by A. G. NOORANI
It is 50 years since the border conflict with China, and the nation must be told the truth in its own interests so that it is prepared for a settlement. The truth about how a boundary problem was, in the first place, allowed to assume the proportions of a dispute and, in the next, how an unnecessary dispute was allowed to trigger an unnecessary war.
“The Ottoman revival is good for the national ego and has captured the psyche of the country at this moment, when Turkey wants to be a great power. But, it terrifies me because too much national ego is not a good thing. Films like Conquest 1453 are engaging in cultural revisionism and glorifying the past without looking at history in a critical way,” Melis Behlil, a film studies professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, said. In 1453, the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmet II conquered the historic city of Constantinople, now Istanbul ( International Herald Tribune; November 1, 2012).
India has had a surfeit of such films, especially in the last quarter century; Ramayana, serialised on Doordarshan, for example. But it has no tradition of any introspection worth the name. The outpourings on the 50th anniversary of the China-India war, which erupted on October 20, 1962, should have prodded some reflection in the same spirit as Melis Behlil’s remarks. But hardly anyone took that trouble. Instead, we were treated to familiar themes such as the omission to use air power, tactical and strategic mistakes and the roles of villains of note.
Professor Wang Gungwa of the National University of Singapore said in New Delhi on December 24, 2010, apropos that war: “Most in China don’t even think about it. Still others don’t know about 1962 and what happened. Most people in China think it was misunderstanding between the leaders.”
This is a bit facile. The Chinese recall to this day the war with Japan which took place much earlier. India’s recall of the war is understandable. It suffered a humiliating defeat and lost territory and prestige; witnessed in its aftermath the Sino-Pak entente of great consequence; felt frustrated at the decline in the relations with China and the deadlock on the boundary dispute; and is baffled as to how all this has happened.
Farthest from the minds of most is any thought of mistakes on India’s part. What was most pronounced was a feeling of self-righteousness. The outpourings produced hardly an ideas of worth. They revealed the mindset of the Indian elite. Patrick Tyler of The New York Times has just produced a fascinating study of the military elite that runs Israel and why it cannot make peace. It is aptly entitled Fortress America. The Indian elite shares this militaristic outlook with two other countries it dearly loves, the United States and Israel.
Not surprisingly, the military aspect dominated the discourse on the war of October 1962. The diplomatic background was ignored. A mass of material has appeared on decision-making in China before October 1962. It is ignored. There is not the faintest suggestion of Indian lapses. Such an outlook bodes ill for the future. But it has been prevalent since Independence as part of nationalistic fervour. In 1968, shortly after the Rann of Kutch Award, this writer was driving down from Delhi to Faridabad for a Quaker seminar, in the stimulating company of Prof. Hans J. Morgenthau. A remark he made sums up the national mood: “Yours is the only country in the world which wins 90 per cent of its case before an international tribunal and calls it defeat.” India broke two international agreements on the cession of Beru Bari; the Nehru-Noon Agreement of September 10, 1958, and the Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Mujibur Rehman Agreement of May 16, 1974. The matter was finalised in a messy deal after prolonged litigation. Beru Bari is about the size of a football field.
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