Military defeats leave a lasting imprint on the psychology of nations. Consider Japan and Germany. Defeated in World War II in 1945, both abandoned their pre-war ambitions of military dominance and rebuilt their security arrangements under an America-led order. Japan renounced war as an instrument of state policy and came to depend on the United States’s security guarantee, while West Germany reconstituted its armed forces within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, under an alliance structure dominated by Washington. The United States, itself, never quite recovered from the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. The experience fundamentally altered American military thinking, making its strategists more cautious about prolonged military engagements, the deployment of ground forces and wars without clearly defined political objectives.
Seen in this context, one can understand why successive Indian governments have been cautious in responding to China’s periodic military assertiveness along the Himalayan frontier since the 1962 war. India’s defeat in the war left a deep strategic and psychological imprint on its political and military establishments—one that continues to influence New Delhi’s calculations in dealing with Beijing, till date.
For more than a decade, India has faced repeated Chinese military transgressions along its 3,488-km Himalayan frontier, stretching from the Karakoram Pass in Ladakh to Jachep La in Arunachal Pradesh. Incidents that have often begun as skirmishes over competing territorial claims have, on several occasions, escalated into prolonged military stand-offs, exposing the fragility of the arrangements meant to maintain peace along the border.
As is often the case in a vibrant democracy, the Opposition has sought to turn such military confrontations into political opportunities, questioning the government’s handling of the Chinese challenge and accusing it of a lack of resolve. Whether it was the Galwan Valley clash in June 2020, which cost India the lives of 20 soldiers, the confrontation in the Yangtse area of Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang sector in December 2022, or the more recent reports of Chinese military face-offs in Upper Subansiri, the Congress has repeatedly sought to put the government on the defensive. It has questioned the government’s response, often overlooking the fact that the border dispute has defied resolution through successive governments over several decades. Yet, the Congress cannot be faulted entirely for playing this political game. The Bharatiya Janata Party, too, when in Opposition, had used similar confrontations to question the Congress government’s resolve and handling of the China challenge. It is now asking the Congress to exercise restraint and avoid politicising matters concerning national security and military strategy.
The Himalayan Blunder
It was Jawaharlal Nehru’s “forward policy” that backfired in 1962, exposing the gulf between India’s territorial ambitions and its military preparedness. In just five weeks of fighting across the frozen Himalayas, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China overran several Indian positions. In the eastern sector, it captured some areas, including Tawang, Sela and Bomdila. In Ladakh, it took numerous forward posts. Even though Beijing unilaterally announced a ceasefire and subsequently withdrew its troops from some territories it had captured in the eastern sector, the Communist nation retained its control over the vast territory of Aksai Chin, consolidating its hold over the strategically vital territory through which it had built a road connecting Xinjiang with Tibet.
This thumping loss left Nehru’s government politically exposed and severely undermined the credibility of its foreign and defence policies. The Panchsheel doctrine of peaceful coexistence of the early 1950s and the sentimental appeal of ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’ had offered little protection against China’s military ambitions. The war exposed the limitations of Nehru’s faith in diplomacy as a substitute for military preparedness, turning what was projected as an era of Asian solidarity into one of India’s most consequential strategic setbacks.
Lessons We Forgot
India may have lost the 1962 war to China, but five years later, it successfully repulsed Chinese attacks at Nathu La and Cho La in Sikkim. The experience of 1962 had taught New Delhi that diplomacy and the language of peaceful coexistence could not, by themselves, deter a militarily assertive adversary. In the following years, India had strengthened its Himalayan defences, improved its military preparedness and built positions capable of withstanding a Chinese assault. At Nathu La, it was the effective use of artillery that proved decisive. At Cho La, Indian troops again repulsed the Chinese advance.
Two decades later, the Sumdorong Chu stand-off of 1986–87 was a turning point in India-China relations. The Indian troops found that Chinese soldiers had set up a presence in the Sumdorong Chu valley, in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh. The then Army chief, General K. Sundarji, launched Operation Falcon, airlifting troops and equipment to forward areas, while the larger exercise chequerboard put Indian forces on high alert. The crisis eventually paved the way for a diplomatic thaw. In December 1988, China invited the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for the first visit by an Indian premier in decades.
No major power can contemplate a full-scale war without weighing the enormous military, economic and political costs.
Yet, the Nathu La and Cho La clashes and the Sumdorong Chu stand-off remain largely absent from India’s political and academic discourse, leaving the national memory of the China conflict disproportionately defined by the humiliation of 1962.
China’s economy and military capabilities have long been considerably greater than India’s. However, India has demonstrated on more than one occasion that military superiority does not automatically translate into victory.
One of the more puzzling aspects of India’s strategic posture is its reluctance to factor its nuclear weapons status into its deterrence calculus vis-à-vis China, even though it declared itself a nuclear-weapon state in 1998. Nuclear weapons do not guarantee that conventional military confrontations will be avoided, but they raise the stakes of escalation for both sides. Pakistan, despite its conventional military disadvantage, has used the threat of nuclear escalation as a strategic shield to constrain India’s military options. The Kargil war of 1999 offered a telling example. India chose not to cross the Line of Control even as its forces fought to reclaim the heights occupied by Pakistani troops. The extent to which nuclear deterrence shaped that decision remains debatable, but the risks of escalation were undoubtedly part of India’s strategic calculations.
No major power can contemplate a full-scale war without weighing the enormous military, economic and political costs it could incur. China must be made to reckon with those costs too. India’s nuclear status, conventional military capabilities and economic weight together give it instruments of deterrence that its strategic establishment must learn to deploy more confidently.
A diffident India will not go unnoticed by Beijing or other capitals. We need not be reckless. But we must stand our ground.
For this to happen, the government and the Opposition must move beyond political one-upmanship on China and draw lessons from both the Himalayan blunder of 1962 and India’s resistance at Nathu La in 1967. Diplomacy is indispensable, but it cannot, by itself, prevent Chinese troops from crossing the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Deterrence rests on something more consequential: Beijing must be convinced that India has both the capability and the political resolve to defend its territory, and that any attempt to alter the status quo by force will carry costs it cannot easily absorb. The objective is not to invite confrontation, but to ensure that China never mistakes India’s restraint for an absence of resolve.
If Southeast Asian countries can resist Chinese coercion, India, with its formidable military and economic strength, has little reason to be intimidated by Beijing’s bullying. What it must guard against instead is the defeatism that appears to have seeped into sections of its strategic establishment and the diffidence with which it approaches China. The issue goes beyond what happens along the border. It is also about how India projects its strength and resolve to the world. There is a larger strategic calculation at play here. The same considerations that restrain India from escalating a confrontation with Pakistan must also enter China’s calculations when it considers escalating tensions with India. China’s economy is roughly five times the size of India’s, but India’s economy is nearly 10 times the size of Pakistan’s. Yet, India’s economic superiority has not prevented it from exercising restraint in dealing with Pakistan. Beijing, too, must be compelled to factor in the economic and military costs of a confrontation with India.
Those who argue that China’s control over critical minerals and technological supply chains gives it an economic stranglehold over India, making the bilateral equation fundamentally different from India’s equation with Pakistan, overlook an important aspect of India’s strategic resilience. During the wars of 1965 and 1971, the Indian public stood behind the government despite widespread poverty and severe economic hardship. India’s economy is far stronger and more resilient than it was then. Its dependence on China in critical sectors is a serious vulnerability, but it cannot become a licence for strategic silence every time Chinese forces cross the LAC, whether to conduct psychological operations or to pressure New Delhi into recalibrating its strategic partnerships. If Beijing learns that economic leverage can silence India at the border and constrain its diplomatic choices, it will have little incentive to abandon this strategy. The answer lies in reducing that leverage through diversification and domestic capacity-building, while making it clear that economic dependence will never translate into strategic submission. A nation cannot claim strategic autonomy if another power can dictate the limits of its response.
It demands a doctrinal shift from perpetual caution to credible deterrence. Such a shift does not mean abandoning diplomacy or pursuing military confrontation for its own sake. It means negotiating from a position of strength rather than allowing the fear of escalation to dictate the terms of engagement. It means ensuring that India can rapidly mobilise forces, sustain them through harsh Himalayan winters, deny the PLA easy tactical gains and impose costs if the status quo is altered by force. It means investing in border infrastructure, intelligence, surveillance, precision weapons and the ability to respond across multiple domains. India has made considerable progress in strengthening its border infrastructure, but the larger challenge is to translate these investments into an unmistakable posture of deterrence.
In the wild, animals read an adversary’s posture and gait for signs of vulnerability. Nations do much the same. A diffident India will not go unnoticed by Beijing or other capitals. We need not be reckless or belligerent. But we must stand our ground and abandon the psyche of weakness. We must not fear. We must not appease.
