IN THE late autumn of 1962, there was a short, intense border war between India and China. It resulted in the complete rout of an underprepared and poorly led Indian Army. For the two rising powers, the battle—and its outcome—was seen in national, civilizational and ideological terms. These nations were, or at least saw themselves as, carriers of ancient civilizations that had produced great literature, philosophy, architecture, science and much else, but whose further evolution had been rudely interrupted by Western imperialists. India became free of British rule in 1947; China was united under Communist auspices in 1949. The recovery of their national independence was viewed as the prelude to the reemergence of China and India as major forces in the world.

Thus, the defeat of 1962 was at once a defeat of the Indian Army by its Chinese counterpart, a defeat of democracy by Communism, a defeat of one large new nation by another and a defeat of one ancient civilization at the hands of another. In India, the defeat was also interpreted in personal terms, as the defeat of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had held the offices of prime minister and foreign minister continuously since independence in 1947.

That debacle at the hands of China still hangs as a huge cloud over Nehru’s reputation. And there is an intriguing comparison to be made here with his fellow Harrovian, Winston Churchill. British historian Robert Rhodes James once wrote a book called Churchill: A Study in Failure, whose narrative stopped at 1939. It excavated, perhaps in excessive detail, its subject’s erratic and undistinguished career before that date. But of course, all Churchill’s failures were redeemed by his heroic leadership in World War II. It is tempting to see Nehru’s career as being Churchill’s in reverse; marked as it was for many decades by achievement and success, these nullified by the one humiliating failure which broke his nation’s morale and broke his own spirit and body. The war began in October 1962; a year and a half later, Nehru was dead.

It is a legacy that still haunts the Sino-Indian relationship.

NEHRU WAS long interested in (and influenced by) China. His prolific writings—books, letters, speeches—reveal much of the man and how he came to be so deeply misled by the threat he (and his country) faced. Nehru saw China at once as peer, comrade and soul mate. His first major book, Glimpses of World History, published in 1934, puts his predilections on full display. It has as many as 134 index references to the Middle Kingdom. These refer to, among other things, different dynasties (the Tang, Han, Qin, etc), corruption, Communism, civil war, agriculture and banditry. Already, the pairing of China and India was strongly imprinted in Nehru’s framework. Thus China is referred to as “the other great country of Asia” and as “India’s old-time friend.” There was a manifest sympathy with its troubles at the hands of foreigners. The British were savaged for forcing humiliating treaties and opium down the throats of the Chinese, this being an illustration of the “growing arrogance and interference by the western Powers.”

In all his pre-1947 writings, Nehru saw China from the lens of a progressive anti-imperialist, from which perspective India and China were akin and alike, simultaneously fighting Western control as well as feudal remnants in their own societies. Chiang Kai-shek and company, like Nehru and company, were at once freedom fighters, national unifiers and social modernizers. It stood to reason that, when finally rid of foreign domination, the two neighbors would be friends and partners.

In the spring of 1947, with India’s freedom imminent, Nehru organized the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi. Representatives of Asian nations already free or struggling for independence from European rulers were in attendance. There, Nehru called China “that great country to which Asia owes so much and from which so much is expected.” The conference itself he characterized as

an expression of that deeper urge of the mind and spirit of Asia which has persisted in spite of the isolationism which grew up during the years of European domination. As that domination goes, the walls that surrounded us fall down and we look at each other again and meet as old friends long parted.

Nehru believed that the fundamental areas of disagreement between India and China could be bridged; in particular, the unresolved detritus of the imperialist era that largely centered on Tibet. For back in 1913–14, a meeting was held in the British imperial summer capital, Shimla, convened by the government of India and attended by Chinese and Tibetan representatives (Tibet was by then enjoying a period of substantial, indeed near-complete, political autonomy from Chinese overlordship). Here the McMahon Line (which sought to demarcate the frontiers of British India) was drawn. When India became independent in 1947 it recognized this boundary, which largely followed the path of the Himalaya, and adopted it as its own. By this, Nehru and his government thought that the border between India and China, determined at the Shimla Conference, had been reaffirmed.

Even when the Communists took power on the mainland in 1949 and began to voice their reservations about the McMahon Line, the prime minister continued to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt. So did other influential Indians. The ambassador to China, K. M. Panikkar, was greatly impressed by the new ruler, comparing Mao Tse-tung to his own boss, Nehru. Both, he claimed—or fantasized—“are men of action with dreamy, idealistic temperaments,” both “humanists in the broadest sense of the term.”

In October 1950, China invaded Tibet. Now, the home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, in a show of realism, wrote to Nehru that

Communism is no shield against imperialism and that the Communists are as good or as bad imperialists as any other. Chinese ambitions in this respect not only cover the Himalayan slopes on our side but also include important parts of Assam. . . . Chinese irredentism and Communist imperialism are different from the expansionism or imperialism of the Western Powers. The former has a cloak of ideology which makes it ten times more dangerous. In the guise of ideological expansion lie concealed racial, national or historical claims.

This was not what Nehru wanted to hear. As he saw it, China, like India, had embarked on an ambitious and autonomous program of economic and social development, albeit under Communist auspices. Once more the two great civilizations could interact with and learn from each other. As Nehru wrote to his chief ministers in June 1952: “[A] variety of circumstances pull India and China towards each other, in spite of differences of forms of government. This is the long pull of geography and history and, if I may add, of the future.” Later the same year, after a visit to India’s northeast, Nehru insisted that there was not “the slightest reason to expect any aggression on our north-eastern frontier.”

In June 1954, Chou En-lai visited New Delhi. In a letter to his chief ministers written immediately afterward, Nehru reported that the Chinese prime minister

was particularly anxious, of course, for the friendship and co-operation of India. . . . His talk was wholly different from the normal approach of the average Communist, which is full of certain slogans and cliches. He hardly mentioned Communism or the Soviet Union or European politics.

Nehru made a return visit to China in October 1954. In Beijing, a million people lined the roads to greet and cheer Nehru and Chou as they drove in an open car from the airport to the city. Then he visited Canton, Dalian and Nanjing to much the same applause.

This reception must certainly have flattered Nehru. But it seems also to have convinced him of the depth of popular support for the regime and of the desire for friendship with India. He had “no doubt at all that the Government and people of China desire peace and want to concentrate on building up their country during the next decade or so.” Indeed, in a 1954 speech on Sino-Indian relations, Nehru articulated his policy of nonalignment, based on the principle of mutual nonaggression and noninterference with (and from) any great powers.

Toward the end of 1956, Chou En-lai visited India again. The Dalai Lama was also in his party. The Tibetan leader briefly escaped his Chinese minders and told Nehru that conditions were so harsh in his country that he wished to flee to India. Nehru advised him to return home. In 1958, the Indian prime minister asked to visit Tibet but was refused permission. The first seeds of doubt, or at least confusion, were thus planted in Nehru’s mind—perhaps the Chinese were not as straightforward, or indeed as progressive, as he had supposed.

Adding to the uncertainty, in July 1958 a map was printed in Beijing which showed large parts of India as Chinese territory. It was also revealed that the Chinese had built a road linking the two troublesome provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet that passed through an uninhabited and scarcely visited stretch of the Indian district of Ladakh. There were protests from New Delhi, whereupon Chou En-lai wrote back saying that the McMahon Line was a legacy of British imperialism and hence not “legal.” The Chinese leader suggested that both sides retain control of the territory they currently occupied, pending a final settlement.

Meanwhile, a revolt broke out in Tibet. It was put down, and in March 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India. That he was given refuge, and that Indian political parties rushed to his defense, enraged the Chinese. The war of words escalated. That autumn there were sporadic clashes between Indian and Chinese troops on the border.

Now, in a letter to his chief ministers, Nehru wrote that

Behind all this frontier trouble, there appears to me to be a basic problem of a strong and united Chinese State expansive and pushing out in various directions and full of pride in its growing strength. In Chinese history, this kind of thing has happened on several occasions. Communism as such is only an added element; the real reason should be found to lie deeper in history and in national characteristics. But it is true that never before have these two great countries, India and China, come face to face in some kind of a conflict. By virtue of their very size and their actual or potential strength, there is danger in this situation.

Nehru had thus begun to come around, at least in part, to the view articulated by Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950. The Chinese state was more nationalist than Communist. Still, he felt that there was no chance of a full-fledged war between the two countries. To protect India’s interests, Nehru now sanctioned a policy of “forward posts,” whereby detachments were camped in areas along the border claimed by both sides. This was a preemptive measure, designed to deter the Chinese from advancing beyond the McMahon Line. It was also provocative.

In July 1962, there were clashes between Indian and Chinese troops in the western sector, followed, in September, by skirmishes in the east. The Chinese launched a major military strike in the third week of October. In the west, the Indians resisted stoutly; in the east, they were slaughtered. The Chinese swept through the Brahmaputra Valley, coming as far as the town of Tezpur in the state of Assam. The great city of Calcutta was in their sights. However, on November 22, the Chinese announced a unilateral cease-fire and withdrew from the areas they had occupied in the east. The territorial gains that they had made in the west before 1962, however, stand to this day.

How did Nehru get it so wrong?

INDIANS, THEN and now, have competing interpretations of Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies vis-à-vis the Chinese. The first is empathetic. Nehruvians, Congress Party supporters and a large swathe of the middle-aged middle class hold Nehru to be a good and decent man betrayed by perfidious Communists.

This point of view finds literary illustration in a novel by Rukun Advani called Beethoven among the Cows. A chapter entitled “Nehru’s Children” is set in 1962, “the year the Chinese invaded India, a little before Nehru died of a broken heart.” The action, set in the northern Indian town of Lucknow (a town Nehru knew well, and visited often), takes place just before the war, when much saber rattling was going on. The people there were spouting couplets “shot through with Nehru’s Shelleyean idealism on the socialist Brotherhood of Man.” A slogan popular through the sixties, widely associated with the Indian prime minister if not actually composed by him, was “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” (Indians and Chinese are like brothers). This brotherhood, wrote Advani, was now being denied and violated by the duplicitous Chinese. Drawing on his childhood memories, the novelist composed four couplets. I will not attempt here a literal translation but content myself with the one-line summary of the writer, which is that these verses “asked the Chinese leaders to shake hands with Nehru, eat chowmein with him, and generally come to their senses.”

The second view, in stark contrast to the first, is contemptuous of Nehru. It sees him as a foolish and vain man who betrayed the nation by encouraging China in its aggressive designs on the sacred soil of India. This viewpoint is associated with ideologues of the Hindu Right, speaking for organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the 1960s, the RSS chief M. S. Golwalkar wrote witheringly that

the slogans and paper compromise like “peaceful co-existence” and “Panchsheel” [the five principles of peaceful co-existence advocated by Nehru] that our leaders are indulging in only serve as a camouflage for the self-seeking predatory countries of the world to pursue their own ulterior motives against our country. China, as we know, was most vociferous in its expression of faith in Panchsheel. China was extolled as our great neighbour and friend for the last two thousand years or more from the day it accepted Buddhism. Our leaders declared that they were determined to stick to China’s friendship “at all costs.” . . . How much it has cost us in terms of our national integrity and honour is all too well known.

And then there was Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, the leading ideologue of the BJP’s mother party, the Jana Sangh. Week after week, Upadhyaya excoriated Nehru and his China policy in the pages of the RSS journal Organiser. When the first clashes broke out on the border in September 1959, Upadhyaya argued that “the present situation is the result of complacency on the part of the Prime Minister. It seems that he was reluctant to take any action till the situation became really grave.” Nehru was compared to the notoriously effete and incompetent nineteenth-century ruler of the north Indian chiefdom of Avadh, Wajid Ali Shah. “Only he [Nehru] knows when a crisis is not a crisis,” wrote Upadhyaya sarcastically, only Nehru knew “how to emit smoke without fire and how to arrest a conflagration in a Niagara of verbiage!”

The argument that India’s first prime minister was pusillanimous with regard to China was also articulated by an obsessive critic of all that Nehru stood for, the brilliant and maverick socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia. In a speech in Hyderabad in October 1959, Lohia asked Nehru and his government “to take back the territory the Chinese have captured by whatever means it thinks fit.” “Increase the country’s strength and might,” he thundered, “Then alone China’s challenge can be met.” When Chou En-lai visited Delhi in April 1960 and was met with a hostile demonstration organized by the Jana Sangh, Lohia said that “if any one deserves a black flag demonstration, it is no one else but Mr. Nehru for extending an invitation to an outright aggressor.”

The third view of Nehru’s attitude to Chinese claims and demands was perhaps the most interesting. Exuding pity rather than contempt, this held Nehru to be a naive man misled by malign advisers and by his own idealism. Responding to the border clashes in the second half of 1959, author and politician C. Rajagopalachari wrote several essays urging Nehru to abandon his long-held and deeply cherished policy of nonalignment. “Rajaji” had once been a colleague of Nehru, both in the Indian National Congress and in government. Now, however, he was a political rival, as the founder of the Swatantra Party.

Rajaji sympathized with Nehru’s desire to avoid full-scale war, which lay behind his reconciling attitude toward the Chinese. Nor had he any illusions about the Western powers, whose policies reflected a general unwillingness to accommodate the aspirations of the postcolonial world. Still, the border conflict had, he wrote in the last week of December 1959, called for “a complete revision of our attitude and activities in respect of foreign policy.” With China backed implicitly and explicitly by the Soviet Union, India had no alternative but to seek support from the Western powers. Rajaji found justification for a tilt to the West in a verse of the ancient Tamil classic, the Kural of Thiruvalluvar, which, in his translation, read; “You have no allies. You are faced with two enemies. Make it up with one of them and make of him a good ally.”

There were, of course, points of overlap between the positions articulated by Rajaji, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and Lohia. This is not surprising, since all were opponents of Jawaharlal Nehru and the ruling Congress Party. However, there were also points of divergence. Rajaji more clearly recognized that India did not have the military might to combat, much less overcome, the Chinese. Hindu ideologues like Upadhyaya suggested that India’s deficiencies in this regard could be made up by a mobilization of militantly spiritual energy; socialists like Lohia thought that the gap could be filled by collective social action. Rajaji could see, however, that it was not merely a failure of nerve but of capacity, which could be remedied only through the forging of a new strategic alliance. And his is a view that may be enjoying a sort of afterlife, in the form of the argument, now quite common in the press and in policy circles in New Delhi, that India must actively pursue closer military and economic ties with the United States to thwart and combat an assertive China.

IN RETROSPECT, it is evident that in the years between the invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the war of 1962, Jawaharlal Nehru did make a series of miscalculations and errors in his dealings with China. By placing too much faith in officials who gave him wrong or foolish advice, or who executed the jobs assigned to them with carelessness or lack of foresight, Nehru created a strategically fraught environment. Two men in particular appear to have been unworthy of his trust: the intelligence officer B. N. Mullick, who advised Nehru to sanction the building of outposts along the border, ignoring the obvious Chinese reaction that would follow; and Krishna Menon, who as defense minister refused to properly arm the military, promoted incompetent generals and otherwise damaged the morale of the armed forces, creating an Indian force easily trounced. A second set of miscalculations was political, namely, Nehru’s ignorance or underestimation of the nationalist underpinnings of Chinese Communism and his taking on trust the professions of internationalism and Asian solidarity proffered by Chou En-lai and his ilk.

Nehru’s mistakes were considerable. But above all, the India-China clash of armies and national egos was structural—and inevitable. If Jawaharlal Nehru had not been prime minister, there would still have been a border dispute. And all other things remaining constant, India and China may still have gone to war had Jawaharlal Nehru never lived.

Indeed, a raft of factors provided the perfect foundation for a battle of the two emerging titans. Tibet had deep geostrategic value for both sides. China was intent on reclaiming an area—seen as having been wrongfully wrested from it by the British—that clearly increased its territorial footprint.

But for India, so long as it was semi-independent, Tibet served as a buffer state. Moreover, there were close and continuing connections between the two countries, reflected in active cross-border trade and regular visits of Hindu pilgrims to the holy mountain of Kailas.

The flight of the Dalai Lama into India in the spring of 1959 was simply the proximate cause of the war. That he was given refuge the Chinese government could perhaps accept; that he was treated as a honored visitor, and that a steady stream of influential Indians queued up to meet him, it could not abide.

Nehru could have perhaps been less trusting of the Chinese in the early 1950s. But he could scarcely have gone to war on the Tibetans’ behalf. India was newly independent; it was a poor and divided country. There was a clutch of domestic problems to attend to, among them the cultivation of a spirit of national unity, the promotion of economic development and the nurturing of democratic institutions. Bloody battle would have set back these efforts by decades; it would have led to political instability and economic privation.

And again, after the Dalai Lama fled to India, the balancing act became more delicate still. Nehru could scarcely hand him back to the Chinese. Nor could he keep him imprisoned and isolated. The exiled Tibetan leader had to be provided refuge consistent with his dignity and stature. In a democracy that encouraged debate, and in a culture that venerated spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama would attract visitors who would make public their admiration for him and their distaste for his persecutors. Nehru could hardly put a stop to this; nor, on the other hand, could he use the situation of the Dalai Lama to wag a threatening finger at the Chinese.

The open manifestation of support for the Tibetans and their leader, of course, was a natural by-product of India’s democratic system. The fact that China was a one-party state and India a multiparty democracy created a fundamental structural wedge between them. When, on his visit to New Delhi in 1960, Chou complained about the protection afforded to the Dalai Lama, a senior cabinet minister, Morarji Desai, compared his status to that of Karl Marx, whom the British had given sanctuary after he was exiled from his native Germany.

This, perhaps, was open to debate—and Desai was a skilled debater—but the fact that the two political regimes differed so radically had a powerful bearing on the dispute, its escalation and its intractability. Thus, when a group of anti-Communist protesters raised Free Tibet slogans and defaced a portrait of Mao outside the Chinese consulate in Mumbai, Beijing wrote to New Delhi that this was “a huge insult to the head of state of the People’s Republic of China and the respected and beloved leader of the Chinese people.”

In its reply, the Indian government accepted that the incident was “deplorable.” But it pointed out that

under the law in India processions cannot be banned so long as they are peaceful. . . . Not unoften they are held even near the Parliament House and the processionists indulge in all manner of slogans against high personages in India. Incidents have occurred in the past when portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and the Prime Minister were taken out by irresponsible persons and treated in an insulting manner. Under the law and Constitution of India a great deal of latitude is allowed to the people so long as they do not indulge in actual violence.

After the first border clashes of 1959, Indian opposition MPs asked that the official correspondence between the two countries be placed in the public domain. The government conceded, whereupon the evidence of Chinese claims to territory further inflamed and angered public opinion. Chou then arrived in Delhi, with his offer of a quid pro quo. You overlook our transgressions in the west, said the Chinese leader, and we shall overlook your transgressions in the east.

In a dictatorship, such as China, a policy once decided upon by its top leaders did not require the endorsement or support of anyone else. In India, however, treaties with other nations had to be discussed and debated by parliament. In purely instrumental terms, Chou’s proposal was both pragmatic and practicable. But Nehru could not endorse or implement the agreement on his own; he had to discuss it with his colleagues in his party and government and, pending their acceptance, send it to the floor of the house. As it happened, knowledge of Chinese maps that made claims that clashed with India’s, of Indian soldiers killed by Chinese forces, of the persecution of supporters of the Dalai Lama—all this led to a rising tide of nationalist outrage inside and outside parliament. And with members of his own cabinet firmly opposed to a settlement, Nehru had no chance of seeing the agreement through.

Toward the end of 1959, after the first clashes on the border and the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India, Jawaharlal Nehru was interviewed by the American journalist Edgar Snow. In Snow’s recollection, Nehru told him that

the basic reason for the Sino-Indian dispute was that they were both “new nations,” in that both were newly independent and under dynamic nationalistic leaderships, and in a sense were “meeting” at their frontiers for the first time in history.

Hence it “was natural that a certain degree of conflict should be generated before they could stabilize their frontiers.”

Nehru was speaking here not as a politician—whether pragmatic or idealist—but as a student of history. In this more detached role, he could see that a clash of arms, and of the ideologies and aspirations behind it, was written into the logic of the respective and collective histories of India and China.

This is why Jawaharlal Nehru himself, soon after the events, came around to the thinking of critics like Rajaji, who saw the war in terms of great-power politics—with a Nehruvian twist, of course. In a fascinating, forgotten letter written to his chief ministers on December 22, 1962, Nehru admitted the lack of preparedness of the Indian Army and the lack of foresight of the political leadership in not building roads up to the border to carry supplies and munitions. But for him, the Chinese attack had to do not so much with the border dispute as with their larger desire to keep the Cold War going.

Between Russia and the United States, said Nehru, lay a large number of countries which, though weak in conventional military terms, had become symbols of his policy of “peaceful co-existence.” Nehru believed:

Both the United States of America and the Soviet Union have appreciated this. . . [but] there is one major exception, and that is China. . . . It believes in the inevitability of war and, therefore, does not want the tensions in the world to lessen. It dislikes non-alignment and it would much rather have a clear polarization of the different countries in the world.

China, claimed Nehru, was upset with “Russia’s softening down, in its opinion, in revolutionary ardor and its thinking of peace and peaceful co-existence.” And thus this difference of opinion led Russia to withdraw economic and technical support to China and even to offer aid to India. Nehru wrote that

If India could be humiliated and defeated and perhaps even driven into the other camp of the Western Powers, that would be the end of non-alignment for other countries also, and Russia’s policy would have been broken down.

Such was Nehru’s thesis—that India was the stumbling block to China’s global ambitions. With the border war, Beijing hoped to thrust India into the U.S. camp, thereby restoring the clear, sharp boundaries that once separated the Russian bloc of nations from the American one.

Behind the border dispute, then, lay the respective national aspirations of the two countries. Now, in 2011, with surging growth rates and sixty years of independent development behind them, China and India seek great-power status. In the 1950s, however, they sought something apparently less ambitious but which, in the context of their recent colonial histories, was as important; namely respect in the eyes of the world comparable with their size, the antiquity of their civilizations and the distinctiveness of their revolutions.

THERE IS a noticeable asymmetry in the ways in which the war of 1962, which was the culmination of all these disputes, is viewed in the two countries that fought it. The Indian sense of humiliation, so visible in some circles even five decades later, is not matched by a comparable triumphalism in China. This may be because they fought far bloodier wars against the Japanese and within their own borders. At any rate, while histories of modern India devote pages and pages to the conflict (my own India after Gandhi has two chapters on the subject), histories of modern China (such as those written by British journalist Jonathan Fenby, former Yale professor Jonathan Spence and others) devote to it a few paragraphs, at most. Likewise, the conflict with India merits barely a passing reference in biographies of Mao or Chou, whereas the war with China plays a dominant part in biographies of Nehru.

In 1961, when relations between the two countries had more or less broken down, India withdrew its ambassador to Beijing. China did likewise. For fifteen years, the two countries ran skeletal offices in each other’s capital. Finally, in 1976, full diplomatic relations were resumed. In the same year, Mao Tse-tung died.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, ever the pragmatist, wished to overcome the baggage of 1962 and to set relations between India and China on a new footing. In the early 1980s, he invited Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to visit. Serving diplomats were sympathetic, but Mrs. Gandhi’s foreign-policy adviser—who had been the last ambassador in Beijing before the war—rejected the proposal, saying the Chinese could never be trusted. “They killed her father,” were the words he used when the gist of Deng’s invitation was conveyed to him.

After Nehru’s grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, took over as prime minister of India, the invitation was renewed. In December 1988, he visited China, the first Indian leader of any substance to do so in more than thirty years. He had a ninety-minute meeting with Deng, who is said to have told him, “You are the young. You are the future.”

In a public speech in Beijing, Rajiv Gandhi remarked that

It is now time to look beyond the past. It is now time to look forward to the future. It is now time to restore the relationship between our countries to a level commensurate with the contribution which our civilizations have made to the world, to a level commensurate with the centuries of friendship between our countries, to a level commensurate with the contribution which today we must together make to the building of a new world order. Between us, we represent a third of humanity. There is much we can do together.

The sentiments were Nehruvian, and indeed the speech was most likely drafted by two scholars who had watched Nehru firsthand. However, Rajiv Gandhi’s hopefulness was called into question by some Indian commentators. In the Statesman, one journalist noted that the territorial disputes between the two countries remained unresolved. He chastised “the myth-makers, the political pundits, the fashionable fellow-travellers, [and] the fervent promoters of Pan-Asianism” for “working overtime to build up the case for friendship in disregard to the border.”

This skepticism was also expressed in a letter to the Hindu from K. Vedamurthy, who had been a close associate of Nehru’s colleague-turned-critic, Rajaji. He recalled the debacle of 1962 and noted that the Chinese had seamlessly moved from being pro-Soviet to being pro-American when it suited them. “We in India,” wrote Vedamurthy,

should not be once again caught in any euphoria of the kind in which we were when Pandit Nehru returned to Delhi from his apparent triumph in the Bandung Conference [of non-aligned nations] of the ’50s. By all means let us repair our relations . . . but let us also remember that what governs international relations is the enlightened self-interest of the countries concerned and not any ideology. . . . Eternal vigilance, as always, remains the price of liberty.

Three years after Rajiv Gandhi visited Beijing, the Indian economy opened itself up to the world. At first, the growing international trade was chiefly with the West and the Middle East. Slowly, Chinese goods began to enter the Indian market—and vice versa.

In 2003, another Indian prime minister visited Beijing. This was Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As a young, right-wing, pro-American member of parliament in the late 1950s, he had regularly attacked Jawaharlal Nehru for being too trusting of the Chinese. Now, Vajpayee signed a document accepting that Tibet was an integral part of China.

Two years later, Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao came to India. He chose first to go to Bangalore, the center of the software industry, traveling later to the political capital. Seconding (or perhaps explaining) the sequence, the Chinese ambassador in New Delhi said in a press conference that “the ‘B’ of business is more important than the ‘B’ of boundary.”

The most recent figures estimate annual trade between China and India at $60 billion, up from zero in the 1990s. India exports iron ore and cotton, and imports heavy machinery and electronics. Indian software and pharmaceutical firms seek a share of the Chinese market; Chinese companies think that they are best placed to build the highways, bridges and ports that India so urgently requires.

Still, despite the steady increase in trade, and the rhetoric that sometimes accompanies it, boundary disputes have not vanished. Every now and then, Chinese newspapers claim the eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh to be their territory. In 2009, when the Dalai Lama sought to visit the ancient Buddhist monastery in Tawang­—which lies deep inside Arunachal—Beijing demanded that the government of India stop him. New Delhi declined to interfere; the Dalai Lama, it said, was a spiritual leader who was going on a spiritual pilgrimage.

On the Indian side, suspicions linger about Chinese intentions. Among the Hindu right wing and some sections of the military, there is talk of Chinese attempts to construct a “string of pearls” to encircle India by building and controlling ports in Gwadar in Pakistan, Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar. China’s consistent support to Pakistan (long a haven for terrorists who have regularly attacked India) is also a sore point in the relationship.

Beijing and New Delhi are not the deadly enemies they were between 1959 and 1962; nor are they the close and intimate friends that, back in the 1940s and early 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru had hoped they would be. The border dispute remains unresolved; and so it will be for some time. After denouncing the McMahon Line for so long, the Chinese cannot suddenly turn around and accept it; while any significant concessions from India will have to be discussed in parliament, to be subjected to, and rejected by, an always-contentious opposition. Meanwhile, the presence of a large and vocal Tibetan community in India still irks the Chinese; as does the steady popularity the Dalai Lama enjoys within India and across the world.

The year 2011, then, looks awfully similar to 1951 or 1961. Such is the argument of the historian, based (he thinks) on a detached, dispassionate analysis of both evidence and context. Alas, the conventional wisdom will most likely remain impervious to his work. Citizens and ideologues shall continue to personalize the political conflict, seeing it principally through the lens of what Jawaharlal Nehru did or did not do, or is believed to have done and not done, with regard to China—some empathetic, some pitying and some contemptuous.

I shall end this essay with a verdict that was offered by H. V. Kamath, a civil-servant-turned-freedom-fighter, who served several terms in parliament and was jailed both during British rule and during Indira Gandhi’s emergency period. In a book entitled Last Days of Jawaharlal Nehru, published in 1977, Kamath took his readers back to a parliament session in September 1963, when he saw “an old man, looking frail and fatigued, with a marked stoop in his gait, coming down the gangway opposite with slow, faltering steps, and clutching the backrests of benches for support as he descended.” The man was Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister of India, as he had been for the past sixteen years.

As Kamath watched “the bent retreating figure,” a cluster of memories came to his mind. Was this the same man who, while studying at the Presidency College in Madras, Kamath had seen “sprightly, slim and erect” speaking at the Congress session of 1927 in that city? The same man who, when Kamath visited him in Allahabad ten years later, had “jumped two steps at a time, with me emulating him, as I followed him upstairs from his office room on the ground floor to his study and library above”? The same man who, when they were both members of the Constituent Assembly of India, during one session “impulsively ran from his front seat and literally dragged a recalcitrant member from the podium rebuking him audibly”? The same man on whom the nationalist poetess, Sarojini Naidu, had “affectionately conferred the sobriquet ‘Jack-in-the-box’—a compliment to his restless agility of body and mind”?

Kamath was clear that it was the war with China that alone was responsible for this deterioration and degradation. As he wrote,

India’s defeat, nay, military debacle in that one-month war not only shattered [Nehru] physically and weakened him mentally but, what was more galling to him, eroded his prestige in Asia and the world, dealt a crippling blow to his visions of leadership of the newly emancipated nations, and cast a shadow on his place in history.

As a consequence of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “supine policy,” wrote Kamath, “our Jawans, ill-clad, ill-shod, ill-equipped were sent like sheeps to their slaughter.”

Ramachandra Guha is the author of India After Gandhi (Ecco, 2007) and Makers of Modern India (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).

Image by Keyan20