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Thursday, March 28, 2024
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HomePageTurnerAfterwordA new book says 1962 wasn't India's fault, China started it

A new book says 1962 wasn’t India’s fault, China started it

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‘China’s India War’ by Bertil Lintner released; former Army chief J.J. Singh says China was familiar with India’s difficult terrain & was fully prepared for the war.

New Delhi: Journalist and author Bertil Lintner’s new book, ‘China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World’, is a rebuttal to Nevile Maxwell’s argument that the 1962 war was instigated by India.

The book that was released here Wednesday also looks at Chinese influence in India’s Northeast, discussing espionage in the erstwhile North-East Frontier Agency (present-day Arunachal Pradesh), and the merger of Sikkim into the Indian Union.

Maxwell’s ‘India’s China War’, published in 1970, is what inspired Lintner’s account.

Former Army chief Gen. J.J. Singh (retired), who took part in a panel discussion after the book launch, agreed with Lintner’s primary argument. “I can tell you that India was naïve enough to give them a trigger or a provocation, but China was prepared,” he said, citing Chinese familiarity with the difficult terrain, and the fact that the Chinese had interpreters for Tamil as well as Punjabi, as proof.

The discussion touched upon issues ranging from India’s border relations with China, and China’s rise as a major geopolitical influencer. Apart from Gen. Singh, the panel comprised Lt. Gen. S.L. Narasimhan, member of the National Security Advisory Board; Nitin A. Gokhale, national security analyst, Sujit Dutta, professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, Shakti Sinha, director of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library.

Bertil Lintner speaking and panel on stage at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library
Bertil Lintner speaking and panel on stage at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library

Dutta described the book as “a lasting contribution”, with “great human interest value”. The book asserts that China had been planning the 1962 war since at least 1959, when the Dalai Lama took refuge in India.

Gokhale said the book debunks Maxwell’s and Alastair Lamb’s work on India as an aggressor in the region. “Hopefully, the shadow of Maxwell and Lamb can be removed from scholars’ minds when they look at China and Pakistan,” he said, adding that the 1962 clash between India and China “was a culmination of a contest between two civilisations”.

The panel unanimously agreed that India should refocus on its Northeast region. Gen. Singh pointed out that seven countries fall within a 1,000 km radius of Shillong and Guwahati, and this makes the region extremely strategically important, and gives India a platform to improve relations with South-East Asian countries.

“The Northeast should be looked at with a fresh perspective. It should be the starting point of India’s ‘Look East, Act East, Implement East’ policy,” said Gokhale.

Dutta talked about contemporary Chinese politics, saying that Xi Jinping is breaking away from the past, and beginning to openly assert Chinese interests. “China’s rise has a huge impact on Asia, and the Chinese are not coy about it anymore,” he said.

Lintner, on the other hand, said that not much had changed with respect to Chinese foreign policy. “China just isn’t exporting revolutions, now it’s flooding the world with consumer goods — but there is still a desire to dominate the world,” he said.

The panel concurred on the fact that the Chinese academia has a better understanding of India. “They put in a lot more effort to know about us than we do to know about them,” said Sinha.

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