Picture - Then & Now

 

 

 

For countering Chinese aggression on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the Government is carrying out intensive and extensive infrastructure development in border areas of Arunachal Pradesh. The Chief Engineer of the ‘Project Vartak’ Brig. Raman Kumar said that the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) is developing and maintaining all key road networks in the border areas of western Assam an western Arunachal Pradesh. The Government is also working to strengthen mobile connectivity in Tawang and other border areas of Arunachal Pradesh ... THIS description of the Government’s developmental activity in border areas is very heartening, to say the least. Thus, the picture, today, is one of confidence and exercise of India’s sovereign strength.

 

This is a very happy and healthy dimension of the strategic scenario that the nation is experiencing for the past 7-8 years. However, this picture contrasts sharply with the picture available in the 1950s when the Chinese had started showing their true colours by taking aggressive stance against India. For strange and even inexplicable reasons, the national leadership in those years did not undertake infrastructure development in border areas by openly ignoring the advice of the military top brass and strategists. It also ignored the advice about weapons etc. The two pictures -- of now and then -- thus show the sharp difference between the national leadership soon after Independence and many years later, and the leadership that the nation has today.

 

It is a revealing contrast. In the mid-1950s and a little later, led by their superstar strategist and Army chief General K.S. Thimayya, India’s military brass worked hard to survey all the delicate border areas in the eastern and western frontier regions from eastern Ladakh to western Arunachal Pradesh and suggested an immediate infrastructure development and acquisition of modern weapons for the Armed Forces. On both counts, the then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Defence Minister Mr. V. K. Krishna Menon harboured other (and rather juvenile) ideas about how to handle the Chinese. Basically, they did not believe that the Chinese had any antagonistic ideas about India. So, they felt that India could handle China diplomatically. On the weapons front, the Nehru-Menon duo floated the idea of indigenisation of defence production -- at a time when India’s ordnance industry was ill-prepared to take up such a task. Every time the military leaders asked for modernisation of weapons through acquisition, the Nehru-Menon duo discarded the idea, in the process frustrating the military brass. As Army chief, General Thimayya ordered two of his stalwart command leaders -- Major General S.P.P. Thorat, Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Command, and Major General Kalwant, Commander-in-Chief of the Western Command, to conduct strategic exercises to reconnoiter possible Chinese moves and prepare response plans. Major General Kalwant conducted his Exercise Sheel at Shimla and Major General Thorat conducted his Exercise Lal Qila at Lucknow. Major General P.P. Kumaramangalam led a ‘Chinese’ force in both cases.

 

The two exercises were a great success and produced response plans -- coupled with demands for raising new formations and acquiring new weapons. Defence Minister Mr. Menon slept over the reports and when pressed to open those files, only paid lip service to the cause -- without actually doing anything concrete in that regard. Both, Exercise Sheel and Exercise Lal Qila showed with amazing accuracy how the Chinese would attack India. General Thorat, for example, had named Tawang, too, as one of the areas where the Chinese would attack. In subsequent years, right until this date, all the predictions have been proved correct.

 

Army chief General Thimayya had also recommended an immediate development of strategic and non-strategic infrastructure in border areas. But Pandit Nehru’s perception was in total variance with that of the military leadership of those days. All this effort well in advance went waste and India suffered an avoidable humiliation in 1962. If only the political leadership had heeded the professional advice in the 1950s, 1962 would not have happened. The picture now is altogether different. India’s political and military leaderships operate in full collaboration like never before. In addition to a well-coordinated infrastructure development in border areas, the Government has undertaken an ambitious and visionary weapons programme of indigenous production and foreign acquisition of rare worth. The picture of the 1950s is now only a bitter memory. The picture sixty years later is far brighter, far better, and far more promising in terms of threat-perception and national response - in sharp contrast.