Unappraised lesson from 1962

Anniversaries serving to focus minds on lessons learnt, the 1962 War’s 60th observance has seen strategists toting up the lessons of India’s defeat by China. The lessons have in the background the current-day circumstance of Chinese intrusions persisting in Ladakh for over two years. 

The bright side of failure is that it catalyses learning as nothing else possibly can. So it is with the 1962 defeat: it perked up India’s military, putting paid to the Nehruvian notion that security can be arrived at through a relegation of the military component.

However, lessons learnt have an underside, particularly those stemming from consequential defeats: overlearning. Arguably, so has been the case with the lessons of the 1962 War. Lessons over-learnt, India is now back at the beginning, at a juncture today at which it might have to relearn a lesson of 1962: on the necessity of balanced civil-military relations.

In the short term, the 1962 defeat steadied India’s civil-military relations. Unsteady civil-military relations in the run up to the war partially led to the defeat. The significant lesson from the War is popularly held to be political interference in military matters. Consequently, the lesson over-learnt was that military matters best be left to the military.

The overlearning contributed to keeping the military confined to a narrow professional till, restricted to doctrinal and operational matters. This kept the military outside the policy loop. While for a period the military had an avatar as an integrated office of the defence ministry, it current-day location is within the bureaucratic structure with a Department, the Department of Military Affairs, to itself. Though the projection today is that the military is no longer tenanting the outhouse as an attached office, this merely flatters to please.

A newly appointed Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) heads that office. Since the one appointed has no obvious distinction to distinguish him from his peers, his recall from retirement is only plausible as nepotism, being from the same ethnic group as his predecessor. Incidentally, both were from the same ethnic group as the national security adviser (NSA) – who has a nontrivial role in the selection of the CDS.

India is back at the beginning, when the run up to the 1962 debacle began with the appointment of an ethnic kin of Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru as Chief of General Staff (CGS). Nehru advanced the career of General BM Kaul, a logistics officer who had no place in the general staff leave alone being appointed as CGS. He was later placed in command of a hastily raised Corps to take on the Chinese in the North East Frontier Agency, when 33 Corps was seen as dragging its feet in evicting the Chinese from Thagla Ridge.  

The fallout of favouritism was dissonance in the high command. Competent Generals ‘Timmy’ Thimayya and Thorat were undercut. An inquiry was even set up to target Manekshaw, Kaul’s bête noire. Suitably cowed, the rest of the brass, comprising otherwise competent figures as DK ‘Monty’ Palit – the director military operations - and LP ‘Bogey’ Sen – the head of the Eastern Command – could not put up a credible professional showing at the crunch.

Not only did personalities play a role in all this, but so did perspectives on national security. Nehru – ever the statesman – had to balance development with security. He chose to use alternative means towards national security – hoping to bring China on board diplomatically rather than presiding over an attention and resource-diverting militarisation at the border.

The famous Nehru-Thimayya contretemps illustrates the clash between the two perspectives. While the case in its detail has Thimayya tendering his resignation on the matter of interference in military appointments by Defence Minister Menon, the clash also had an ideational backdrop.

Thimayya, unconvinced that the military kept on a tight budget during the Nehru years could take on the Chinese, was tacitly pushing a policy plank in favour of external balancing involving leaning on the West. Given his socialist background, irascible Defence Minister Krishna Menon, was firmly against forging such relations.

The clash of perspectives went back to Sardar Patel’s famous paper on handling China differently. Patel’s demise left the perspective without a champion, though the military held up its end with General Thorat – in a famous paper of his own - bidding for strengthening of defences in the North East. A like cautionary paper by the Western Command chief, General Daulat Singh, was ignored.

However, that strategy is a two-player game was driven home rather rudely. The Chinese playing hard ball, led Nehru to be assertive on the border. The opposition too set up a clamour. This forced Nehru’s hand in the adoption of an ill-prepared Forward Policy.

Nehru’s dominance in the national security system was such that the military could not carry the day. A cautious policy, in sync with military capabilities, was discontinued. The nepotistic insertion into the higher ranks was to facilitate the military’s adoption of the political perspective on the emerging conflict.

Though Thimayya had also superseded two seniors to the post, he had a war record to back his elevation. He justified his promotion by standing firm on the military’s input into China-related decisions. In the event, his successors proved less forthright. Nehru’s public let down of Thimayya, implying that his resignation was out of pique, rather than on a policy question, had the unintended consequence of making the military – once bitten, twice shy - reticent.

The intelligence arm of the State had Nehru’s ear, articulating a threat perception permissive of a forward policy. The military’s top order, appropriately peopled (VN Thapar having taken over from Thimayya), fell in line. Nehru, as his own foreign minister, set the pace for diplomats. The resulting group-think led to the defeat, in turn casting a shadow on the Nehruvian security perspective.

Rightly, accountability for the debacle rested at the political level, on Nehru’s broad shoulders, taking a toll on his heart. While the take away for politicians was not to interfere with the military, the take away for the military is the von Moltkean idea that the military’s is an autonomous turf and once the military has been given its marching orders, it must be left free to get on with delivering on this without the political and bureaucratic class looking over its shoulder, or, worse, tying its hands.

The problem with the von Moltke’s idea of military autonomy came to fore when the German General Staff operating under the military duo von Hindenberg and Ludendorff lost Germany World War I. Trotting out the ‘stab in the back’ theory, they blamed the civilian side. The blame game had a consequential outcome in post-War German politics, undercutting the successor Weimar Republic and thereby setting the stage for Hitler’s accession and, in turn, World War II.

As a consequence of the Sino-Indian War, India caught a dose of Molkaen thinking. The politician was unwilling to shoulder the burden of accountability. By default, the bureaucratic layer – that did not suffer the ignominy of the 1962 War – gained a buffer role between the two. As popularly depicted, the politician, notionally having the authority but little understanding, and the bureaucrats, usurping the authority but with no accountability, occupied the defence policy space. The military chafed at the bit.

Early in wake of the war, a new equation settled. A military historian informs of the Army taking its own time to retrieve to territories that the Chinese had by then unilaterally withdrawn from, though the government bid for an immediate return. In the 1965 War, though war termination is a political call, the critical input was left to the Army. Later the canard was put out by a scholar-bureaucrat that the Army bid for a ceasefire fearing that it was running out of artillery ammunition.

The political level had a month earlier okayed the Army’s war plan operationalised in September, including opening up the Punjab front. That it played little oversight role is evident in the Air Force learning of the War’s outbreak in scrambling battlefield air interdiction sorties, that in the haste and owing to lack of coordination took a fratricidal opening toll alongside.

More importantly, absent political ownership of favourable war termination decision making, the 1965 War - though fought over Kashmir - turned out strategically inconsequential. Post-War diplomatic-military moves were not thought through to arrive at a sustainable peace in Kashmir, leaving the Army carping thereafter at the loss of Haji Pir. This had telling consequence a quarter century on.  

Another India-Pakistan War soon followed. There is dispute over the apocryphal story of the military’s reluctance on military operations in East Pakistan in the summer of 1971. Apparently, there is no record of a meeting that April in which General Manekshaw is supposed to have colourfully registered a preference of campaign season.

At any rate, India gained time for preparation for the invasion as also a locus standi in a humanitarian intervention. In the interim, India’s instigation of the civil war led up to the genocide, making it culpable to an extent and, to that extent, afoul of international law. No wonder India cited self-defence as its casus belli, though it was into Pakistani territory - as revealed in the recent 50 year observances of the War - some two weeks prior.

Even in the invasion itself, the political expectation - for gaining a proportion of territory in order to emplace a government of national liberation - appears to have deferred to a bottom-up impetus within the military. The plans delivering a political outcome eventuated into a more ambitious one: dismembering neighbour. To lap up the credit, the political leadership latched on to the change once the invasion panned out as it did.

As with the 1965 War termination, though six months elapsed between the war and the peace agreement, there was no plan in place to profit from the neighbour’s dismemberment. Though fought to address the situation in the East, the 1971 War had at its core India’s concern with West Pakistan and Kashmir.

As it turned out, the ‘secret’ clauses of the Simla Agreement in relation to Kashmir failed not only because Pakistan reneged. (Benazir Bhutto, eyewitness at Simla, denied that there were any such secret clauses.) Events in Kashmir two decades on indicate the high long-term cost.

India, in a bid to transcend Pakistan as the undisputed regional power in wake of 1971, upped the military imbalance by conducting the nuclear test and going in for mechanisation. Pakistan, decided to trip India up by its proxy wars, imitative of India of 1971.

The military action in Siachen was another military-instigated operation, serving little political or strategic purpose. It, yet again, set the conditions for another war a decade and half down the line, at Kargil. How much was it influenced by ambition of generals out to get the political principal’s attention is for military sociology to look at. The controversial supersession of General SK Sinha had sent tacit signals from the political class to generals receptive to the same.

The Sri Lankan adventure end-decade needs little elucidation as a case testifying to the civil-military divide in India, wherein the military is left autonomously in its sphere of expertise, while the civilians managed the strategic level with little reference to the military. The two ministers with diplomat background in the current cabinet know more than most on this disjuncture, both having served in Sri Lanka even as the peacekeeping force went about its thankless task at the cost of over 4000 casualties, not counting Sri Lankan Tamils.

A stark illustration of the military’s distinct space is the approach to counter insurgency. The doctrine persuasively reflects on the place of kinetic operations in securing conditions for political activity and governance. Even so, the political prong seldom delivers on the peace processes timely, squandering windows of opportunity to advance political solutions.

The most significant theatre to study the disconnect is Kashmir. The intelligence-led core national security elite is in the lead on peace processes. The military is reduced to bystander. Compensating for loss of salience, in Kashmir, it has taken to demonstrating its relevance by periodic bouts of cheerleading, sometimes with its commanding generals - with a self-styled yen for information operations - in the lead. 

A political solution of sorts is being implemented that requires continuing suppression of Kashmiris. As in Nagaland, the regime’s ideological aversion to a separate flag and Constitution, rightly genuflecting to India’s diversity, holds up solution.

With the Chinese intrusion in Ladakh, a full circle has been completed in the return to 1962. The regime’s game-plan for self-perpetuation in office was to inflate its image as being strong-on-defence. It did this through over-hyping its liberal use of the military instrument in its first tenure.

The military for its part rose to the occasion, whether it was in killing Kashmiri youth (there were at least two years in which there were negligible surrendered and captured militants), trading ordnance on the Line of Control (LC), two surgical strikes each (which, to cynics, were anything but) across the LC and into Myanmar, or competing in transgressions with the Chinese on the Line of Actual Control.

With its ‘propaganda by deed’ and nationalist credentials to back it, it went about reducing the defence budget. Successive years witnessed commentators carping that the defence budget was the ‘lowest as a proportion of the gross domestic product since the 1962 War’. The raising of the Mountain Strike Corps that India could have based its conventional deterrence of China stood aborted.

Mindful more of Kashmir to its electoral calculations based on polarisation in the heartland, it appointed an army chief over the heads of two capable seniors. It went on to successively appoint regime favourites as ‘first among equals’ in the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It is not clear if the brass-hats so favoured chimed in its favour, even on hitherto political questions, either unwarily, on being manipulated or as believers.

There is no record that its China policy received any significant military input. The military was vociferous in the previous administration’s time, when it unilaterally pivoted to China by autonomous adoption of the Two Front War idea. But with the new regime, the military largely continued its Pakistan-centricity.

The Air Force touted its Balakot strikes, with little evidence of any efficacy. It Navy even put a nuclear submarine to sea to pressure Pakistan during that crisis. The Army immersed itself in creating the conditions in Kashmir for the Article 370 parliamentary caper of the home minister to play out. In the event, the home minister’s posturing triggered off the Chinese intrusion.

Even so, the regime allowed the military a continued upping of its game on the China front by transgressions of its own, brought about by better infrastructure. However, the civil-military cleavage kept the military out of the China policy. As with the Forward Policy adoption, there appears to have been no contingency planning as to what to do in case China gets its gander up.

It cannot be that the NSA – known as a Pakistan hawk from his days as a spook there – has the reins of India’s China policy. By implication, it appears that the diplomat with China expertise who caught Narendra Modi’s eye for organising his outreach to the upper caste diaspora in the United States - Dr. S Jaishankar – has corralled the China policy space.

An ‘informal’ summit diplomacy resulted after the Doklam incident. Aware of the intricacies of the Doklam confrontation – and sensibly not self-deluded by its own propaganda that it was an Indian ‘victory’ - the regime has taken to appeasing China.

Seeing a weak Indian hand perhaps in its up-close deconstruction of India’s chief interlocutor, Narendra Modi, China went about ambushing India in Ladakh. Appeasement continues, with calm on the LAC being paid for by Indian claimed land vacated as buffer spaces after military talks.

It emerges then that the lesson of 1962 is that neither placing the military at a distance nor holding it to the breast is any good. Firstly, clear from the two confrontations with China is that an apex military chosen for any yardstick other than professional credibility cannot prove useful.

More importantly, India needs to find its own answer to civil-military relations wherein the military tenders the advice on its area of expertise and mandate forthrightly. At the apex level, the contrived divide between policy and strategy at a higher level and the operational one is untenable. As seen here the military camel is better accommodated in the tent than outside it.