On the night of 15th June 2020, a major clash took place between Indian and Chinese troops on the ridges overlooking the Galwan River in Ladakh. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed, and according to both China and India the Chinese also "suffered casualties". This did not occur out of nowhere; in fact the two sides had been in close confrontation for over a month on that border and there had been multiple fistfights between them. Why - the border having been calm for decades - this happened now, who benefited, and who won, is the purpose of discussion of this article.
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Because of multiple problems with uploading photos and graphics on Blogger, which is getting more and more bug-ridden and dysfunctional by the day, owing to total neglect by Google, I have converted the article into a 16000 word long PDF file for download.
You can download it here. It's free!
To be clear, CLICK ON THAT BIG ITALICISED "here" just above this line. Honestly!
Please feel not just free but positively encouraged to download, share, cite, praise, excoriate, or whatever you want to do with the article.
Note:
Links to sites presenting information in it are at the end in the form of footnotes.
Statutory Disclaimer:
As always, I am not in any way responsible for any fights, quarrels, disagreements, flame wars, or other unpleasantness rising from the contents present therein. Thank you.
"out Indian Navy ships in the post of Visakhapatnam"????
ReplyDeletepost????
MichaelWme
I am posting this here because it is more current than the earlier article. (I read this one too of course.) In Reading your 1962 history of the India China border clash I saw your reference to The Henderson-Brooks/Bhagat Report. This is the military commissioned study of what went wrong for India, and has been classified as Top Secret for more than 55 years. You said there were two copies of the report under lock and key and intimated that a third copy was floating around somewhere, stating Neville Maxwell, the author of “India’s China War” had used it as source material. Yes, I believe that you used it as source material also.
ReplyDeleteIn 2014 Maxwell supposedly published it on his website. You have also linked to it. All these links are dead, 404. But still I was curious to find out more about it. Every download link was dead. Then finally yesterday I was on the India Defence Review And low and behold, after a long pause, a pdf popped out. 126 pages on a manual typewriter from the 60’s. On one page there’s a post-it note saying 45 pages are missing, (pp 112 - 157). It’s a reconstruction of events piecing together all the coded messages of the orders wired to the troops. Every message has the name of that message, for example: “IV Corps Signal No. 03116 of 16 October 1962 – Annexure 96”. Then a summary of the message. How can it not be authentic? There was no study of the deliberations of the Department of Defense, the government nor the military high command. That’s because they never existed. No high command meeting ever had minutes of the meeting, and there were no telephone logs. It was said these deliberations were top secret so nothing written could be permitted. Funny thing is: After every secret meeting all decisions were published in the newspapers the following morning. The Chinese intelligence service only had to read the Indians paper to make their war plans.
It is not an article nor modern-day report. I was somewhat familiar with the locations from your earlier article. All the maps referred to were missing, not part of the manual typewriter. I didn’t know very much about the Indian military structure. No Chinese explanations are included accept noting what they are doing and where they move. But I could definitely follow it and was fascinated. I have really gained an immense understanding from your writing and from finding this classified report. Is this India bashing?
I don't think so. India does have a problem in that certain segments of the population are rather hot headed. You can gather that. And their newspapers fan those flames.
Everybody, see for yourself.
http://www.indiandefencereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/TopSecretdocuments2.pdf
I see it is also on the Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/henderson-brooks-bhagat-report