indo-Soviet/Russian military alliance it would have been an Indo-US military alliance that would have lasted the decades! If a military pact was signed between India and US in 1963 Pakistan would not have been emboldened to launch its wars of 1965, 1971 and 1999. The Shaksgam Valley trade between Pakistan and China could have led to US declaring enmity with Pakistan and thus US would not have used Pakistan as its conduit to open relations with PRC. US would not have been antagonistic towards India in 1971 war. India and not China would have been the world’s second largest economy today.

So many missed opportunities and I am compelled to squarely blame Harold Macmillan’s government of the United Kingdom for sabotaging it in their continuing attempts to appease Pakistan. And what did US and UK gain by appeasing Pakistan and China? 9/11, grooming gangs and a super power People’s Republic of China that is infinitely more dangerous and a greater existential threat than Soviet Union ever was even at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis (16 to 29 October, 1962), which too unfortunately happened at the same time as the Sino- Indian War (20 October to 21 November, 1962)