THIS DAY, THAT YEAR (PART - 1)

'MUD MUD KE DEKH'

Friday 15 Oct 62, fifty six years ago.

While on his way to Colombo,  Nehru made an off the cuff highly irresponsible statement to the journalists hounding him at Palam airport. ‘I have told the army to evict Chinese from Indian soil’. In reality he had done no such thing, had neither met, spoken or written to the Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) Gen PN Thaper. He was in fact procrastinating over an offer made by his friend Chou En-lai, ‘Premier’ of the ‘People's Republic of China’. Chow had conveyed to him, ‘Give us Aksai Chin and take NEFA’, a seemingly fair offer. Nehru was procrastinating because of a no confidence motion that was being precipitated against him led by Firoz Gandhi, husband of Indira Gandhi.  Agreeing to Chow’s goodwill offer would have been a political suicide for Nehru.

‘It is a declaration of Sino Indian war’, trumpeted an equally irresponsible and ignorant press. Spooked by the headlines, and vitriolic opinions espoused by Delhi left right backwards march think-tank paladins, the Chinese envoy in Chanakyapuri immediately conveyed the declaration of war to Peking.    Mao was back in power and PLA HQ was quick to react. They pushed forward their amassed army into Ladhak (Galwan / Chushul) and into NEFA (Thagla ridge and Rima in Walong valley). An eye ball to eye ball confrontation ensued. Troops from both sides began sniping at each other.  A humiliating defeat of the Indian army would begin within five days, lasting till the benevolent declaration of ceased fire by Peking on 21 Nov 62. India would lose 210,000 sq km of territory, 6000 odd soldiers killed, and a similar number severely injured and maimed, besides the indelible political and military humiliation.

This day that year, the army chief (CoAS Gen Thaper) had no clue of the herculean tragedy that faced India. He had neither been to the battle front at Ladhak nor to NEFA, comprehended the terrain, fighting ability and morale of the army deployed there, or received any direct written order from GoI to go to war with China. He was abroad, sipping wine on ‘venue des Champs-Élysées’ in Paris with his family.

Like many preceding days, coded, ‘Top Secret’ messages from formations deployed along the 4056 km of Sino Indian border, began to pile up at the Signals Enclave in Delhi, faster than they could decipher the messages and bring it to the notice of those who had the power to stop the war. Almost all messages were more or less identical in tone and tenor, they were SoS of some kind. So they lay unattended either in Signals Enclave or in South Block basement.

In Nehru’s absence, the next king in waiting, defence minister VK Krishna Menon sat in a high back chair in his spacious office in South block with large French windows, chain-smoking Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes and sipping black tea. As Caesar, he held India by the juggler. Outside his office, Delhi went about innocently observing ‘Nav Ratra’ and preparing to annihilate evil during ‘Dussahera’. There were high cirrus clouds, a precursor of the seasonal pitter-patter rain, while high up in the Himalayas where the Indian soldiers sat huddled in cotton clothing and canvass shoes, hugging outdated WW-II weapons, it was freezing cold and snow fell on them mercilessly.

Waiting in the corridor of South Block on Raisiana hill, to meet and brief the Caesar, were four intelligent, but conceited and ambitious men.  BM Mullick (Dir IB), HC Sarin (JS MoD), Maj Gen Palit (Dir Gen Military Operations) and Air Cmde HC Dewan (Dir Operations Air HQ). Menon had a habit of pitting one against the other and hence, as a routine, he rarely met them together, though the reason for meeting them was common; execution of his foolhardy posturing, called ‘forward policy’; forward patrolling and establishing 48 army posts, at platoon or weak company strength, all along the Johnson’s line (Ladhak) and Mc Mahon line (rest of the border, including one at Bara Hoti in Char Dham area all the way to NEFA). He usually had Sareen besides him, but no notes or minutes were to be taken down by Sareen. Menon despised all such bureaucratic British procedures of record keeping.  All his orders were usually verbal, or communicated to his ‘infamous four’ subalterns on telephone by Sareen, a system designed to belittle the stature of military Hqs and inculcate subservience of Chiefs of army, navy and air force, after the earlier CoAS Thimayya had threatened to quit (thereby topple the Govt), on the same issue, differences in politico-military appreciation and methodology of defending the Sino Indian border, post war gaming in ex Lal Quila conducted at Lucknow.

Due to steadfast opposition of Menon’s forward policy by all military protagonists in the evolving Sino-Indian drama, (Theatre Commanders Maj Gen Grewal, GoC 3 Div in Leh, in control  of Ladhak;  Lt Gen LP Sen, Army Cdr East and his predecessor Thorat, Area Commander Lt Gen Umrao Singh GoC 33 Corps, Maj Gen Niranjan Prasad GoC 4 Div at Zementhang and Brig Dalvi Cdr 7 Brigade at Namkachu), Menon chose to not only ignore military wisdom but also to belittle and usurp the chain of command, by creating a new phantom 4 Corps, under Lt Gen BM Kaul at Tezpur, reporting directly to him, to do as per his bidding. Kaul was asked to debouch the PLA from the 16,000 feet high Thagla massif, presumed to be the Mc Mahon line in an operation named ‘Leghorn’.

For the first time, on 9 Oct, 50 year old Kaul hitched a ride with Sqn Ldr Williams in a Bell 47 helicopter from Tezpur to Tsangdhar (14,500’), went charging 4500 feet downhill to the verdant Namka Chu river basin, 7 Bde HQ, with all intent to ‘Summary Courtmarshal’ Brig Dalvi on the spot. It took Kaul only a few minutes to do a tactical appreciation when he stood at Namka chu and looked up the vertical face of the Thagla ridge 10,000 odd feet above him, and saw for himself the Division strength  PLA deployments on the slopes waiting to come down. Now he realised the folly of it all, about which Dalvi and others had been crying hoarse. Kaul was in a dilemma. He had no senior army officers including army chief to appeal to, and would need to convince Menon in person. Therefore, without much ado, he asked Dalvi and Niranjan Prasad to hold position till he has a chance to appeal to Menon. If he were a stronger man with courage of conviction, he had the power to permit Dalvi to withdraw 7 Bde to the west to east Hathungla-Serkhim-Drokung Samba line, 10 km south of Namka Chu, as Dalvi wanted to do. 

 

While climbing back to Tsangdhar helipad, Kaul was assailed by a mild heart attack and high altitude sickness (pulmonary oedema, formation of water in the lungs) and had to be carried up the slope by relay teams of young soldiers. On arrival back at Tezpur by helicopter, he was immediately taken to field hospital. Kaul sent word to Air Cmde Jaswant Singh in Guhati to requisition a Dakota and flew to Delhi from Tezpur with two doctors attending to him during the long flight in an unpressurised aircraft, without Oxygen pressure breathing, aggravating his medical condition. On arrival in Delhi, he was rushed into the ICU of MH Delhi, where surgeons inserted long needles into his lung to extract fluids. The bed ridden, but restless and agitated Kaul asked for a field telephone in the ICU to make contact with Menon, to seek his permission to allow orderly withdrawal of 7 Bde from Namka Chu. Menon was fighting off the political assault by opposition in parliament and could not be reached.

Meanwhile a very frustrated Dalvi and his ill-fated 7 Bde stood eye ball to eye ball with the PLA division, awaiting someone to order withdrawal. In retrospect, if Dalvi (or his immediate superior on site, Maj Gen Niranjan Prasad, GoC 4 Div) had disobeyed Kaul’s orders to stay put and had withdrawn as they wanted to, it may have avoided the Sino Indian conflict (not deemed a war since no one actually declared a war other than Indian press !!). Dalvi / Prasad may have at worse been removed from command, or court marshalled. But the infamy of such a disciplinary action may have been far less than the humiliation of defeat that they faced afterwards.  It is doubtful whether any disciplinary action would have ensued, because in the first place there was no written order from any quarter to justify the deployment of 7 Bde in Namka Chu.  Dalvi was taken PoW during the war and Prasad removed from command, to be later given another command, where his poor leadership qualities were to create problems and near defeat in 65 war too.

Till a laboriously detailed aerial survey was done around 1971 using  Canberra photo reconnaissance aircraft, in conjunction with AF Int and Survey of India, none had noticed that the representative of Dalai Lama who signed the 1914 Indo-Tibetan trade and border treaty at Shimla had done a bit of mischief and had deviated from the principle of watershed (Mc Mahon Line) at the India, Bhutan, Tibet tri-junction and that the border was actually not Thagla ridge, but near the Hathungla-Serkhim-Drokung Samba west to east line, that Dalvi wanted to withdraw to. The man who made the blunder, and created the casus belli for Sino Indian imbroglio was Maj Gen Palit, predecessor of Dalvi in 7 Bde, who made a wrong hand drawn sketch of the border as Thagla ridge. This hand drawn sketch, enlarged and mass produced in Delhi in his own press,  using ammonia print technology, was freely distributed to  all and sundry including Menon, Kaul, Prasad and Dalvi, as also every man fighting the war in NEFA. It became the instrument of war in Namka Chu. After 62 war, Palit got away clean because he sat down to write history, to defame everyone else other than the ‘infamous four’, which when  repeated and quoted again and again ad nauseam,  became reason to make a Rufus out of the wrong men.

In Ladhak too, unchartered territory, with no border demarcation, the ground reality was no different. Indian forces, J&K militia with quickly beefed up infantry units like 13 Kumaon were concentrated mostly in rear areas of DBO, Galwan and Chushul. The rest of the area east was already in PLA control. 3 Div was to put up a stout defence when attacked on 20 Oct 62.  But the trigger for the 62 imbroglio was the unwritten order to Kaul to run up the impossible Thagla ridge, since Palit pointed that out to Menon as the border. The LAC as in Sep 62 and later on 23 Nov 62 after cease fire are depicted by dotted line, viz the 1865 Johnson Line, that was agreed as a trade boundary by a treaty between the British and temporal head at Lhasa.

(to be continued in parts, the events of next few days that year, till the war started on 20 Oct 62. After that it is a balls up story of defeat, one part with incredible valour across the rank and file, and the other part of fear psychosis and untold mess up by those who had no ability to command, or lead from the front).