Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
deep Indian hostility that would long mitigate against Chinese efforts to
normalize relations with India. Yet offsetting these costs was an even greater
gain: a far more realistic, sober, and cautious Indian approach toward China.
India's moves
vis-à-vis
China were subsequently far more cautious. It was upon
this greater Indian sobriety that subsequent Sino-Indian friendship would grow, at
least in the Chinese view of things.
Let us again imagine a different outcome in 1962. The outcome that transpired
was not inevitable. India had many tactical and strategic advantages which more
hard-minded Indian leaders could have seized. China's economy was in a state
of collapse. One of the most devastating famines of modern history had just
swept across China with perhaps tens of millions starving to death. China was
isolated from its erstwhile ally, the USSR; the Sino-Soviet alliance had collapsed.
The Tibetan populace cowered fearfully under brutal Chinese repression, and
almost certainly would have rallied to a liberation force acting with Indian
support and under the Dalai Lama's imprimatur. There was in India a pool of
tens of thousands of young Tibetan men who had recently fled Maoist misrule in
Tibet and who would have been enthusiastic fighters in a war to liberate Tibet.
China's long logistic lines from Sichuan and Gansu were vulnerable to
interdiction. Distances from economic centers in India to the Lhasa-Shigatze
heartland of Tibet were far shorter and less rugged than comparable distances
from centers in China. The actual outcome of the 1962 clash was not a result of
advantages one-sidedly in favor of China. It was, rather, a result of the fact that
China had political-military leaders who seized whatever advantages China had,
while India had leaders who were positively feckless in their disregard for the
realities of military operations.
India's leaders had allowed India's military capabilities to atrophy in the
1950s and then, from this position of weakness, ordered assertive policies
designed to expel Chinese military forces from areas claimed by India. This
alone was a receipt for disaster. But there was much more; the indictment of
India's handling of the 1962 war could hardly be more damning.
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Indian leaders ordered Indian forces to defend every inch of Indian territory at
the boundary, thereby ensuring that Indian forces would be strong nowhere and
could not choose particularly advantageous territory on which to make their
decisive stand. Indian leaders deployed to the high Himalayas troops
acclimatized to the plains of the subcontinent, gave them inadequate logistic
support, allowed their command to drift with an ill and over-age general in
charge, and ignored intelligence pointing to a probable Chinese resort to force.
India's leaders ordered Indian forces to undertake impractical defensive and
offensive operations oblivious to tactical and logistic realities.
Let us imagine that India had had more realistic leaders in 1962. Suppose the
broad contours of the planned PLA offensive had been detected by vigilant,
Tibetan-aided and perhaps CIA-aided, Indian intelligence services. Suppose that
