Nehru's ghost haunts Modi's China failure

Asia Times

10-03-2025

The 1962 Sino-Indian War remains a deep-seated national trauma for India, leaving a lasting imprint on the nation's post-independence national psyche. The battle, often referred to as a 'national humiliation,' saw China's People's Liberation Army overpower India's unprepared forces in the barren Himalayan region.
The defeat shattered Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's slogan of 'Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai', a supposed fraternal bond between India and China. It also exposed the fragility of the newly independent nation's military and diplomatic capabilities. More than seven decades later, the lost war's reverberations continue to influence India's politics, society and global ambitions.
No publicly available document neatly encapsulates Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy. However, his external affairs minister, S Jaishankar, offers insights through his scattered speeches and two books, 'The India Way' and 'Why India Matters.'
Jaishankar casts the 1962 debacle as one of three seismic blows to India's development trajectory, alongside the suffocation of British colonial rule and the bloody rupture of India's partition in 1947. He argues that the defeat inflicted a lasting wound on India's self-confidence and strategic imagination—a psychological hobble from which it has yet to recover fully.
Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wield this narrative as a cudgel against incumbent opposition Indian National Congress Party and its longest-serving prime minister, Nehru, blaming his historical mistake for not just 1962 but a cascade of woes: the Kashmir quagmire, the longstanding hostility toward Pakistan and unresolved border tensions with China.
Nehru's 1961 'Forward Policy', which saw Indian troops creep into contested frontier zones and his failure to gird for China's riposte, is held up as damning evidence of naiveté. This critique doubles as political theater, a bid to dismantle Nehru's towering legacy while framing Modi as the strongman India lacked then and needs now.
Modi insists his muscular leadership has hoisted India toward global prominence, even as the ghosts of Nehru's failures still haunt its borders.
However, the 1962 war's significance stretches beyond India's borders and is refracted differently through Chinese and Western prisms. For Chinese leader Mao Zedong, Nehru was once a figure of respect—a fellow traveler in the fight against Western imperialism.
When India wrested Goa from Portugal in 1961, China quickly applauded. The two leaders shared a visceral disdain for colonial plunder yet diverged sharply on remedies. Where Mao embraced revolutionary upheaval, Nehru sought a gentler path—until, in Beijing's telling, he veered toward provocation.
China has accused Nehru of stoking the border dispute at the Soviet Union's behest, as a pawn in Moscow's Cold War geostrategic chess game to check Chinese power. As Sino-Soviet tensions simmered, Nehru's alignment with the Kremlin, however loose, curdled his rapport with Mao.
At Nehru's side stood V K Krishna Menon, his defence minister and foreign-policy aide. Menon, a prickly ideologue, pushed an assertive line against the West first and then China, urging the Forward Policy despite India's thin military resources.
In April 1960, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai arrived in New Delhi intending to settle the border row. What unfolded instead was a study of dysfunction. Nehru, urbane and idealistic, appeared adrift, lamenting that his cabinet—Menon chief among them—slipped his grasp.
Exasperated, Zhou bypassed protocol to call on Menon, Finance Minister Morarji Raj Desai and Home Minister Govinda Ballav Pant at an unspecified location, either Rastrapant Bhavan (President's residence) or Teen Murti Bhavan (Nehru's residence), hoping to broker peace.
Menon's obduracy dashed those hopes; Zhou left empty-handed, his patience spent. A subsequent Indian proposal, conciliatory but muddled, only deepened the rift. After his return to Beijing, Zhou reported to Mao that India was no longer worth engaging. Trust collapsed and China began to plan a sharper response.
By October 1962, Mao's strategy bore fruit: a swift, punishing campaign that left India reeling. Menon's brinkmanship and Nehru's indecision exacted a steep toll—thousands of dead, territory lost and a nation humbled.
The war's fallout still dogs Nehru's reputation, raising piercing questions about his command. Had he curbed Menon's zeal or read China's resolve, might India have sidestepped disaster?
The Forward Policy, which saw Indian troops creep into contested frontier zones, played a significant role in escalating the conflict. This aggressive stance and Nehru's failure to read China's intentions led to a war for which India was ill-prepared.
The West saw Nehru's 'mistake' through a different lens. To Uncle Sam and John Bull, he embodied democratic promise—a Harrow- and Cambridge-educated statesman who preached pluralism, multiculturalism, openness and multiparty democracy. They assumed he would tilt toward their orbit, a bulwark against communism.
Yet Menon, with his socialist fervor and Soviet sympathies, tugged Nehru leftward. This alignment with the Soviet Union profoundly impacted India's foreign relations. A British Secret Service secret document portrays Menon as a 'fierce Russian commie'; in Washington, he was a red flag.
Under his sway, Nehru's India drifted from the West, spurning Cold War largesse—trade, technology, and even a permanent UN Security Council seat proffered after China's 1949 communist revolution.
Nehru's critics lament this as a historic miscalculation. Embracing Western ties might have fueled India's industrialization and modernization, vaulting it past the economic torpor that followed. Instead, swayed by Soviet-style socialism, Nehru doubled down on autarky—a noble but costly creed.
That choice reverberated. In 1971, facing American pressure over the Bangladesh row, India inked a strategic pact with the Soviet Union—a lumbering giant led by gerontocratic apparatchiks, its technology and economy stagnating. The US, by contrast, brimmed with technological innovation, growth and prosperity, yet India's rebuff opened the door to a Washington-Beijing thaw.
When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, India's bet looked costlier still: decades of missed opportunities, while China, pivoting Westward, surged ahead economically, technologically and militarily. Nehru's heirs rue his aversion to the West and flirtation with Moscow—a legacy, they argue, that left India weaker than its rival.
Modi took office in 2014 with little foreign-policy experience and fumbled foreign affairs for eight months. He ousted Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh and elevated Jaishankar, then ambassador to the US, to the role in January 2015.
Jaishankar is a cerebral diplomat who has championed a US-India axis and is less enamoured of Western pieties than their strategic heft. Jaishankar wrote 'India and USA: New Direction' in the limited-circulation Indian Foreign Policy: Challenges and Opportunities, published by the Indian Foreign Service Institute, Delhi, in 2007.
In his article, he had mused about toppling China's communist regime with American help—a provocative notion. As foreign secretary, he edged India from its 'non-aligned perch,' a position of not aligning with any significant power bloc and Soviet-era military ties toward Washington's embrace.
China took note. But 100 days through Donald Trump's first term, India veered harder Westward, agreeing to revive the Quad (with the US, Japan, and Australia) in April 2017. In June 2017, a standoff at Doklam—where Indian and Chinese troops faced off—tested the shift.
Jaishankar brokered talks; Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Wuhan in April 2018 to ease tensions. In 2018, India joined the Indo-Pacific Strategy—Obama's 'Pivot to Asia' was reborn under Trump's first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.
An October 2019 Modi-Xi summit held in Tamil Nadu fizzled; Xi's curt remarks a day later signalled a freeze. This hypothesis is supported by Xi's subsequent statement during an official visit to Nepal directly after the Mahabalipuram summit.
There, Xi warned that 'anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones,' which could have been interpreted as a veiled response to India's alliance with the US to contain China.
Then, in June 2020, a brutal clash in Ladakh's Galwan Valley—20 Indian soldiers killed, Chinese losses undisclosed—plunged ties to a nadir not seen since 1989. India banked on Trump's 'decoupling' from China to reroute a caravan of factories its way. Joe Biden's 2021 ascent to the White House, with his 'bringing manufacturing back to the US' push, scuttled that hope, turning the US' focus inward.
Modi named Jaishankar foreign minister in 2019, leaning on his pro-US bent to chase the trade and tech dividends China had reaped for decades. By late 2020, India cemented its US pivot with four foundational pacts, locking in military and strategic cooperation.
Yet Biden's election upended the calculus. His administration's domestic priorities left India short of the economic boon it craved. Trump's 2025 return to the White House has brought 'reciprocal tariffs'—a stark reminder, delivered with Modi beside him, that America holds the upper hand. Meanwhile, General Motors, Ford and Harley-Davidson have pulled out of India, dimming its industrial allure.
Today, the US mirrors the Soviet Union's 1970s twilight—technologically stalled, highly inflationary and steered by gerontocratic mavericks like Trump. India's American wager has yielded little and instead stoked China's ire. Modi, who pilloried Nehru for snubbing the West and hugging Moscow, has stumbled into a parallel trap: spurning China's hand for a faltering US alliance.
The 1962 war's lessons—on leadership, timing and the perils of misjudgment–still haunt India. Nehru's ghost, it seems, is not alone; Modi's shadow grows alongside it, a testament to India's enduring struggle to find its footing among giants.
As philosopher George Santayana cautioned, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Yet, Modi, despite knowing the past, has repeated the very mistake he has blamed Nehru for making.
Bhim Bhurtel is on X at @BhimBhurtel