Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (Hum.), Vol. 61(1), 2016, pp.

161-179

Review Article

Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA, and Sino-India
War, Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 2015, pp.177

Ruksana Kibria*

For millennia sharing more than a 2,500 mile-long common border, China
and India fought a limited war for the first time in their long history in1962 in
the contested borders along the Himalayan-Tibetan massif. The tortuous
course of the territorial spat may be simplified as a matter of border
demarcation, a hold-over from the British-colonial policy of maintaining
buffer zones between China and India. The crux of the dispute was the 350
mile-long McMahon Line,1 laid down as the border between India and Tibet.
by an agreement2 signed at the conclusion of a conference held in Simla,
India in July1914, between the Foreign Secretary of British India Sir Henry
McMahon and the Tibetan representative. The plenipotentiary of the Republic
of China, while attending the meeting, refused to sign the agreement since it
sought to establish a "veiled British protectorate" over Tibet, by dealing with
it as a de facto independent country, and as such, compromised Chinese
suzerainty over it. The British-Indian Government did not favor the
agreement since it was a contravention of the Anglo-Russian Convention of
1907,3 which reaffirmed Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, and reassured that it
would not deal with Tibet bilaterally without Chinese approval. It was only in

*
Professor, Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka
1 See Alastair Lamb, The McMahon Line: A Study in the Relations between India, China
and Tibet, 1904 to 1914, 2 Vols., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)
2 See Convention Between Great Britain, China, and Tibet, Simla (1914), http:// www.
tibetjustice.org/materials/treaties/treaties11.html. For a succinct historical background
of the Simla agreement, see K.N. Raghavan, Dividing Lines: Contours of India-China
Discord, (Mumbai: Platinum Press, 2012);Neville Maxwell, China's Borders:
Settlements and Conflicts, (New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2014).
3 See Convention Between Great Britain and Russia(1907), http://www. tibetjustice.org/
materials/ treaties/ treaties12.html
162 Ruksana Kibria

1937 that the Survey of India map showed the McMahon Line, running along
the crest of the Himalayas to be the official Indo-Tibetan borderafter
having tampered with the original Aitchison's Treaties of 1929 showing the
alignment of that border to be southwards along the foothills of Assam.4
While after 1947 the Indian government upheld the British colonial legacy, its
legality was acknowledged neither by the Nationalist Chinese government of
Chiang Kai-shek nor, after 1949, by the People’s Republic of China, led by
Mao Zedong. Once Tibet was reincorporated into the Chinese administration
in 1951, the erstwhile Indo-Tibetan border was transformed into the Sino-
Indian border, with profound implications for their bilateral relations.
Although the McMahon Line continued to be a disputed issue even at the
height of their friendship in the mid-1950s, Sino-Indian amity remained
unaffected, which the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru assiduously
sought to foster under the banner of Panchsheel5, the Bandung spirit, non-
alignment and Asian solidarity. However, their idealistic but fragile
framework began to give way once it was exposed to the blast of international
politics when, in 1959 the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama along with his
followers took refuge in India in the wake of an anti-Chinese uprising in
Lhasa.6 Since then, the Sino-Indian relations deteriorated precipitously,
leading to the implementation of the militarily untenable7 Indian strategy
called "forward policy" in 1961.8 On October 20, 1962, the negotiation

4 Ibid., p. 203.See also, K.N. Raghavan, op. cit.

5 The five principles of Sino-Indian peaceful coexistence: broadly, mutual respect for
each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-
interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and cooperation for mutual benefit,
peaceful coexistence.
6 According to Atul Bhardwaj, “In 1959, India entered the game of brinkmanship vis-à-
vis China and kept climbing up the escalation ladder. India was gullible enough to
follow western instructions both on Tibet and its boundary with China and ended up
fighting a frivolous war. By allowing asylum to Dalai Lama, India acted like a foolish
crow that hatched American strategic eggs.” “A Cuckoo Strategy on China,” Economic
and Political Weekly, September 20, 2014, Vol. XLIX, No. 38, p.31
7 Lt. Commander James Barnard Calvin (U.S. Navy), "The China-India Border War
(1962)," April 1984, Marine Corps Command and Staff College, http://www.
globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1984/CJB.htm
8 The controversial 1961 Indian policy of establishing military posts in the contested
Sino-Indian border areas, thus provoking the Chinese who regarded it as an
encroachment on their territory. Nehru reportedly thought it would bolster Indian
claims on the territories covered by this policy, since "possession was nine-tenths of
Review Article 163

between Jawaharlal Nehru and the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai having failed
earlier in April 1960, the first salvoes of what the Chinese characterised as
“Counterattack in Self Defense on the China-India Border,”9 were fired in the
remote northwestern (Aksai Chin)10 and northeastern (NEFA)11 border areas
of India. After a total of 10 days of active fighting, the campaign came to an
end on November 20, with the enigmatic unilateral Chinese declaration of
cease-fire and withdrawal of its forces from territories more than 100 miles
inside India. Caught in the quagmire of militant public opinion, parliamentary
intransigence, factional politics,12 and misguidance from the Historical
Division of the Ministry of External Affairs,13 the trauma of the impending
military catastrophe in the eastern sector compelled the beleaguered Indian
prime minister (for so long championing the cause non-alignment), to solicit
US military assistance.
Bruce Riedel, in JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA, and Sino-India War,
attempts to analyse the response the conflict elicited from the administration
of President John F. Kennedy (1961-63), whose "critical role in the Sino-

law." A.G. Noorani, "A Review Article: India's Forward Policy," The China Quarterly,
No.43, July-September 1970, p.137
9 Larry M. Wortzel, "Concentrating Forces and Audacious Action: PLA Lessons From
the Sino-Indian War," in Laurie Burkitt, Andrew Scobell and Larry M. Wortzel
(edited), The Lessons of History: The Chinese People's Liberation Army at 75,
(Carlisle, PA.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, July 2003), p.328,
http:// web.stanford.edu/group/tomzgroup/pmwiki/uploads/0199-2003-Burkitt-a-IEM.
Pdf., p.327
10 Aksai Chin, located between the Chinese province of Xinjiang, Ladakh in Indian
controlled Kashmir and Tibet. Prime Minister Nehru told the parliament on September
10, 1959 that, "It is an uninhabitable area, 17,000 feet high and it had not been under
any kind of administration. Nobody has been present there. It is a place where not even
a blade of grass grows." Quoted in Arun Kumar Banerji, "Borders," Chapter 6, in
Jayanta Kumar Ray, ed., Aspects of India's International Relations,1700-2000: South
Asia and the World Vol. X, Part 6, (New Delhi: Pearson, Longman, Centre for Studies
in Civilizations, 2007), p.226
11 North East Frontier Agency-NEFA, currently the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh.
12 See Yaacov Vertzberger, "Bureaucratic-organizational Politics and Information
Processing in a Developing State," International Studies Quarterly (1984), Vol. 28,
No.1, March 1984, pp. 69-95
13 In a November 1959 Note On the Historical Background of the Himalayan Frontier of
India, the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs claimed Aksai Chin to
be historically a part of Indian territory, which was not the case. Karunakar Gupta, The
Hidden History of the Sino-Indian Frontier, (Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1974), pp.
64, 65
164 Ruksana Kibria

Indian War of 1962," in the opinion of the author, a former Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, "has [...] been largely ignored. This book
seeks to fill that lacuna." Whether it lives up to his claim is debatable, though.
In a press conference in September 1963 Kennedy had stated that, "I can tell
you that nothing has occupied our attention more than India in the last nine
months."14 In that case, how could a such a top-priority issue, over which so
much presidential concern was expended, which Pakistan was told by the
Americans to be "the most dangerous move made by Mao since Korea in
1950," and which resulted in far-reaching political changes in India, along
with a shift in the geopolitical setting of South Asia, be a "forgotten crisis,"
while the concurrent "Cuban missile crisis," which was resolved without
escalation, receive such extensive media coverage and analytical focus?
Tibet occupies a prominent place in the book which, while related to the Sino-
Indian 1962 border encounter, was not necessarily the cause of it, as Riedel
seeks to make a case for: "The CIA operation helped persuade Chinese leader
Mao Zedong to invade India in October1962, an invasion that led the United
States and China to the brink of war and began a Sino-India rivalry that
continues today." The operation had been going on since 1956, but why did
Mao "invade" India six years later? However, towards the end of the book,
Riedel changes his tack and dismisses the Tibet mission as counter-
productive. He writes: "Indeed [it] never had any real chance of achieving its
aims. At most it was a nuisance to Mao and the Chinese Communist
leadership." Why then, one may wonder, was such a costly, risky and long-
term (1956-74), project undertaken by the CIA if it had only "nuisance-
value"? At one point though, he concedes that the flagging value of the Tibet
operation was redeemed when, in October 1961 the CIA-trained Tibetans
ambushed a People's Liberation Army (PLA) jeep in Tibet and "captured" a
leather bag containing highly classified reports on sensitive matters pertaining
to Chinese national security. It is indeed astonishing to know that the PLA
was in the habit of dispatching secret documents through the inhospitable and
desolate territory in unescorted vehicles!15

14 John F. Kennedy Press Conference, September 12, 1963, Audio Tape Accession
Number WH-215, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
15 A similar incident had reportedly occurred in November 1940 during World War II
when a British commercial ship S.S. Automedon was captured by a German vessel near
the tip of western Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. It was discovered to have contained
Review Article 165

The book itself opens with the state dinner for President Ayub Khan at Mount
Vernon, Virginia, in July 1961where the U.S. president feted his counter-part
and eulogized him as the "George Washington of Pakistan," the purpose of
this spectacular reception being cajoling him to resume the suspended
clandestine Tibet air-flights from East Pakistan. Would Kennedy have gone to
such lengths to “charm” his guest unless it was of critical importance for the
United States? One can surmise that the covert (and ultimately terminated),
Tibet mission did serve a purpose, but exactly what, is not clear, the author
remaining conveniently opaque about it.
Riedel attempts to move beyond the traditional interest-based analysis of state
behavior to an emphasis on personalities to be the driving force in the
conflict, thus giving an undue focus on the speculative, cognitive dimension
of decision-making. At one point he writes that, "Mao's misconceptions about
Nehru's intentions stemmed from the paranoid dictator's isolation from
outside opinion: He was surrounded by sycophants who told him what he
wanted to hear [emphasis added]." He then asserts that, "Mao probably
assumed that Nehru was a partner with the CIA and Washington in these
covert operations to assist the Tibetan resistance [emphasis added]." While
seductive, such assumptions remain hypothetical, unsupported by concrete
evidence. Seeking refuge in such a psychoanalytical ploy is almost like
leaning on feeble linguistic crutches in the absence of real analytical legs for
ambulation, which may be effective for obfuscation, but not as an explanatory
tool, a practice that was pioneered by the late M.I.T. Sinologist, Lucian W.
Pye who, in a biography16 of Mao, claimed that the Chinese leader rebelled in
order to regain a sense of "infantile omnipotence.”17 Likewise, in his widely

highly classified sensitive documents, including "a full copy of the August 1940 COS
Far Eastern Appreciation" detailing the vulnerabilities of the British strategic position
in Malaya and Singapore! It also stated that Britain would not intervene in case of
Japanese occupation of French Indo-China . Grasping their value, the documents were
in due course sent to Berlin from which the Germans shared the information with the
Japanese for whom it was supposedly an "intelligence windfall." See, "S.S. Automedon:
The Ship That Doomed A Colony," http://www.forcez-survivors.org.uk/ automedon.
html
16 Lucian W. Pye, Mao Tse-tung: the Man in the Leader, (New York: Basic Books,
1976).
17 Quoted in Douglas Martin, "Lucian W. Pye, "Bold Thinker on Asia, Is Dead at 86,"
The New York Times, September 11, 2008. Pye repeatedly referred to "Mao's
166 Ruksana Kibria

cited article, "China's Decision for War with India in 1962," John W. Garver,
an eminent Sinologist, too resorts to psychological jargon like perception,
misperception, fundamental attribution error and psychological projection to
establish his point:
A premise of the argument developed below is that what leaders think matters.
Some Realists find it satisfactory to look only at interests and policies, black-
boxing or ignoring the specific psychological processes through which leaders
18
arrive at their determinations about interests and policies.
But then "what leaders do think" has to be based on rational national interests,
not their irrational personal idiosyncrasies, the above argument being a plain
misuse of psychological tools19 for political purpose.
Riedel argues that by antagonizing India through the border conflict in 1962
Mao pushed it toward a closer collaboration with the United States,
something that he had “feared”. But according to Mikhail A. Suslov, the chief
ideologue of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), that was
precisely Mao's intention. In a draft report of December 1959 to the Central
Committee, CPSU, he stated that:
One should ask, what aims did Chinese comrades pursue in attacking Nehru so
uncompromisingly? As they explained it themselves, they stood by the
principle of "cohesion and struggle." According to [comrade] Mao Zedong,
they unmask Nehru as a "double-dealer," "half a man, half a devil," "half a
gentlemen, half a hooligan," and in doing this they allegedly "force" him to
strengthen friendship with the PRC.
A question, naturally, was raised how to live side by side with this "devil"?
How to build relations with India? The Chinese comrades found a solution in
forcing Nehru to repent and in pressuring him into cooperation with China. At
the same time the Chinese said that they visualize the possibility of the
downfall of the Nehru government and see no great trouble if a reactionary

narcissism and borderline personality," in "Rethinking the Man in the Leader," The
China Journal, No. 35 (Jan., 1996)
18 John W. Garver, "China's Decision for War with India in 1962," in Alastair Iain
Johnston and Robert S. Ross (edited), New Direction in the Study of China's Foreign
Policy, (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p.89. Steven A. Hoffmann, in
his otherwise impressive analysis of the war, India and the China Crisis,(Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990),used terms like "attitudinal prism,"
and "conceptual failure." Jian Chen in Mao’s China and the Cold War, (Chapel Hill
and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), referred to Mao’s ‘‘post-
revolution anxiety’’ (p.10) –whatever that may have meant.
19 Cheryl Payer Goodman, “REVIEW: Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics,”
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol.1, Number 3, March 1969, p.19
Review Article 167

pro-Western government comes to power in India. In their opinion, this would

only bring us closer to a revolution in India.20[Emphasis added. The last two
sentences are unrelated, the latter obviously being an afterthought.]
Such polemics while amusing, even comical, are a gross misrepresentation of
facts on Mao's part. According to the official records, the Indian Prime
Minister was unwilling to forsake the Sino-Indian friendship that he had
helped establish, and restraint being the "broader pattern" of Nehruvian
military policy toward China,21 he was committed to salvaging it till the final
stages of the crisis, negative media reports notwithstanding.22 In 1959 Nehru
was not only willing to “dispatch” the Dalai Lama elsewhere if his asylum in
India jeopardised Sino-Indian friendship, a suggestion at which Mao
cavilled.23 He was also forthcoming about compromising on the territorial
issue, which some in the Congress Party opposed.24
One of the weak points of the book is his failure to offer any compelling
explanation for the conundrum of China's sudden unilateral announcement of
cease-fire on November 20, only to restore status quo ante, which was further
mystified by Mao's sophistry.25 The author indicates that it was due to the

20 Draft report dated 18 December 1959,“On the [October 1959] trip of the Soviet party-
governmental delegation to the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” by M. Suslov to
CC CPSU Presidium for presentation to a forthcoming CC CPSU Plenum (excerpt).
Cold War International History Project, The Wilson Center, Washington D.C. http://
digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/112989.
21 Andrew Bingham Kennedy, The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru: National
Efficacy Beliefs and the Making of Foreign Policy, (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), p.236
22 See Steven A. Hoffmann, “Rethinking the Linkage between Tibet and the China-India
Border Conflict: A Realist Approach,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, Number 3,
Summer 2006, and Steven A. Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis,(Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1990)
23 Sankar Ghose, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1993),
p.294
24 The Sino-Indian Border Dispute: Section 1:1950-59, Central Intelligence Agency
declassified document, March 2, 1963, (Released in May 2007), P.1, https://www.
cia.gov/ library/readingroom/docs/polo-07.pdf
25 According to Mao, "People may ask if there is contradiction to abandon a territory
gained by heroic battle. Does it mean that the heroic fighters shed their blood in vain
and to no purpose? This is to put the wrong question. Does one eat to no purpose
simply because he relieves himself later? Does one sleep in vain because one wakes up
and goes about? I do not think the questions should be asked thus; rather one should
keep on eating and sleeping or fighting. These are illusions born out of subjectivism
168 Ruksana Kibria

implicit threat of US military involvement in the fray that gave a signal to the
Chinese to withdraw, and therein, as a far-fetched post hoc rationalisation,26
lies the rub. To corroborate his argument he merely adduces the views of
Brigadier John P. Dalvi27 from his memoir, (a scathing indictment of Nehru's
non-aligned foreign policy), treating them almost like ex cathedra
pronouncements: "From his POW camp where he was held in solitary
confinement by the PLA ... Dalvi credited Kennedy as a 'big brother and true
friend of India.' He later wrote that the Chinese withdrawal was the direct
result of President Kennedy's decisive action." Elsewhere Riedel writes that,
By withdrawing from NEFA, Mao also demonstrated restraint. China would
later point to its restraint in November 1962 as a sign that it was a responsible
member of the international community and should be given its seat in the UN
Security Council [emphasis added].
But wasn't Mao seeking to break with the norms of the very international
order that the author claims he was signaling to uphold? Mao’s ambivalence
regarding the professed goal of dismantling the established international
order, as well as seeking a place for China within it, thus opens to question
his revolutionary credentials.

A spate of publications on the subject since 1962, while shedding light on the
geo-political, economic and military impact of the conflict on India, do little
to elucidate the elusive Chinese interests in Mao's (personal) decision to
transform, through the political instrument of the Central Military
Commission (CMC),28 relatively minor border skirmishes into a war with

and formalism and do not exist in real life." "Mao’s return to power passes through
India." http://www.claudearpi.net/maintenance/uploaded_pics/Mao_1962_war.pdf
26 See Rup Narayan Das, The US Factor in Sino-Indian Relations: India's Fine
Balancing, IDSA Monograph Series No.46, October 2015,(New Delhi: Institute of
Defence Studies and Analysis), p.24
27 The commander of the ill-fated 7th infantry brigade that collapsed without any
resistance immediately after the beginning of Chinese assault near the Thagla Ridge on
October 20, 1962, and the senior-most Indian officer to be taken prisoner by the PLA.
28 Wortzel, "Concentrating Forces and Audacious Action: PLA Lessons From the Sino-
Indian War," Loc. cit., pp.346-7; Monika Chansoria, "Five Decades of China’s War on
India in 1962: Current Contextualisation," CLAWS Issue Brief, No.30, January 2013,
http://www.claws.in/images/ publication_pdf/ 1357201939IB%2030%20Monika.pdf.
Also see Ellis Joffe, Chapter 3,"The Military And China’s New Politics: Trends And
Counter-Trends," https://www.rand.org/ content/dam/rand/ pubs/conf_proceedings/.../
CF145.chap3.pdf
Review Article 169

profound political repercussions. Since the concept of "[t]eaching India a

lesson," as Mao purportedly sought to, is vague, it begs the question, what
exactly did he "teach" India apart from humiliating Nehru, up till then the
unrivaled Indian leader? Did it “knock” India back to the “negotiating table,”
which reportedly was Mao’s objective? It was only in 1994, 32 years later,
that India agreed to sign a treaty on confidence-building measures with China.

Neither does Riedel, while articulating US interests in the resolution of the

conflict and militarily assisting India, cogently discuss how the Chinese
interests were promoted by the military operations, and as such, it becomes
the crucial missing link --the actual "lacuna" in the narrative. He is remiss
about explaining how Nehru’s “diminished authority”29 and "the downfall of
[his] government" enhanced Chinese national interests or consolidated Mao's
revolutionary aspirations. The fact that, while expecting a renewal of the war
in the spring of 1963, Washington was at same time also seeking
reestablishment of trade relations with Beijing, is overlooked by him.30
Furthermore, in apparent defiance of Cold War logic, Anglo-American and
Chinese views about Nehru appeared to be not incompatible. By 1962 the
former had begun to regard the Indian leader as a “liability,” and in fact,
welcomed the Chinese incursions on the Himalayan borders,31 which for
Galbraith, whose memoir and journals Riedel quotes liberally, was also “the
kind of opportunity that comes once in a generation,”32 to steer Nehru’s foreign
policy toward the West, and disabuse him of the “folly” of non-alignment.33

Riedel mentions that, in 1964 Mao explained to a visiting Nepalese delegation

that the war with India was not about the border issue, but “Nehru and the
Indian government[’s belief about] Tibet belong[ing] to India.” But, on
another occasion , he also bragged to Felix Bandaranaike, the Ceylonese (Sri
Lankan) Foreign Minister, that Beijing wanted to demolish India’s “illusion

29 McGarr, op. cit., p.122. Also see Margaret W. Fisher, “India in 1963: A Year of
Travail,” Asian Survey,Vol.4, No.3, March 1964, pp.741-742
30 Atul Bhardwaj, “Cold War 2.0:Sino–US Strife and India,” Economic and Political
Weekly, August 22, 2015, Vol. L, No.34,p.11
31 McGarr, op.cit., p.119
32 Ibid.
33 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and
Pakistan, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.287
170 Ruksana Kibria

of grandeur,” in order to establish China’s preeminence in Asia.34 What, then,

was its actual motive in the war, in which “not a single” PLA soldier was
reportedly killed, nor were there any Chinese civilian casualties?35 Coinciding
as the Sino-Indian conflict did with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is indeed
baffling why, instead of taking advantage of “imperialist” US’s predicament
in the Caribbean, Mao attacked not Taiwan (unification with which, in fact,
was a top priority issue), but peripheral, nondescript and inaccessible
Himalayan tracts, just to make Indian leaders “appreciate[e] Chinese power”–
and did so with the US reassurance that it would not countenance Taipei’s
foray into the mainland. 36
The centrality of the puzzle, whether the war was planned by Mao long before
1962, or was an ineluctable escalation, has not been addressed by Riedel, or
for that matter, by others, either. The decision to counterattack was taken by
the Chinese CMC on October 16, 1962 to eliminate Indian troops that had
crossed the McMahon Line.37 The question is, how could the Chinese
overcome logistics and communication challenges, and mobilise 5 divisions
in Ladakh and NEFA across mountainous terrain within a few days, and be
prepared for attack by October 20—unless, of course, they had made the
necessary preparations long before that date. 38
As an aside, it can be stated that, the virtual absence of analyses in the public
domain from Chinese sources on a military engagement of such historical
import, which was "a source of great pride" for the PLA,39 is indeed
remarkable. In 1993 and 1994 two important studies were published (in
Chinese),40 revealing the exceptional extent and depth of Chinese access to

34 Ghose, op. cit., pp. 294, 295

35 Huiyun Feng, Chinese Strategic Culture and Foreign Policy Decision-
Making:Confucianism, leadership and war, (London and New York: Routledge,
2007), p.54
36 Enrico Maria Fardella, “Mao Zedong and the 1962 Cuban Missile,” Cold War History,
2015,Vol. 15, No. 1, p.87
37 Cheng Feng and Larry M. Wortzel , “PLA Operational Principles and Limited War:
The Sino-Indian War of 1962,” in Mark A. Ryan, David M. Finklestaein, and Michael
A. McDevitt, eds., Chinese Warfighting:The PLA Experience Since 1949, (Armonk,
New York and London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), p.182
38 Ghose, op. cit., p.294
39 Ibid., p.327
40 Xu Yan, Zhong-Yin Bianjie Zhizhan Lishi Zhenxiang (The historic truth of the Sino-
Indian border war the National Defence University in Beijing,( Hong Kong: Tian Di
Review Article 171

the intelligence on Indian military operations in 1962. However, they hardly

clarify how the brief border encounter with the poorly equipped, ill-prepared
and disorganized Indian forces served Chinese interests. It's indeed odd that
some sort of omerta-like silence about this pivotal issue seems to prevail in
the Chinese officialdom. It is only in India where one finds the most
agonizing soul-searching about the military disaster, concerning which scores
of books have been published. Most of what are thought to be the reasons for
the Chinese entry into the war have been gleaned from Western sources,41
which before 1970, i.e., before the normalisation of relations between the
United States and China, were anti-Chinese in tone, and after the Sino-
American rapprochement, sympathetic to the Chinese, particularly Mao.42 As
such, the interpretation and analytical treatment of the war have been more
political than historical.
Ideology as well as security concerns were instrumental in legitimising Mao’s
major foreign policy decisions,43 but in the case of the 1962 conflict with
India, any such reference to “ideology” was missing. Also, there’s a puzzling

Publishing Co., 1993); Jiang Siyi and Li Hui, et al., eds., Zhong-Yin Bianjing Ziwei
Fanji Zuozhan Shi (The history of China’s counterattack in self-defense on the Sino-
Indian border). Beijing: Junshi Kexue Chubanshe, 1994. Reference given in
Wortzel,"Concentrating Forces and Audacious Action: PLA Lessons From the Sino-
Indian War," Loc.cit., and Shiv Kunal Verma, 1962:The War That Wasn't, (Aleph
Book Company, New Delhi, 2016),
41 Neville Maxwell, India's China War, (Jonathan Cape, 1970); Garver, "China's Decision
for War with India in 1962," loc. cit., Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of
Deterrence: India and Indochina, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975),
Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Vol.III; The coming of
the Cataclysm 1951-1966,,(Oxford University Press, 1997); Steven A. Hoffmann, India
and the China Crisis,(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990);
Lt. Commander James Barnard Calvin (U.S. Navy), "The China-India Border War
(1962)," April 1984, Marine Corps Command and Staff College, http://www.
globalsecurity.org/ military/library/report/1984/CJB.htm.
42 Also see Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-
45, (New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan and Company, 1970), published on the eve of
President Richard Nixon's landmark visit to China in February 1972, as an example of
the role of American scholars in depicting Mao in a more positive light than Chiang
Kai-shek in the pre-1949 era, so as to create a public opinion receptive to the idea of
U.S. friendship with Maoist China, for so long regarded as an arch-foe. John King
Fairbank, The United States and China, third edition, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard.
University Press, 1971), too is similar in tone.
43 Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War, (Chapel Hill and London: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 9
172 Ruksana Kibria

asymmetry not only between the stated reasons for the Chinese entry into the
war (protecting Chinese territory from Indian incursions, teaching India a
lesson), and its outcome (the gradual shift away from the socialist moorings
of the Nehru era in India, undermining of his non-aligned policy, and an
increase in anti-Chinese sentiments among the common masses, etc.), but also
between the rhetoric of Mao's foreign policy itself (supporting fraternal
communist parties in Third World countries and promoting international class
war), and its actual practice (maintaining friendly relations with "bourgeois"
governments). According to Riedel himself, "Humiliating India would
demonstrate that China's hardline foreign policy and ruthless determination to
“communize” itself on its own without the aid of Soviet advisers was a
superior strategy to Khrushchev's more moderate policies." This, however, is
not factually validated. If Mao did believe that "ideology prevailed over
realism,"44 it was not reflected in his ambivalent foreign policy, least of all in
the curious border encounter in the high Himalayas, during which official
Chinese reports and speeches used terms like "national pride and dignity,"
"national feelings" and "national territory,”45 but not international, socialist or
communist. In other words, Mao's foreign policy was informed by
expediency and contingency rather than ideology. To quote Allen S. Whiting,

The Mao regime gave so little help to "National Liberation wars" as not to
provide a single success anywhere except Indochina where the fight was
primarily against a foreign government. The Chinese role in insurgency in
India, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia shows no
willingness on the part of the Chinese to furnish the support necessary to
46
assure victory against a local government.

44 Ibid. One instance of Mao's irrational rhetoric of revolutionary people's power was in
August 1950, a few months before the Chinese intervention in the Korean War when ,
while addressing a Politburo meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, he said:"[It]
may be a short war, a long war, a wide-ranging war, a nuclear war, and so on. If the
U.S. attacks with atomic bombs, we have no choice but to let strike since we do not
have them; this is something that we cannot control. But we are not afraid. We can still
respond with our hand grenades, and we must be prepared. "Quoted in Kennedy, op.
cit., p.75
45 David R. Devereux, “The Sino-Indian War of 1962 in Anglo-American Relations,”
Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 44, No. 1, January 2009, p.74
46 Quoted in Karunakar Gupta, (book review), Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of
Deterrence: India and Indochina, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975),
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.36, No.4, August 1977, p.714
Review Article 173

Interestingly, the 1962 Sino-Indian war was also China's “forgotten war,"47
with the decision-making process in Beijing for its entry into the war given
minimal media coverage. This absence of domestic publicity with regard to
the border war is indeed perplexing, since it does not accord with Mao’s
policy of using external threats or security concerns to bolster the legitimacy
of his regime. His decisions to intervene in the Korean War in 1950, and the
shelling of Quemoy and Matsui islands during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1958
were justified in the name of defending China’s security interests, which
otherwise would be severely endangered.48 It’s worth noting that, in the
Korean War, the Chinese intervened when the U.S.-led forces crossed the
38th parallel, but not the Yalu River, (the China-North Korea border), but in
1962 they “retaliated” after the Indians had encroached upon what the
Chinese considered to be their territory, (Dhola and Thag la Ridge) beyond
the McMahon Line. The latter case, a fortiori, should have merited not only
the invocation of the defence of Chinese national security, but even greater
publicity, which on the contrary, inexplicably was not the case.
In reality, Mao's revolutionary posturing did much to damage the standing of
the communist party of India (CPI). Even during the crisis, with the Nehru
government in disarray, Beijing, while liaising with the pro-Chinese CPI
faction, did not attempt to incite any war of national liberation against the
Indian government or sever diplomatic relations with New Delhi,49 but
provided assistance to the ethnic secessionist groups in northeast India.50
Moreover, the pro-Beijing CPI was actually discredited for supporting Beijing
during the crisis, by the pro-Moscow "moderate" faction of S.A. Dange. At
that time V.K. Krishna Menon, the controversial Indian Defense Minister,
lamented to Chester A. Ronning, the Canadian High Commissioner in New
Delhi, that the Chinese had set back the cause of socialism in India for several
years. In his words, “Even if we succeed in ultimately reaching a negotiated

47 John W. Garver, "China's Decision for War with India in 1962," in Alastair Iain
Johnston and Robert S. Ross (edited), New Direction in the Study of China's Foreign
Policy, (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p.86;Allen S. Whiting,
“China’s Use of Force, 1950-96, and Taiwan,” International Security,Vol.26, No.2,
Fall 2001, p.113
48 Jian Chen, op. cit., p.10
49 Peter Van Ness, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy: Peking's Support for Wars of
National Liberation,(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.100
50 Banerji, op. cit., p.229
174 Ruksana Kibria

settlement, India will continue to be intensely nationalistic and continue a

military preparedness program which will delay for a long time raising the
standard of living of the Indian people.”51 Indeed, as foreseen by him, the
Indian defense budget was almost doubled from $473 million in 1962/63 to
$867 million after 1963.52
There's also a debate about the authorship of Nehru's desperate second letter
requesting "a minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all weather fighters and
radar installations ...to be manned by US Air Force personnel,"53 tantamount
to a joint Indo-U.S. air defence of India,54 that he supposedly sent to Kennedy
late in the evening of November 19 (Washington time).55 It is speculated that
M.J. Desai, the Indian Foreign Secretary, may have drafted it, which was
unusual given the fact that Nehru would always write his own letters.56
According to his official biographer, S. Gopal, who had himself never seen it,
The letter is precise and too detailed about the assistance that India was
expecting, and even a foreign secretary as experienced as [...]Desai could not
have done that. My guess is that John Lall, the joint secretary in charge of the
Air Force, must have assisted Desai, because I found the same noting in his
57
brief to the defense minister for discussion with US and UK dignitaries.
Riedel however, blithely discusses the letter in a large section of the book
without mentioning its controversial provenance, giving the impression that

51 Telegram from Canadian High Commission, Delhi (Ronning) to Department of

External Affairs, Ottawa, No. 794, “Military Equipment for India,” 29 October 1962,
file 6083-40 pt. 8.1, Vol. 5201, RG 25, LAC. Quoted in James G. Hershberg, "Quietly
Encouraging Quasi-Alignment: US-Indian Relations, the Sino-Indian Border War of
1962, and the Downfall of Krishna Menon," p. 148, Eurasia Border Review Special
Issue, Summer 2012, (Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido, Japan), http://src-
h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/publictn/ eurasia_border_review/Vol3SI/hershberg.pdf
52 Chris Smith, India's Ad Hoc Arsenal: Direction Or Drift in Defence Policy?(Stockholm
International Research Institute, Oxford University Press, 1994),p.79
53 Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947, (Oxford
University Press, 2014), p.109
54 While keeping the Indian air force grounded.
55 See India: Subjects: Nehru correspondence, November 1962: 11-19, John F.Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, http://www.jfklibrary.org/
Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKNSF-111-016.asp
56 Ambassador K. Gajendra Singh, "Trauma and Humiliations of 1962--A Look from
Egypt and Turkey too," November 29, 2010, Tarafits blog, http://tarafits.blogspot.
com/2010/11/trauma-and-humiliations-of-1962-look.html
57 Quoted in ibid. For details about the "second letter" see Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in
Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947, (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Review Article 175

India's "supplication" had potentially transformed the U.S.-India relations into

one of alliance, the validity of which "remains empirically untested."58
In itself the Sino-Indian border conflict was a relatively limited military
engagement, basically a “frivolous”59 melee with “virtually no ground war,”60
which, according to one commentator, was an "unfought war."61 However,
the political ramifications of the 1962 debacle were far more significant than
the military rout itself.62 Apart from the defenestration of Krishna Menon,63
the discrediting of Nehru's policy of nonalignment, the decline of the
Congress Party's popularity, the emergence of the arms lobbies,64 and steering
New Delhi toward Washington and London for military assistance, it also
resulted in India's departure from its previous policy regarding nuclear
weapons. So far opposed by Nehru, a vigorous debate on the question
ensued after the war. With the collapse of what was called the "Nehruvian
consensus,"65 the idea of a nuclear deterrent now gained a firm foothold in
the Indian political soil, so to speak, what with its demand from the
strategic elite66 and opposition politicians.67 Ironically, despite their rivalry,

58 Chaudhuri, op. cit., p.112

59 Atul Bhardwaj, “A Cuckoo Strategy on China,” p.31
60 Air Vice Marshal Arun Kumar Tiwary, Indian Air Force in Wars, (New Delhi: Lancer
Publishers and Distributors, 2013), Chapter 4, https://books.google.com.bd/books?id=
eTdeAQAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Indian+Air+Force+in+Wars+By+Air+Vic
e+Marshal+Arun+Kumar+Tiwari&source=bl&ots=vYGjdOvYyo&sig=UyiwgRRt5mS
8FVpclyhj9qOcjpk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Indian%20Air%20For
ce%20in%20Wars%20By%20Air%20Vice%20Marshal%20Arun%20Kumar%20Tiwar
i&f=false
61 Shiv Kunal Verma, 1962:The War That Wasn't, (New Delhi:Aleph Book Company,
2016); Lt. Col. J.R. Saigal, The Unfought War of 1962:the NEFA Debacle, (New Delhi:
Allied Publishers, 1979); Dibyesh Anand, "Remembering 1962 Sino-Indian Border
War Politics of Memory," Journal of Defence Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, October 2012
62 Smith, op. cit., p.79
63 Out of 30 days of Sino-Indian war, 18 were spent by the Indian Parliament and media
more on the ousting of the Defence Minister, Krishna Menon from office, than
throwing the Chinese out from Indian lands. Sankar Ghose, Jawaharlal Nehru:A
Biography, (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1993), p.292, 293.The rest 12 days were
devoted to making a list of arms to be procured from the Americans. Bhardwaj, “A
Cuckoo Strategy on China,” p.32
64 Bhardwaj, “A Cuckoo Strategy on China,” p.32
65 See Rajni Kothari, "Political Consensus in India: Decline and Reconstruction,"
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 4, No. 41 (October 11, 1969),p.1635;
66 See Karsten Frey, India’s Nuclear Bomb and National Security, e-book third
edition,(London and New York: Routledge, 2007), chapter 2
176 Ruksana Kibria

domestically both Prime Minister Nehru and President Ayub Khan shared a
deep antipathy towards any nuclear weapons program, considering it to be a
drain on the economy.
There are a number of factual errors that are unexpected in a Brookings
Institution publication: i) President Ayub Khan's daughter, Nasim Akhter
Aurangazeb is referred to as Nasir, perhaps inadvertently; ii) Nehru was in
prison for 9 years, not 13, according to the book; iii) in 1962 Duncan Sandys
was the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, a British cabinet
post, not the Commonwealth Secretary (sic), as mentioned by the author; iv)
on October 7, 1964 Nehru could not have addressed a nonaligned conference
in Cairo, since he had passed away the previous May;68 v)during the Korean
War (1950-53), the Chinese participants were called Communist People's
Voluntary Army (PVA), but Riedel refers to them as Chinese Communist
Forces; and vi)he is not sure whether the Indian nuclear tests were conducted
in 1998 or 1999.
Despite its shortcomings the book is not without merit, as it offers the "inside
dope" on the astute workings of American diplomacy at the highest levels of
the Kennedy administration during the conflict. For instance, immediately
after the Chinese unilateral announcement of cease-fire on November 20, a
high-powered delegation composed of the American envoy Ambassador W.
Averell Harriman and the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations
Duncan Sandys arrived in New Delhi to assess the matter of military
assistance to India, which Richard Helms, the director of the CIA operations,
called “the hottest ticket in town”— as if the negotiation was some kind of
show business! It is also beyond comprehension how the US Ambassador,
John Kenneth Galbraith, at the height of the crisis could find managing it
stressful but "exhilarating" as well! Bearing a quasi-vice-regal authority, he
succeeded in persuading the Indian government at a critical juncture of the
war to desist from using airpower in combat against Chinese targets when that

67 Inder Malhotra, "Shastri gets his way on nuclear policy," The India Express, Oct. 15,
2012,http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/shastri-gets-his-way-on-nuclear-policy/
1016715/0
68 It was Lal Bahadur Shastri, who became the Indian Prime Minister after Nehru's
demise.
Review Article 177

would have effectively undermined the latter's military advantage on the

ground. It surfaced subsequently that the CIA knew of Chinese inadequacy in
air power in Tibet where there weren’t sufficiently long air-strips, and
aviation fuel was in shortage. Besides, the Chinese fighter aircrafts were
deployed on the country's eastern seaboard.69 During the tense situation when
it was apprehended that Ayub Khan might take advantage of India's plight by
opening a second front in Kashmir (as was suggested by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,
a member of his cabinet),70 Galbraith compelled Nehru to pledge that he
would "respond positively"71 to any Pakistani assurance of neutrality.72 Riedel
offhandedly comments that, "Three years later in 1965 Ayub Khan did attack
India," when he was, under very complicated circumstances, actually goaded
into such a course, again, by Bhutto, now his foreign minister.73 The author
also disingenuously gives the impression that Galbraith had a free hand in
managing the crisis from New Delhi in any manner he liked, since the
administration in Washington was preoccupied with the Caribbean crisis:
"Thus Galbraith was increasingly becoming a key policy counselor to the
Indian prime minister behind the scenes." However, the strategic
“contingency-planning” regarding South Asia and the Sino-Indian conflict
was undertaken confidentially by a small coterie of experts in the national
security team who would “formulate, coordinate and implement” policy from
the White House,74 virtually without any debate in US Congress or the
media. Robert W. Komer, as South Asia specialist at the National Security
Council (NSC), played a decisive role regarding the administration’s India

69 Inder Malhotra, "The strange case of the air force in wartime," The Indian Express,
November 14, 2011. In a post-bellum assessment, the Pentagon concluded that if the
Indian air force had been used, the outcome of the war would have been significantly
different. Ibid. http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-strange-case-of-the-air-force-
in-wartime/875426/0 . For a more detailed analysis from the Indian perspective, see
Tiwary, op. cit.
70 Jug Suraiya, "Dealing with a Superpower by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,” Bombay Times,
May 14, 2011.
71 To cooperate with Pakistan, under US mediation, at the behest of the United States, on
a settlement of the Kashmir issue, an idea at which Nehru had heretofore demurred.
72 This too, due to American arm-twisting!
73 See Mohammed Ayub Khan, Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, 1966-
1972, edited by Craig Baxter, (Oxford University Press, 2008)
74 McMahon, op. cit., p. 275
178 Ruksana Kibria

policy,75 but is mentioned only twice by Riedel; in contrast to that, he greatly

inflates the “activism” of the U.S ambassador in New Delhi, (whose
negotiating skills, strictly speaking, went beyond mere management of the
situation and bordered on manipulation), thereby advancing the notion that he
had acted without any coordination with Washington.
An intellectually unengaging account of the 1962 Sino-Indian war, with all its
complexities left out, and tailored to conform with the official projection of
how Washington managed the crisis, JFK's Forgotten Crisis disappointingly
does not quite fill what Riedel called “lacuna” in the introductory chapter. It
is not apparent what new perspective one gathers about the much-debated
conflict from his narrative that was not previously accessed from
Ambassador Galbraith's tendentious journal or memoirs,76 on which he
largely depends. Essentially a paean to President Kennedy in particular, and
his administration in general, it raises a lot more questions than it answers
but, by the same token, piques one's interest about the broader U.S. policy
toward South Asia. To give such extraordinary credit to Kennedy as he does,
for the “deft” management of the Sino-Indian conflict is a bit of a stretch,
since it was due to the byzantine dynamics of Cold War politics, in which not
only the White House, operating through the NSC, but the entire U.S. foreign
policy, intelligence and military establishment, as well as other majors powers
were involved.
The nineteenth century Great Game between imperial Britain and imperial
Russia which had led to the controversial McMahon Line in 1914, evolved
half a century later into an even Greater Game involving the United States,
Britain (to a lesser degree), the Soviet Union, China and India, but played
according to a new set of arcane rules. As in any war during which truth
becomes the first casualty, the causes of the brief border encounter are still
murky, with its subtext largely undecipherable in the analytical ambiguities.
While it is difficult to substantiate that the Sino-Indian war had occurred for
reasons other than the ostensible ones (the border issue and Tibet being

75 Ibid.
76 John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador's Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy
Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969) and, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs,
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981)
Review Article 179

preeminent), it would be just as difficult to demonstrate that it was not the

case. Only after all the relevant archival materials in the key countries are
declassified, and the discourse about the conflict de-mythologized, would a
coherent and undistorted picture of the “frivolous” war emerge, After all,
the late Great Helmsman himself had famously exhorted to “seek truth
from facts.”