What book mentioned by PM Modi to counter Rahul says about 'failure' of Nehru's policy

Indian Prime Minister Nehru (1869 - 1964) speaking on his arrival at the White House, watched by President John F Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson. (Photo: Getty Images)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday led a no-holds-barred attack against the Opposition, particularly the Congress and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, a day after the latter's remarks against government on several issues including foreign policy.

In a veiled jibe at Gandhi, PM Modi said that some people made it a point to mention the term foreign policy "just to be perceived as a mature leader". However, Modi said that those genuinely interested in understanding foreign policy should read the book, 'JFK's Forgotten Crisis'.

“This book mentions correspondence between India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru and then US President John F Kennedy and also decisions taken at the time. The book brings out the games being played in the name of foreign policy at a time the country was facing a lot of challenges,” PM Modi said, without directly referring to the 1962 India-China War, which the book talks about extensively.

Published in 2015, 'JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA and the Sino-Indian War' is authored by former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official Bruce Riedel delves into the India-China War in 1962 and cites letters exchanged between Nehru and Kennedy. Notably, the book says that the Indian leadership was "ill-prepared and taken aback", and sought fighter jets to stem the Chinese aggression in 1962.

Here are some excerpts from the book:

China's occupation of 14,500 square miles

"The Chinese attack on India that began in October 1962 inflicted major casualties on the poorly equipped and badly led Indian army and resulted in China's occupation of 14,500 square miles of territory claimed by India in Kashmir called Aksai Chin or the desert of white stones. So grave was the defeat that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was compelled to ask Kennedy for “immediate American military aid to India, including an airlift of infantry weapons and light equipment for troops fighting on the border, and even American piloted transportation planes, and he had authorized a formal request to Washington for consideration of a joint air defense, involving American air cover for Indian cities to free India's air force for tactical raids against the Chinese. Hundreds of U.S. military advisers and air force personnel descended on New Delhi,” as one eminent American historian of modern India has written, the book says.

When Nehru batted for UNSC seat for China

"China was a major topic of their discussions. Nehru pressed (US President Dwight D) Eisenhower to support giving Communist China the seat in the United Nations Security Council that Nationalist China had been given in 1945 at the end of World War II, making it one of the five permanent members of the Council with the right to veto any resolution it did not approve. It was “only logical that any government controlling six hundred million people will sooner or later have to be brought into the council of nations,” Nehru argued.

Nehru dismissed possibility of China attacking India

"The prime minister (Nehru) dismissed any possibility that China would attack India, given the “fortunate location of the Himalayan mountain chain” on their 1,800 miles of common border. India could not afford the cost of building a defense along this long border: Taking part in an arms race would jeopardize its hopes of development. Better, Nehru concluded, that India stay neutral in the cold war and seek to build friendly ties with China.6 Eisenhower, with China's role in the Korean War still fresh in his memory, refused to budge on China and the UN seat."

Pressure at home and abroad

"In early October 1950, just as he was dealing with Zhou's warning that China would invade Korea, Panikkar received reports that 20,000 Chinese forces had crossed into Tibet and seized control of a strip of land along the frontier dividing Tibet from China. On October 25, China announced that it had begun “the process of ‘Liberating Tibet’.

"Nehru faced pressure at home and abroad to do more. The Indian press was full of stories about Chinese atrocities in Tibet and the potential for China to use Tibet to threaten India. His own intelligence chief, B. N. Mullik, head of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) from 1950 until after Nehru died, warned Nehru that China's move into Tibet was “sinister” and would threaten India's interests. Mullik also thought Panikkar was too soft on China. In the United Nations, which had already deployed forces to fight the Chinese in Korea, there was pressure to label the PRC as an aggressor and to condemn the invasion. Nehru worked quietly both to calm down his agitated domestic constituency and to keep the Tibet issue out of the UN."

Neither capability nor intention

"Chinese forces did not occupy all of Tibet in 1950; rather China's strategy was to seize the border area and then negotiate full control over the kingdom with the weak theocratic government in Lhasa, which was powerless to resist the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The “stiffness” in Chinese-Indian relations caused by the invasion, as Panikkar described it, proved to be short-lived. Nehru had neither the capability nor the intention of fighting for control of Tibet, and Mao was not eager to overplay his very strong hand. Instead, Mao was content to gradually absorb Tibet and welcomed Nehru's behind-the-scenes help in the UN. After all China had enough on its agenda with a full-scale war with the United States and the UN underway in Korea."

When China took Nehru for a ride

"In 1965 the CIA did a top-secret postmortem of the Sino-Indian War that was later declassified. In assessing the early years of the dispute between Nehru and Mao over Tibet, the CIA concluded correctly that China “played on Nehru's Asian, anti-imperialist mental attitude; his proclivity to temporize, and his sincere desire for an amicable Sino-Indian relationship.” China's “strategy was to avoid making explicit, in conversations and communications with Nehru, any Chinese border claims, while avoiding any retraction of those claims which would require changing Chinese maps.” The CIA postmortem concluded it “was a masterpiece of guile
executed by Chou en Lai."

"The 1965 CIA postmortem concluded that the Tibet uprising had gravely compromised Nehru's ability to keep Indian relations with China friendly. The crisis between the two countries was now in the open, with the Indian press pushing Nehru not to give Mao any concessions."

'Nehru was more interested in Pat Kennedy'

"When Kennedy was visiting India, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi convinced Prime Minister Nehru to give him an audience. As Jackie Kennedy later recalled, the embassy staff told Kennedy that “whenever Nehru gets bored with you, he taps his fingertips together and looks up at the ceiling.” After only ten minutes with Kennedy, she said, “Nehru started to look up at the ceiling” and began tapping his fingertips. It was an inauspicious start to their relationship. According to another account, Nehru was much more interested in Pat Kennedy, JFK's attractive twenty seven-year-old sister, than in either Jack or Bobby."

Failure of Nehru's policy

The CIA had prepared a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in 1960 titled “Sino-Indian Relations” that noted, among other things, that the border dispute had “resulted in a sharp upsurge of anti-Chinese sentiment in India,” and the “failure of Nehru's policy of befriending Communist China caused a noticeable decline in his prestige.” It claimed that because of this policy Nehru would be “unlikely again to enjoy the virtually unquestioned power to direct India's foreign policy” that he had in the 1950s. The dispute had “tended to create among Indian
leaders a more sympathetic view of US opposition to Communist China,” although “Nehru has no intention of altering India's basic policy of nonalignment.” It also suggested that India was likely to look to the Soviet Union for help with China; Moscow had taken a neutral posture toward the border quarrel, even though the NIE noted that “the USSR has been perturbed by the crudeness, if not the substance of China's actions.”

When Nehru asked US to join war against China

As India was fast losing its territory to China and suffering heavy casualties, Nehru said in his letter to Kennedy that India needed “air transport and jet fighters to stem the Chinese tide of aggression".

“Nehru was thus asking Kennedy to join the war against China by partnering in an air war to defeat the PLA (People’s Liberation Army of China). It was a momentous request that the Indian Prime Minister was making. Just a decade after American forces had reached a ceasefire with the Chinese Communist Forces in Korea, India was asking JFK to join a new war against Communist China.”

“A minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all-weather fighters are essential. We have no modern radar cover in the country. The United States Air Force personnel will have to man these fighters and radar installations while our personnel are being trained."