What If India Had Won The 1962 War Against China?

Tibet would have been liberated; the loss of face would have made China retreat
into its shell
instead of becoming an aggressive imperialist....and of course India's Marxists
would have
been defanged.
RAJEEV SRINIVASAN
Indians have been conditioned to believe that we had not a ghost of a chance aga
inst China in 1962;
but that's simply not true. If the Indian government had not been so blas; if the
military leadership
had not been so ineffectual; if the Indian Air Force had not been grounded, illadvisedly; well,
all historic ifs, but the outcome would have been very different. China's army i
s a lot less than invincible,
as the battle-hardened Vietnamese proved by thrashing it in 1979.
Even the timing was propitious for India, yet we fumbled.
In 1962, China was weak militarily. If defeated, Tibet would have been f
ree,
future water wars avoided, Chinese self-esteem hurt.
In 1962, China had just experienced four years of decreasing foodgrain productio
n and a major famine.
Chinese supply lines to the Indo-Tibet border were stretched thin, and could hav
e been disrupted from the air.
If only the Indian political and military leadership had not been criminally neg
ligent which is why
the Henderson-Brooks Report on the war has been suppressed, for it would implica
te too many in high
places India could have won.
The end results would have been dramatic: Tibet would have been liberated; India
ns would not have been starry-eyed about China;
the loss of face would have made China retreat into its shell instead of becomin
g an aggressive imperialist.
Tibet was an avoidable catastrophe. First is the decimation of a vibrant Indic c
ulture, that of the Tibetan Buddhists.
They have been doubly unfortunate. For, Tibetan Buddhism owes its traditions to
the few monks who escaped being
beheaded by Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1197 when he sacked Nalanda. And now, in a repea
t, they are being exterminated once again,
this time by fascist Han Chinese.
In 1962, China was quite weak militarily. If India had created a coalition with
Western powers,
who worried about the Soviet-China axis, the Han Chinese could have been ejected
, and Tibet saved from genocide.
The Americans would have cooperated; in those Domino Theory days, they even trai
ned a group of Tibetans for a
guerrilla resistance movement back home. India, instead, chose to be gullible "u
seful idiots", in Chou En-Lai's
dismissive phrase.
However, in addition to altruistic concern for a sister culture, India would hav
e gained concrete things from Tibetan freedom.
The plateau is the source of many of the rivers in Asia, and benign Tibetan cont
rol over them would have given much of Asia water security:
the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Irrawaddy all originate there.
Instead, China plans to divert the Brahmaputra northwards from Tibet. If so, the
Ganga-Brahmaputra doab would dry up,

and civilisation as we know it would end in North India. This is a national secu
rity issue of the highest order,
and Indians ignore it at their peril.
Chinese dams across the Mekong are already causing drought in downstream riparia
n states like Laos and Cambodia.
The Chinese deliberately created floods on the Brahmaputra in Arunachal not too
long ago. There is every reason
to believe China will proceed with diverting water, ignoring India's objections.
This water war India could absolutely have avoided by routing China in 1962. Sim
ilarly, Chinese nuclear missiles
in Tibet's high plains, as well as the dumping of nuclear waste therein, both ha
ve serious security and environmental
implications for India.
On a more subtle level, the 'loss of face' to China would have had incalculable
value in geopolitics. At that time,
China was viewed with disdain. They got into the UN Security Council only becau
se Nehru, in his infinite wisdom,
gave them the seat offered to India! Bizarre experiments with fundamentalist Len
inism/Stalinism, including the Great Leap Forward,
caused most observers to view China as a freak show.
The bonhomie with the Soviet Union was showing signs of wear; the experiments in
collectivisation had not brought the expected benefits; the Great Leap Forward
(1958-62), an attempt at using vast amounts of manpower to rapidly industrialise
the country, was a colossal failure, and instead created a famine in which as m
any as forty million perished.
China was vulnerable, its self-image mauled by colonialism, as despised gwailo (
foreign devils) had ruthlessly penetrated their hitherto smug, supercilious land
, the allegedly impregnable Middle Kingdom. The British, through judicious use o
f opium, and the Japanese, through military might, had shown Chinese their imper
ial pretensions counted for nothing in the real world.
A stinging defeat by India would have so seriously hurt Chinese self-esteem that
they would not have dared to dream of dominating Asia. They would not be bullyi
ng all their neighbours, as in irredentist adventures in Xinjiang, Tibet, Arunac
hal Pradesh, Spratlies, Mischief Reef, and the Senkaku Islands. Their Sino-Islam
ic axis, aimed at containing India, would have been stillborn. And they would no
t have been proliferating nuclear technology so openly to North Korea, Pakistan,
Iraq, Libya, etc.
To consider the psychological effect of such a defeat, just look at India. Even
though Indians are not quite so worried about 'face', the loss damaged the India
n psyche. The shock of betrayal, and the Macaulayite history of defeat that we i
mbibe through textbooks, have caused Indians to see themselves as losers. The Ch
inese would have been far more humiliated after a defeat by India.
There would have been more fringe benefits. Everyone respects power and the will
to use it. India's case for the Security Council would have been much stronger.
The containment of China through alliances with Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan and Russ
ia would have proceeded apace. Pax Indica in the Indian Ocean would have given I
ndia a choke-hold on critical shipping routes transporting Persian Gulf oil to C
hina. India would have acceded to the non-proliferation treaty as a nuclear weap
ons state, instead of being bulled by the offensive Chinese-drafted Security Cou
ncil Resolution 1172 condemning the Pokhran II blasts.
Another side-effect and in a way, this might have been the greatest benefit to Ind
ia would have been the defanging of India's Marxists. These evangelists for the Ch
urch of Marx would have been laughed out of court if they plugged the sayings of
Chairman Mao immediately after China had been defeated by India. This would hav
e prevented Marxist infiltration into academia, institutions and the media, whic
h urgently need to be de-toxified from their baleful influence. Furthermore, bot
h West Bengal and Kerala would have been spared decades of under-development and
degeneration.
Thus, winning the 1962 war would have made an enormous difference to India. But

there is no mistaking the civilisational conflict between India and China. In th

is millennia-old Grand Narrative, 1962 is a mere skirmish. India colonised Asia
softly: with a few exceptions, without military conquest or migration. China col
onised by demographic warfare.
Indic ideas went everywhere West Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet; even C
hina and through it, Korea and Japan. The ideas were enormously influential, and
they included religion and philosophy, martial arts, mathematics, language, arc
hitecture and mythology. China, on the other hand, depended on demographic thrus
ts: periodic emigration of Han Chinese took their culture and their industrial a
rts with them. They were looking for survival, for lebensraum: for China has poo
r land, and either too little or too much water. This process has continued to t
he present, with the large Chinese diaspora.
The last word in this monumental competition has not been written. China may be
leading right now, but India is surely no pushover any more.
________________________________________
Rajeev Srinivasan is a columnist for rediff.com.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/what-if-india-had-won-the-1962-war-against-c
hina/224864