Clash of the Titans

How the Indo-China relationship marked Nehru’s descent into purgatory

By Nirupama Rao (Former Indian Diplomat)

Not far away and not long ago, in the midtwentieth century and in the brave new dawn of their existence as independent nations, India and China began to craft a diplomatic relationship that aimed at peaceful coexistence between two very different political systems—one a constitutional democracy built on the principles of pluralism and respect for diversity, and the other Marxist- Leninist and authoritarian. The relationship of so-called brotherly friendship they built in that pioneering phase was short-lived. It foundered on the rocks of a boundary dispute that exposed the relationship’s critical flaws and its brittleness—both of political vision and policymaking—and the differences between their top leaderships in character, personality and experience.

This is a history retold about India and China in mid-century from 1949 to 1962, a formative and yet self-destructive phase in a troubled relationship.

All this happened in a short timeframe of thirteen years between 1949 and 1962. Why did India and China stumble into war in 1962? The so-called follies of Jawaharlal Nehru, a lead actor in our story, cannot be the simple or default answer, our textbook gospel. The India-China relationship in its mid-20th century phase was a history of politics, of ideologies, of the disposition of leaders, and a history of diplomacy and war. An investigation into ‘the nature of being human’, this study focuses on the human quotient of the history of relations between these two Asian nations; two civilizations and their leaders coming face-to-face with the geopolitics of their time.

No doubt, it is dominated on the Indian side by Jawaharlal Nehru, whose mind was inspired by those pioneering voyagers in millennia past, both Indian and Chinese, who reached out across deserts to build a partnership of civilizations; a Caesar who was neither Bismarck nor Kissinger, but more philosopher and historian.

What propelled Nehru’s vision of China? He saw China as this emergent nation ready to shake off the clutter of backwardness and foreign subjugation and the shackles of the past; a potential best friend and a geo-civilizational ‘equal’ to India.

For Nehru, India and China could together be that mid-twentieth century definition of an independent force in world politics, unhitched to east or west. India, Nehru held, would bring China to the global stage so that it would become a responsible stakeholder in world politics. It was a lofty aspiration, and India would feel betrayed when she saw her goodwill as inadequately reciprocated—even spurned—by China, as the relationship unravelled.

There were weaknesses, oversights born of haphazard, adhoc and careless policymaking during the period covered in this history. There is no intention to apportion blame for such shortcomings because the exercise of critiquing India’s China policy in those early years and the role of Prime Minister Nehru, particularly, has persisted for years now. It is considered derigueur to fault Nehru for all his ‘wrong’ decisions on China policy, overlooking that hindsight is never 20/20 and that it is essential to better understand the circumstances in which he made those decisions for which we fault him today. Decisions by leaders are made in real time, and not by scholars in retrospect as the historian Srinath Raghavan notes ‘One must visualize the circumstances in which Nehru was placed. The luxury of simplified hindsight, as we often use it, blinds us. The lessons of history are useful only if they help us overcome that visual incapacity and understand not only those aspects on which a blinding bright light tends to shine typically but also the rest of the picture that exists in the shadows.’

India’s collective memory coheres around imaging of the conflict with China as a betrayal by the country’s largest neighbour, the failure and misplaced trust in China of Jawaharlal Nehru, the role of his Defence Minister in the military debacle surrounding the conflict, the gallantry of the men who fought the Chinese as well as the hubris and strategic errors in what post-mortems of the conflict of 1962 called ‘the higher direction of war’ by senior Indian military commanders.

Where national honour is at stake, emotions run high. The national humiliation resulting from the 1962 conflict with China haunts the national consciousness. China continues to be the adversary (a term that is synonymous with enemy, after the Galwan Valley killings of June 2020) whose alignment with Pakistan and whose now-established economic and military resurgence are seen as posing a clear and present danger to India’s national security and s