Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt and the prehistory of the Sino-Indian border war

Abstract

For the mere fact that Beijing in October 1962 ultimately resorted to force to resolve the Sino-Indian border dispute, many scholars maintained that armed conflict had become inevitable. Such determinism tends to lead to false conclusions. Both sides wanted to avoid escalation and were concerned that large-scale hostilities might trigger the involvement of third powers. With regard to the Indian side, the general consensus among historians is that a long-term series of lapses together with uncoordinated and ill-prepared steps contributed to the defeat at large. The armed forces were in a hopelessly inferior position, and India stood isolated without any allies. Therefore, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menon received most of the blame for supposed naivety or alleged neglect of the military, political and diplomatic preparations necessary for a war. Such a view, first, ignores that any government, notwithstanding limited financial resources investing huge sums into a long-term armament and infrastructure programme for an unlikely high-altitude war in remote and partly uninhabited border areas, would have come under massive criticism. The focus on the faults of the Nehru government, second, has led critics and historians to ignore developments in the years between 1954 and 1959. Until today, the discussion focuses, on the one hand, on the years between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the Tibet Agreement from 1954, when India allegedly missed the opportunity to settle the boundary issue on its own terms, and, on the other hand, on the developments between 1959 and 1962, that is, from the Tibetan uprising to the failed Nehru-Zhou Enlai summit, often portrayed as a failed chance for a peaceful settlement in the form of a barter of the North East Frontier Association (NEFA) versus Aksai Chin, and finally to the Forward Policy leading into the war.