Letters: The ghosts of 1962

This refers to the editorial "Talking about 1962" (March 19). A lot of books and articles have been written on the fiasco that the 1962 India-China war turned out to be for the brave Indian Army. The public knows only too well who the guilty men were. Then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru kept telling the nation that the "Chinese are our friends who would not attack us," based no doubt on the inputs provided to him by the then Intelligence Bureau chief B N Mullick. Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon's one-point agenda was to demoralise the army generals, with his high-handed approach. Lt Gen B M Kaul was the proverbial "Yes man", who promised to carry out the impossible orders of the political leadership "to evict the Chinese from the disputed land". The result was a humiliating defeat for an unprepared and ill-equipped army, whose men did not even have proper winter clothing, not to speak of the weaponry with which to fight a far better-equipped enemy. As the London Times editorially remarked (in the aftermath of the Himalayan tragedy) "the Indian army is in need of everything, except courage". After the disaster, Nehru, for his part, showed his love for the nation by weeping in public, when Lata Mangeshkar sang "Aye mere watan ke logon". Five decades later, the Congress does the predictable by reportedly banning access to the website of veteran journalist Neville Maxwell (who dared to publish a part of the Henderson Brooks report) because the report is still "sensitive and of current operational value", no doubt, to the ruling party.

V Jayaraman Chennai

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