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”.