While at least a couple of reflective articles have appeared in the Pakistan press tracing the disaster of 1971 back to the war with India in 1965, the latest being by Mr AR Siddiqi, editor of Defence Journal, in the December 1976 issue of the magazine, there has to the best of my knowledge, been no similar review in this country of the consequences of the armed conflict with China in 1962.
This is in a sense understandable. For most of those who take interest in public affairs in this country continue to be convinced that China was wholly responsible for the border war and that India could not afford to give defence the kind of low priority which, in their view, it received up to 1962. But while there is considerable merit in both these propositions, they cannot eliminate the need for an objective assessment.
The plea for such a study can doubtless be dismissed on the ground that it would be a purely academic exercise. But that need not be the case, specially in the present context when the Chinese leadership, too, is likely to engage in a review of its foreign policy and perhaps reshape it to rid it of the anti-Soviet obsession Chairman Mao Tse-tung had imposed on it.
Pragmatists
It will obviously be wrong to rush to conclusions. Since so little is known about what is happening in China, it is necessary to be cautious. But it is not open to serious doubt that the pragmatists have taken over in Peking, that they are likely to be preoccupied for years with the complicated and heart-breaking task of modernising the economy and that therefore, there is a reasonable chance that they will work for a peaceful environment. In concrete terms, there is a genuine possibility that the new Chinese leaders could seek to ease tensions with the Soviet Union and stabilise and even improve relations with this country.
It does not follow that the Indian leadership should, on its part, try to revive the atmosphere of the early ‘fifties. That is just not possible, even if it is considered desirable, for the simple reasons that the Indian intelligentsia has, on the whole, become too mature to believe in the old bhai-bhai business not only in respect of China but other countries as well. New Delhi could not, for example, win popular support if it was to conduct its relations with the Soviet Union on a basis other than a hard-headed calculation of the country’s national interest.
The new Chinese leadership is likely to engage in a serious review of its gains and losses – more losses than gains – in the last 15 years, and a similar exercise by Indians, too, will be in order. Just as the dispute with the Soviet Union set in train a chain of developments for the Chinese, the armed conflict with China did for India.
In the field of foreign policy, for instance, it cannot be seriously disputed that President Ayub Khan’s provocative behaviour first in the Rann of Kutch and then in Jammu and Kashmir in 1965 was to a large extent an offshoot of the 1962 India-China war. Whatever his other calculations – his assessment of the then Indian prime minister, Mr Lal Bahadur Shastri, for example – it is most unlikely that he would have dared try to annex the state of Jammu and Kashmir if he was not convinced that New Delhi would not live up to its threat of retaliating on the plains because a significant portion of the Indian army would remain immobilised in the Himalayas for fear of some move by China.
Twelve years later it is still far from clear beyond reasonable doubt whether or not he or his foreign minister, Mr Bhutto, discussed the plan with the Chinese in advance and whether or not they gave a specific assurance of active help. Mr Bhutto said some years ago that they issued the “ultimatum” to New Delhi regarding the “stolen” yaks from Tibet and the “kidnapped” Tibetans when he made a secret visit to Peking and that he did so because President Ayub Khan and the chief of army staff, General Musa, had lost their nerve. From this it would appear that in initiating the infiltration of several thousand armed men into Jammu and Kashmir across the cease-fire line, President Ayub Khan had acted completely on his own, that is without any kind of collusion or even discussions with the Chinese. But all that is not pertinent. The relevant point is that the conflict with China activated India’s Himalayan border and that it became possible for the otherwise level-headed President Ayub Khan to conclude that he could seize Jammu and Kashmir without fear of retaliation by this country in the plains of Punjab.
Disaster
This discussion might look out of place now in view of the fact that Mr Bhutto has been fairly reasonable since he came to power in the wake of the 1971 disaster and that the Shah of Iran’s friendly attitude towards this country, specially since the middle of 1973, and the change in the US perception regarding the relative importance of Pakistan have left him little choice in the matter. But long-term peace in the region depends as much on amicable relations between India and China as on friendly co-operation between New Delhi and Teheran. This would have been so even if Bangladesh had not become an independent country. Its emergence as a fully sovereign nation and subsequent developments, particularly the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and several other leaders of the freedom struggle in 1975, make it imperative that India and China overcome the bitterness of the last 15 years. Not only India but China also has nothing to gain from trouble in the region because that could open the way for interference by external powers.
As for the impact of the war with China on domestic developments, it is self-evident that India could not even otherwise have maintained its defence expenditure at the 1962 level of around Rs 300 crores. The expenditure would have increased substantially as a result of the unavoidable rise in the pay of the officers and men, and the cost of the equipment which has gone up manifold. But there can be no question that India undertook the programme for rapidly expanding and re-equipping its armed forces in 1963 directly as a result of the debacle in NEFA, that this has been a factor behind the steady increase in prices since 1964 on the one hand and the much slower rate of investment on the other, and that this in turn has produced political tensions.
A number of experts have argued that a defence expenditure of three to four per cent of the gross national income is not too heavy for this country to carry, that it is wholly possible for it to reconcile the requirements of economic growth with those of strong defence and that by improving the efficiency of its industrial plants it can save much more money than it spends even today on defence. None of these arguments can be dismissed out of hand. Indeed, it can reasonably be said that India ran into difficulties, first economic and then political, after the general election in 1967, not so much because it had stepped up its defence expenditure as because it was hit by a widespread drought for two successive years in 1965 and 1966.
Restrained
That is not all. One can go even farther and say that China and Pakistan have been far less restrained in raising their military expenditure and that their actions have left India no option but to step up its defence preparedness. While in Pakistan’s case it is at least possible to argue, if only for the sake of argument, that it has since 1965 reacted to the increase in India’s military strength, China’s build-up has had little to do with New Delhi’s actions in this regard. It has wholly been the result of Peking’s perception first of the US threat and since the late ’sixties of the Soviet threat.
But after all these necessary qualifications have been made, the fact remains that the increased military expenditure, however necessary, has consumed a substantial proportion of the total resources that the Indian state has been in a position to raise. And since in this country economic growth has to a large extent been the result of investment by the government, this has adversely affected the rate of development which in turn has had unsettling political consequences.
Other adverse factors have doubtless been at work. It is, for example, almost certain that but for the bad monsoons in 1972 and 1973, events would never have taken the direction they did in 1974-75. Similarly, the population explosion has placed an enormous strain on the Indian economy and the political system. The Bangladesh crisis in 1971 cost this country several hundred crores of rupees and thus added considerably to the inflationary pressure. Even so, it was the 1962 conflict with China which did more than anything else to aggravate India’s problems.
The Times of India, 2 February 1977