India After Gandhi (142 page)

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Authors: Ramachandra Guha

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15. T
HE
E
XPERIENCE
OF
D
EFEAT

George N. Patterson, Tragic Destiny (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 187.
‘Record of Prime Minister’s Talk with Dalai Lama’ (24 April 1959), in File 9, Subimal Dutt Papers, NMML.
See Ramesh Sanghvi, India’s Northern Frontier and China (Bombay: Contemporary Publishers, 1962), pp. 1–2.
Notes, Memoranda and Letters Exchanged and Signed between the Governments of India and China, 1954–1959 (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 1959), pp. 46, 26–7. This was the first of nine similarly titled White Papers issued by the government of India between 1959 and 1962, subsequently referred to here as WP I, WP II etc. Unless otherwise stated, the rest of this section is based on the notes and correspondence in this first White Paper.
Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 282.
George N. Patterson, Peking versus Delhi (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 162–3.
For JP’s views see The Tragedy o fTibet: Speeches and Statements of Jayaprakash Narayan (New Delhi: Afro-Asian Committee on Tibet, 1959); for the Jana Sangh position, see ‘India’s Stake in Tibet’s Freedom’, Organiser, 27 April 1959, reprinted in Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, Political Diary (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1968), pp. 97–101.
See Subject File 16, Thimayya Papers, NMML.
He was the first, and remains the last, Indian military man to be the subject of a biography by a Western author: Humphrey Evans, Thimayya of India (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1960).
Arthur Lall, The Emergence of Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 119.
Wells Hangen, After Nehru, Who? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), chapter 9. Kaul’s alleged closeness to Nehru is also extensively advertised in his memoirs, where he claims that he was a sort of confidant and sounding-board for the prime minister. See Lt. Gen. B. M. Kaul, The Untold Story (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1967), pp. ix–x, 81–2, 86fn, 87, 97, 114, 118 etc.
Maj. Gen. D. K. Palit, War in High Himalaya (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1991), p. 76.
See Thimayya to Nehru, letters of 31 August and 3 September 1959, Thimayya Papers, NMML.
Press Clippings File 16, Thimayya Papers, NMML. This file has a cover note, almost certainly in the general’s own hand, summarizing its contents thus: ‘If a poll was to be taken outside Parliament, opinion both inside and outside would have found favour with Thimayya’.
Letters of Ashutosh Lahiri and Sheodatt, Subject File15, Thimayya Papers, NMML.
H. V. Kamath, ‘The Sino-Indian Border Dispute’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 18 October 1959.
The Current, 14 and 28 October 1959.
Shiva Raoto Nehru, 3 December 1959, B. Shiva Rao Papers, NMML.
Chou to Nehru, 8 September 1959, and Nehru to Chou, 26 September 1959, in WP II, pp. 27–46.
The ‘forward policy’ is described in the memoirs of one of its chief architects, B. N. Mullik. See his My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1971), esp. chapters 14 and 19. Mullick was the chief of the Intelligence Bureau, and privy to most crucial decisions taken with regard to the border dispute.
Latifi to Nehru, 27 November 1959, copy in Subject File 423, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML (emphasis in original).
Quoted in Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 152.
The Hindu, quoted in Dorothy Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers: A Political Review of British, Chinese, Indian and Russian Rivalries (London: Barrie and Rockcliff, 1969), p. 245.
Steven A. Hoffman, India and the China Crisis (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 67, 73, 82–3 etc. The origins and trajectory of the India-China dispute are, as one can imagine, the subject of a huge and very motivated literature. On the one side are the various self-serving memoirs by Indian generals and officials, which seek to blame China for ‘betraying’ India’s trust. These are collectively answered by Neville Maxwell’s India’s China War, a well-documented book but one that sees everything, big and small, from the Chinese point of view. Hoffman’s is an admirably detached and comprehensive account of the dispute, perhaps the best there is.
Chou to Nehru, letters of 7 November and 17 December 1959; Nehru to Chou, letters of 16 November and 21 December 1959, in WP III, pp. 45–59.
Owen Lattimore, ‘India–Tibet–China: Starting Principle for Frontier Demarcation’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1960. Steven Hoffman explains that Chou’s ‘barter’ offer could not be acceptable to India because’it was being asked to accept the clandestine and forceful seizure of parts of its territory [in the west], in return for a worthless assurance that another part of the frontier [in the east] would not be menaced’ (India and the China Crisis,pp. 86–7).
‘Pragmatist’, ‘The Political Economy of Defence’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1960.
Presidential address of Pitambar Das, reproduced in Girja Kumar and V. K. Arora, eds, Documents on Indian Affairs, 1960 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965), pp. 22f.
See Gyanvati Darbar, Portrait of a President: Letters of Dr Rajendra Prasad, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976), pp. 85–6.
Unless otherwise stated, this and the following paragraphs are based on reports and comments in the Indian Express, various issues of 10 March to 27 April 1960.
Kumar and Arora, Documents, pp. 493–4. The signatories to this letter included J. Kripalani, M. R. Masani, A. B. Vajpayee, and N. G. Goray.
The Current, 27 April 1960.
‘Record of Talks between Prime Minister of India and Prime Minister of China, 20th to 25th April 1960’, in Subject File 24, P. N. Haksar Papers, First and Second Instalments, NMML. The transcripts of the talks run to over a hundred foolscap pages.
Copies of the transcripts of Chou En-lai’s talks with Desai, Pant, Radhakrishnan and other leaders are in Subject File26, P. N. Haksar Papers, First and Second Instalments, NMML. Desai was right in spirit if not in substance, for it was Karl Marx who sought asylum in the UK, whereas Lenin lived in exile in that other bourgeois nation, Switzerland.
This paragraph is based on Margaret W. Fisher, Leo E. Rose and Robert A. Huttenback, Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), esp. chapter 11.
The transcripts of the talks are reproduced in Appendix XI of Parshotam Mehra, Negotiating with the Chinese, 1846–1987 (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 1989).
Interview in Look magazine, 18 October 1960, reproduced in Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 762–3.
Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 248–60;the Current, 16 August and 23 August 1961; correspondence between Nehru, Rajaji and Tara Singh in Subject File 82, C Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.
Nehru to Jayaprakash Narayan, 10 October 1961, Brahmanand Papers, NMML.
See E. N. Mangat Rai, Commitment My Style (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973), chapter 10. Mangat Rai was Kairon’s chief secretary for five of his eight years in power.
The Current, 9 December 1959, 6 January 1960 and 14 September 1963.
A. G. Noorani, Ministers’ Misconduct (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973), p. 42.
Nirmal Nibedon, Nagaland: The Night of the Guerillas (New Delhi: Lancer, 1983), pp. 88–90.
A. Z. Phizo, The Fate of the Naga People: An Appeal to the World (London: privately published, July 1960).
See, for example, the clippings in the W. G. Archer Papers, Mss Eur F236, OIOC.
Anon., The Naga Problem (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 1960). As many as 2,000 copies of this pamphlet were printed.
This memorandum is reproduced in Kumar and Arora, Documents, pp. 91–5.
Ibid., pp. 101–5.
Clipping from The Times, 21 September 1962, in Mss Eur F158/239, OIOC.
Daniel Thorner, ‘Ploughing the Plan Under: Ford Team Report on Food “Crisis”’, Economic Weekly, special issue, July 1959.
See Report of Non-Official Enquiry Commission on Cachar (Calcutta: N. Chatterjee, 1961); L. P. Singh, Portrait of Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Quintessential Gandhian (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996), chapter 3.
The Current, 8 March 1961.
Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
See Grover Smith, ed., Letters of Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 926–7.
Arthur Cook, ‘Nehru’, Daily Mail, 20 February 1962.
For details, see WPs IV, V and VI, passim.
Lok Sabha Debates, 11 April 1961.
Ibid., 17 August and 28 November 1961, 14 August 1962.
Ibid., 5 December 1961.
P. D. Gaitonde, The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1987), chapter 18; Illustrated Weekly of India, special issue, 18 February 1962; D. R. Mankekar, The Goa Action (Bombay: The Popular Book Depot, 1962).
See clippings and papers in File8, Box XVI.18, Richard B. Russell Papers, University of Georgia, Athens; File29, Penderel Moon Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur F230/29).
New York Times, 18 and 19 December 1961. There is also a suggestion that sections within the Indian army welcomed the Goan adventure as a victory easily won. It was, recalled one officer, ‘light relief from the gloom and foreboding of the general strategic scene’ along the borders with China. See Maj. Gen. D. K. Palit, Musings and Memories, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Lancer, 2004), pp. 411–12.

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