Revisiting The China War 1962

When the 1962 war ended, not only had India been defeated, but also abandoned by the world. The Chinese victory was complete, while India's prestige was a shambles

- R. Prasannan

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, goes an old proverb. India’s political and military leaders did exactly that in 1962.

On February 4, 1962, idealist Jawaharlal Nehru’s peacenik home minister Lal Bahadur Shastri declared: “If the Chinese will not vacate the areas occupied by her, India will have to repeat what she did in Goa.”

Indeed, what India had done in Goa six weeks earlier had startled the world—it had freed the Portuguese enclave by sending its Army. Here was an Asian country of starving millions, newly freed from colonial yoke and partitioned into two, militarily taking on a European power and prevailing. The action did strain

India’s ties with the western world, including Great Britain from where most of the India’s arms and spares were coming, as also the United States that was keen to rope India into an anticommunist alliance. But Nehru, who had been a passionate campaigner against colonialism, did not care.

In India’s neighbourhood, the action rang alarm bells: is India rising militarily and getting assertive? In China, with whom India had a long-standing border dispute despite warm political and diplomatic relations, it brought back nightmares of Indian military actions such as the 1904 Younghusband expedition when a force of just about 3,000 British and Indian troops simply walked across the Himalayas, massacred thousands, and captured Tibet's capital, Lhasa.