In 1962, Intelligence Chief B.N. Mullick ruled the roost. These days it is the mandarins of External Affairs Ministry and Babus in the MOD. There is no single point military advice.
Things are not good at all.
Lt Gen Harbhajan Singh (Retd)
Extract
indian express oped
Posted: Sat Nov 20 2010, 03:34 hrs
Blaming Pandit Nehru for everything wrong with India has grown from a fashion to a rage, so the letters he addressed to American President John F. Kennedy on November 19, 1962, will be used as another stick with which to beat him. Destructive denigration serves him as ill as the idolatry in which he could do no wrong. Of course he made mistakes, who doesn’t, and to pretend they really were not mistakes worse, to conceal facts only feeds his detractors. What our country owes him becomes ever more apparent, time and our travails keep confirming its value. Viewing so great a man whole, faults and all, cannot diminish his stature, or our debt. What we need is to learn from the mistakes, his and ours which we stubbornly refuse to do.
November 1962 was a national disaster, all the more painful for being so self-inflicted: blinding ourselves to it is to invite repeats. Panditji must bear his share of responsibility, but the totality of our failure extends far beyond individuals. India failed to function as an organised state, alive to its challenges and opportunities, appropriately prepared to deal with them. Have we used our experience to become such a state now?
People today cannot realise the horrific pressures of those weeks. Despite our foolishness in imagining that suppressing facts can change them, plentiful evidence has been published by important actors of the time, inter alia recording the frightening situation Delhi saw itself facing that November 19 morning. Key positions had been left to the enemy, Sela and Bomdila augured horrendous dangers, civil officers had started being withdrawn and a complete evacuation from Assam was being considered, the DIB even starting to plan a resistance movement. An outstanding soldier, Major-General Monty Palit wrote 20 years ago that he was shown the draft letter seeking 12 fighter and two bomber squadrons; as DMO, at a desperate stage of a war that seemed to be moving along a course of escalating disasters, [he] could only welcome the proposal of obtaining military help, whatever its source, though confessing he had not for a moment imagined that... the architect of India's non-alignment policy, would ask for actual intervention by US forces. (War in the High Himalayas pp 342-343)
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