That exactly is what is being misinterpreted by many of our friends here. Your post detailing the debacle of '62 gives the impression, that wasn't your intention I believe, that IA and Nehru were to blame for the failure. That may or may not be the case - I am not an expert here, you are. But less informed people tend to take that as a tacit confession that Nehru was indeed responsible for the mess, while au contraire, the reasons for this conflict started way back in the 50's with China's posturing as the CIA reports mention. One often also neglects that China choose the time of Cuban crises to precipitate this crisis and stopped hostilities and withdrew once the Cuban crises blew over. Your post coupled with specific passages taken out of context from the CIA report are being used to portray India as the aggressor.
A lot was on GoI's plate in the years following Independence and ignoring the threat or postures taken by the Chinese was a blunder. But priorities were different then and what ensued, ensued. Blame it on incompetence or lack of priority on India's part but giving China a wide berth is plain wrong.
This is going to be painful, and I request your sympathetic attention.
I do in fact blame Nehru, and the Indian Army, among others, for the debacle, in an outbreak of hostilities that should not have happened, and that overshadows our security world-view as a result.
But they were not solely to blame, and that, I understand, is the point that you are making.
Nehru was swept along by his self-created self-imposed vision of a statesman setting the world to rights, now that he and his comrades had set India to rights. This quest for prominence and leadership on the world stage could well have belonged to him in more durable fashion if he had handled the China question with the statesmanship that he projected. But, rapt in an internationalist frame of mind, he lost track of his own country's interests.
There were other mistakes, other faults.
The use of the most convenient maps, rather than other, less convenient ones, was very strange. His refusal to acknowledge the essential fuzziness of British views of the boundary, both the clumsy and botched attempts of McMahon at boundary delineation, and the wildly ambitious and greedy Charles Johnson pushing the boundary to the Kuen-Lun Mountains on the other side, was one of the keys to the solution of the problem. His belief that the expressed good intentions of the Chinese leadership, as conveyed by Zhou enLai, would extend to treating the border issue as a game of chess with the soldiers of either side serving as live pieces, was silly, at the mildest, insane, at the extreme. But he did worse, in his interactions with the Indian Army, for instance.
Between his fascination for Kashmiri Pandits, and ill-concealed efforts at every possible opportunity to promote their individual causes, the eccentric intellect of Krishna Menon, right in most things but always wrong overall, the slimy B. M. Kaul, and a bunch of sycophants described in cruel but fitting terms as the Kaul-boys, the Indian Army was fighting a difficult battle from the outset. It allowed its best general at that time, S. P. P. Thorat, to retire in the face of the greater seniority of P. N. Thapar, who turned out to be India's worst COAS. What it did on one of the three battle-fields beggars description. However, my lingering on those events was intended, I repeat, to make us conscious of how badly we fought some of that war.
This is by no means to absolve the Chinese establishment; there is no point in repeating the various ways in which they took advantage of Nehru's foolishness to build themseves a fool-proof position legally and on the ground.
So there you are.
) ... I believe this giant sould not be a threat for indians' own sake !!!! anyways ....
