Book review: The unpalatable story

Bruce Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA, and The Sino-Indian War — “forgotten” because the Americans were busy having a showdown with the USSR over the Cuban Missile Crisis at the same time as the war between India and China during October-November 1962 — is excellent for a variety of reasons. First is his mining of the Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) — the morning report that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gives the President — from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.

This trove was released to the public in 2015, as was the centre-piece of the book, the second of two letters that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Kennedy on November 19, 1962, after the two worst days in the Indian Army’s history. This letter’s existence was denied by India for years — Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri even denied it officially — but the US made it public in 2010.

This letter asked the US to join the war against China. Positively inclined, Kennedy despatched his envoy, Averell Harriman, to study Nehru’s request. Events overtook them the next day however, when Chinese supremo Mao Zedong, near midnight, declared a unilateral cease-fire and pulled his troops back to the McMahon Line in the Northeast while keeping Aksai Chin in Jammu and Kashmir — exactly what Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai had been offering Nehru since 1959, and on the basis of which the India-China border dispute will be settled, if ever.

That letter could have been the basis for closer India-US relations after the war but events never aligned: Days before a $500 million aid package to India was to be finalised, Kennedy was assassinated; and days before the rescheduled meeting, Neh-ru passed away. Shastri wanted no delay on a major jet fighter purchase and promptly bought it from the USSR. For decades after that, the world’s two largest demo-cracies were estranged (as Dennis Kux put it), a situation that rectified only after the USSR’s demise.

Ironically, India still hasn’t released its official postmortem of the war, the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report, an excerpt of which was leaked (with a significant gap) in 2014 by Neville Maxwell, the Australian whose book, India’s China War, blamed Nehru for the war. Maxwell in particular faulted Nehru’s “Forward Policy”, which was less a policy than a piecemeal reaction to the Chinese digging their heels in Aksai Chin — Indian troops, as ill-equipped and logistically-handicapped as they were in treach-erous terrain, were to set up posts behind Chinese positions.

(This blame was pooh-poohed by Brigadier John P. Dalvi, who was held prisoner behind Chinese lines when India’s Fourth Division disintegrated in the November 17 onslaught. Dalvi pointed to China’s massive prepa-rations since May 1962, when it built up forces, prepared supply depots for arms, gasoline and ammunition, constructed roads, and even camps for Indian PoWs.)

Maxwell’s book was held up as evidence of Indian duplicity by Zhou Enlai to Henry Kissinger, who was quietly working out President Richard Nixon’s detente with China. The second reason Riedel’s book is excellent is the portrait of an old and tired Nehru who could not reciprocate Kennedy’s obvious enthusiasm to improve relations.

The third reason Riedel’s book is excellent is that it contextualises the US’ Tibet activities and the US department’s internal con-flicts between the Near East division (which handled India) and the Far East division (which hand-led China). Riedel makes use of NDBs and his CIA colleague John Kenneth Knaus’ (who headed covert activities in Tibet) book, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival.

But, finally, the real reason to read this book is because it is so well-written. The writing is clear, crisp and to the point; especially compared to turgid accounts by our retired officials of what are merely vanity projects. In India, we are still afraid of revealing how we lost a war over half a century ago. So we must read Riedel instead.

Aditya Sinha is the co-author of the recent bestseller, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years