Road to Doklam: When will China and India start talking about the 1962 war honestly?
Both countries have been peddling a simplistic narrative of the last war, each blaming the other. Is it any surprise there’s so much loose talk of a new one?
As the Doklam military standoff in the China-India-Bhutan tri-junction enters its second month, the memories of a border war in 1962 have been stirring back to life. Chinese state media is warning of teaching India a lesson similar to 1962. The cover of the India Today magazine this week is asking ‘Will there be war?’ The People’s Liberation Army is urging the Indian Army to learn from history and stop “clamouring for war”. India’s defence minister is warning that India is not what it was in 1962. Neither is China, Beijing is warning back.
The wider world has largely forgotten that short border clash 55 years ago, playing out as it did in the shadows of the more momentous Cuban missile crisis at the peak of the cold war. But in this part of the world, the ghost of that war still lurks – it is the key to how the world’s two most populous nations imagine one another.
For Indians, spooked more by that distant war for the shame its defeat inflicted on a young nation, 1962 remains an open wound desperate for closure. From warmongering television anchors to bloodthirsty Twitter warriors, the craving for revenge is ubiquitous. As editor and author Shekhar Gupta succinctly said in a column on the 50th anniversary of the war, “for generations, the loser wishes he could fight the same battle, the same war, again, this time with different results of course”.
For the Chinese, their superiority irrefutably established by the overwhelming military triumph in 1962, silent disdain is more the norm. As Fang Zhenjun, a researcher from the China Institute of Cyberspace Strategy, is quoted by the strident state-run newspaper Global Times as saying, the war with India is “scarcely mentioned in the Chinese government statements, official news reports or textbooks, largely out of concerns that it might affect bilateral ties”.
More on the China-India border dispute
No wonder then there’s so much talk about another war, because neither side learnt much from the last one. There’s little knowledge, understanding or debate over the complex mesh of factors that whorled into the war of 1962, and that’s because neither India nor China has been completely honest about the war. Each state churned out a simplistic narrative that blamed the other. These half-truths have over time crystallised into myths, providing the monochromatic, self-righteous prism through which the Chinese and the Indians see each other today. Any suggestion that their own actions may have contributed to the war verges on the blasphemous.
