Sino-India border blunder

India’s china war Neville Maxwell Natraj Publishing Rs.595 Pages 510 This book first published in 1970 was banned in India by Indira Gandhi and the dynasty for 40 years. An updated version was reprinted in 2015 Although liberals put up a stout defence, no politician’s star has fallen from the zenith of his glory to near rock-bottom as of Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister who passed away in 1964. Undoubtedly there were some fine elements mixed in him. He united the country after Partition — the parting kick of the British Raj — led by example in transcending caste and religion, and ensured free India remained a functional democracy by according high respect and accountability to Parliament. Yet this great man who strode not only the Indian, but world stage like a colossus, burdened the nation with three toxic legacies which makes it impossible for an objective historian to forgive him. First, despite his claim to being a historian — he wrote Discovery of India (1946) — he ignored India’s several millennia tradition of private enterprise and imposed the socialist economic model of development upon the newly independent nation under which the State would “dominate the commanding heights of the Indian economy”. Private enterprise was strangulated and national savings and huge foreign loans were canalised into giant public sector enterprises (PSEs) managed by bureaucrats and government clerks. Unsurprisingly, Central PSEs whose number has multiplied to 256, never made a half decent profit and dragged down the economy. For over 50 years, post-independence India’s GDP grew at an average 3.5 percent per year, while GDP growth in our neighbour nations of South-east Asia including China, grew at two and three multiples thereof. Nehru’s second abiding sin was dynasticism and nepotism. Himself parachuted into the top echelon of the Congress party by his father Motilal whom he succeeded as president of the party in 1929 when he was only 29 years of age, Nehru signalled preference for his daughter Indira Nehru Gandhi as his successor, when he appointed her as president of the Congress in 1957. In turn, she anointed her totally inexperienced and unqualified sons Sanjay and later Rajiv as her heirs. Moreover, Nehru saw nothing wrong in appointing his sister as ambassador to the United Nations, nephew R.K. Nehru ambassador to the United States, and several Kashmiri pandit kith and kin to highest offices including head of RAW, and most disastrously Gen. V.K. Kaul — an officer of no combat experience — as Chief of Defence Staff during the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, in which India suffered a humiliating defeat. Nehru’s third egregious error for which the country has paid a huge price — and continues to do so — was neglect and failure to negotiate a clearly demarcated boundary between China and India. As a result, a hazy boundary which divides the world’s two most populous nations stretches over 4,000 km from the Aksai Chin plateau in the north-west to Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east. As…