The 1962 War: How India and China Went From ‘Bhai-Bhai’ to Battle on the Roof of the World

Before dawn on 23 October 1962, on a bare ridge near Tongpen La, just short of the Bum La pass, twenty soldiers of 1 Sikh waited in shallow trenches in frozen ground. Ahead lay Tibet. Behind them lay Tawang and its great monastery.

Their platoon commander was Subedar Joginder Singh, 41, a farmer’s son from Mahla Kalan in Moga district. He had joined the Army in 1936 as a teenager and served in Burma in the Second World War. He knew what was coming. Three days earlier the Chinese had smashed the Indian brigade on the Namka Chu river to the west.

At about 5.30 the first wave came up the slope, some 200 men by the Army’s count. The Sikhs cut it down. A second wave was stopped too, but half the platoon was now dead or wounded and Joginder Singh had a bullet in his thigh. He refused to be carried back and took over a light machine gun.

When the third wave came and the ammunition ran out, the survivors fixed bayonets. Army accounts say he and his last men charged shouting the Sikh war cry and bayoneted several attackers before they were overwhelmed. He was given the Param Vir Chakra, India’s highest award for bravery. He was taken prisoner, wounded, and died in Chinese hands.

Tawang fell within two days. Within a month Chinese troops stood above the plains of Assam, and then, to the world’s astonishment, they turned round and went home. How did two countries that had called each other brothers come to that ridge?

In June 1954 Zhou Enlai flew into Delhi and the crowds lining his route shouted a new slogan: Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai, Indians and Chinese are brothers. Two months earlier, on 29 April, the two governments had signed an agreement on trade with the Tibet region of China. Its preamble set out five principles of peaceful coexistence: respect for each other’s territory and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, and peace.

Nehru called them Panchsheel and preached them across Asia. The deal accepted that Tibet, a buffer the British had kept half-independent, was now part of China. It did not say where the border ran. Nehru believed it did not need saying. Beijing believed the opposite.

The border India inherited was a British border, drawn in two very different ways at its two ends.

In the east, at a conference in Simla in 1914, the British official Henry McMahon and a Tibetan envoy agreed a line along the crest of the Himalaya, from Bhutan to Burma. It put Tawang inside British India. China’s delegate initialled a draft but his government refused to sign the convention, and no Chinese government, Nationalist or Communist, ever accepted the McMahon Line. Zhou Enlai called it ‘the so-called McMahon Line’.

In the west, high on the Ladakh plateau, lay Aksai Chin, a cold desert of salt lakes where almost nobody lived. British maps had drawn the border there in more than one place. India’s maps of 1954 put Aksai Chin firmly inside Ladakh. But in the mid-1950s China built a road across it, linking Xinjiang to Tibet, and Delhi learned of it only after it was finished. An Indian patrol sent to check in 1958 was detained by Chinese troops.

So each side held a piece the other claimed: China held Aksai Chin, its road to Tibet; India held the land below the McMahon Line, the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA, today’s Arunachal Pradesh). In January 1959 Zhou wrote that the boundary had never been settled. Nehru’s answer, in effect, was that it had.

In March 1959 Lhasa rose against Chinese rule and the rising was crushed. On the night of 17 March the 23-year-old Dalai Lama slipped out of his summer palace in disguise. Two weeks later, at about two in the afternoon of 31 March, he rode a yak across the frontier at Khenzimane, north of Tawang, and was met by Indian officials and a guard of the Assam Rifles.

Nehru gave him asylum, and later a home at Dharamsala. In Beijing the welcome was read as proof that India wanted Tibet back as a buffer. Some historians argue that this, more than any line on a map, turned Mao against Nehru.

Then the border drew blood. On 21 October 1959, near the Kongka Pass in Ladakh, an Indian police party led by Karam Singh went looking for a reconnaissance party that had not come back. Chinese troops opened fire at Hot Springs. Ten Indian policemen were killed and seven, including Karam Singh, taken prisoner. China said the Indians fired first; India said the opposite. The bodies were handed back three weeks later. India’s police forces still mark 21 October as Police Commemoration Day.

In April 1960 Zhou came to Delhi to bargain. Many historians read his offer as a swap, Aksai Chin for NEFA. Nehru would not trade.

On 2 November 1961, in a meeting in Nehru’s office, India decided to push small posts forward into the land it claimed, especially in Ladakh, to show that it was Indian. The orders reached the Army commands in December: patrol as far forward as possible and set up posts to stop any further Chinese advance. This was the Forward Policy.

On a map in Delhi it looked like chess. On the ground it was platoons supplied by air at 15,000 feet, often beside Chinese posts, short of food, warm clothes and ammunition. Neville Maxwell later wrote that the confidence came from B.N. Mullik, head of the Intelligence Bureau, who held that China would not fight.

In June 1962 the Assam Rifles set up a post called Dhola below the Thag La ridge in NEFA. On the 1914 map the ridge lay north of the line; India said the border followed the watershed, the crest of Thag La. On 8 September Chinese troops came down and surrounded the post. Delhi decided they must be thrown out, and in early October created a new corps for the job under Lt Gen B.M. Kaul, a favourite of both Nehru and Krishna Menon who had little battle experience.

On 12 October, leaving for Sri Lanka, Nehru told reporters at the airport that the Army had been instructed to free Indian territory. In Beijing the remark was read as a declaration of intent. In fact Brigadier John Dalvi, whose 7 Brigade was to do the freeing, had told his superiors that his men had no chance. They were strung out along the Namka Chu, a narrow valley below the ridge, on a front about 12 miles wide, many still in cotton uniforms and short of ammunition.

At first light on 20 October 1962, Chinese guns opened up on the valley and Chinese infantry came down from Thag La and around the brigade’s flanks. At the same time, two thousand kilometres to the west, they struck the Indian posts in Ladakh.

On the Namka Chu, 2 Rajput, holding the river crossings, fought where it stood and lost about 280 men killed by one count, the heaviest toll of any battalion that day. 1/9 Gorkha Rifles, 4 Grenadiers and 9 Punjab were caught in pieces across a front so stretched that it took days to march from one end to the other. By midday the brigade had ceased to exist as a fighting force. Survivors walked out through the forest, some into Bhutan.

Dalvi was captured and spent seven months in Chinese camps. In 1969 he published The Himalayan Blunder, blaming the politicians and the generals who would not stand up to them. Its title became India’s shorthand for 1962.

After Bum La, Tawang could not be held with what was there. Indian troops left on the night of 23 October and Chinese troops walked into the monastery town. By 25 October it was in Chinese hands, along with the whole stretch of NEFA north of the Se La pass.

Then the guns went quiet for three weeks. On 24 October Zhou Enlai proposed that both sides pull back 20 km from the line of actual control and that the prime ministers meet. Nehru rejected it on 27 October; he wanted China back behind the line it held before 8 September. Nehru later called the pause a deceptive lull. China says it was offering peace; many Indian writers say it was buying time to bring up roads and men.

In Delhi heads began to roll. Kaul had fallen ill and was flown to Delhi; for a few days Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh, a Sikh officer who would lead the Army in Punjab in 1965, held his command at Tezpur, before Kaul was sent back. On 31 October Nehru took the Defence portfolio away from Krishna Menon, leaving him in charge of defence production. Congress MPs and the public wanted more. On 7 November Menon resigned, and Nehru accepted it the next day with regret.

At the far eastern end of NEFA, where the Lohit river runs down from Tibet, lay Walong, a small airstrip in a deep valley. Advance parties of 4 Sikh were flown in on 26 September. There were no porters or ponies, so the men carried their own stores on a six-hour climb to their positions, alongside battalions of the Kumaon, Gorkha and Dogra regiments.

Chinese probes in late October were thrown back. On 25 October Sepoy Kewal Singh, with eighteen months’ service, charged an attacking party; he was given the Maha Vir Chakra after his death. Havildar Kirpa Ram, a boot repairer with no combat job, kept leading cooks and clerks forward under fire with ammunition until he was killed.

On 14 November India attacked first here, trying to take a feature called Yellow Pimple, and failed. On 15 and 16 November the Chinese came in strength. On the East Ridge Lieutenant Yog Raj Palta’s company of 4 Sikh threw back two assaults; the third, at 4.45 in the morning, overran them. His last order, as his battalion remembers it, was in Punjabi: roughly, chew the enemy up and do not let him go.

Dushman nu kachha kha jao, pichha na chhado.Lt Yog Raj Palta, 4 Sikh, at Walong, as recorded by his battalion

Walong fell on 16 November after more than three weeks. 4 Sikh lost 85 dead and 97 wounded. When Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh later came to the ridges, he wrote that the dead were lying in their bunkers where they had fought to the last.

At about 16,000 feet in Ladakh, the pass of Rezang La guards the approach to Chushul and its airstrip. In November 1962 it was held by C Company of 13 Kumaon, about 120 men. Almost all of them were Ahirs from the Rewari and Mahendragarh country of Haryana. Their commander was Major Shaitan Singh, a Rajput from Jodhpur.

At about 5 a.m. on 18 November, in cold so deep the guns were hard to work, the Chinese attacked. A ridge cut the company off from Indian artillery support. Wave after wave was beaten back; then Chinese guns shelled the platoon posts one by one. Shaitan Singh moved between them in the open to keep the men fighting, and was hit. As two of his men tried to carry him down under machine-gun fire, he ordered them to leave him and go.

Of the company, by the Army’s accounts, between 109 and 114 were killed. A handful survived, most of them badly wounded. Nobody went back to Rezang La until February 1963, when a patrol found the company where it had fought, frozen in the snow. Maj Gen Ian Cardozo wrote that the mortar man died with a bomb in his hand and the medical orderly with a bandage in his.

Every single man of this company was found dead in his trench.Maj Gen Ian Cardozo, on the patrol that reached Rezang La

Shaitan Singh’s body lay behind a boulder where his men had left him. It was flown to Jodhpur and cremated with full honours; 96 of his men were cremated at Chushul. He was given the Param Vir Chakra. The same day the Chinese took Gurung Hill above Chushul, but the airstrip itself was still in Indian hands when the guns stopped.

In NEFA the Army had built its main line at Se La, a pass at nearly 14,000 feet south of Tawang, with a brigade dug in on the heights. It was meant to hold for weeks. It held for days. On 17 November, near Nuranang, Rifleman Jaswant Singh Rawat of 4 Garhwal Rifles, with Lance Naik Trilok Singh Negi and Rifleman Gopal Singh Gusain, crawled up to a Chinese machine gun and captured it; Rawat was killed and given the Maha Vir Chakra. A shrine to him, Jaswantgarh, stands by the road.

But Chinese columns had marched round Se La and cut the road behind it. Orders from above changed, then changed again. On the night of 17 November the Se La garrison was told to withdraw, and in the dark and the forest the retreat broke up under ambush. Brigadier Hoshiar Singh, whose brigade had held the pass, was killed in the retreat. Bomdila was abandoned on 18 November. Roughly 10,000 Indian troops had been cut off.

Below lay the town of Tezpur. On 18 November the civil administration left and advised people to go. The manager of the State Bank branch burned the currency notes so they would not fall into Chinese hands, and the coins went into a pond. On 19 November Nehru spoke to the nation on All India Radio.

Especially our countrymen in Assam, to whom our heart goes out at this moment.Jawaharlal Nehru, radio broadcast, 19 November 1962

Many in Assam heard a farewell, their state written off. Others, including writers in the Assam Tribune, say the line was torn from a speech vowing that India would fight on.

Then, on the night of 20 to 21 November, Beijing announced that its troops would stop firing from midnight on 21 November along the whole border. From 1 December they would pull back to 20 km behind the line of actual control as it had stood on 7 November 1959, which in the east meant behind the McMahon Line itself.

They did. Chinese troops walked back out of Bomdila, Se La and Tawang. They handed back some captured weapons and, over the following months, released their prisoners. In Ladakh they stayed where they had pushed, in Aksai Chin and up to the line they had claimed. China had won the war on the ground and given back almost everything it had taken, except the one piece it actually wanted.

Why stop? China said it only ever wanted to defend its border and force talks. Historians add that winter was closing the passes, the lesson had been taught, and the United States was now arming India.

Counting the dead depends on whose count you trust. India’s Defence Ministry figures are 1,383 killed, 1,047 wounded, 1,696 missing and 3,968 captured. China’s official military history gives its own losses as 722 killed and 1,697 wounded, and counts 4,897 Indians killed or wounded. Neither count has been independently checked.

On 17 May 1963 the Chinese handed back the ashes of Subedar Joginder Singh to his battalion, with military honours. They went to the Sikh Regimental Centre at Meerut and then to his widow.

On 19 November, the worst day of the war, Nehru wrote twice to President John F. Kennedy. For the father of non-alignment, it was an astonishing request.

According to the declassified letters, published by the former CIA analyst Bruce Riedel in his book JFK’s Forgotten Crisis, Nehru asked for about a dozen squadrons of supersonic fighters and two of bombers, radar cover, and American pilots and ground crews to fly them until Indians were trained. He called it a fight for the survival of free governments across Asia.

Washington had just come through the Cuban missile crisis. It did not send the squadrons, but American and British planes were already flying in arms and winter clothing, and the US ordered the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk towards the Bay of Bengal. The ceasefire came first, and the carrier turned back. Moscow, which had promised India MiG-21 fighters that August, kept its distance while the fighting lasted.

Y.B. Chavan, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, became Defence Minister. The Army chief, General P.N. Thapar, resigned and General J.N. Chaudhuri took over. Kaul left the Army. Nehru died in May 1964.

In December 1962 the new Army chief asked two officers to find out what had gone wrong: Lt Gen T.B. Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P.S. Bhagat, who had won the Victoria Cross in the Second World War. Their report was handed in in 1963 and stamped top secret. It has never been officially released. In 2010 Defence Minister A.K. Antony told Parliament it still had current operational value.

But one copy got out. Neville Maxwell, The Times’s correspondent in Delhi in the 1960s, used it for his 1970 book India’s China War, and in March 2014 he put a large part of the report’s first section on his website. The government did not confirm it; officials suggested it might be a draft. Copies spread across the internet anyway.

What the leaked text shows, as analysts who have read it describe it: the Forward Policy was pushed by Delhi without the troops to back it, on the belief that China would not respond; a small group of generals at Army headquarters overruled or ignored warnings from commanders in the field; and China’s strength and roads were badly underestimated. The historian Srinath Raghavan reads it as harder on the generals who failed to give honest advice than on Nehru alone.

Congress governments kept it secret; the BJP demanded its release in opposition and has not released it in power.

The war on the mountains lasted a month. The war over the blame is still being fought, in books.

Maxwell’s India’s China War argued that India was the real aggressor: Nehru refused to negotiate an unagreed border, pushed troops into land China held, and China hit back. The American scholar Allen Whiting also found Beijing saw the Forward Policy as creeping annexation.

Indian historians have answered it. Srinath Raghavan calls Maxwell’s book a seminal revisionist account but says its pronounced anti-India bias cost it credibility; he argues that Maxwell read Delhi’s every move as Beijing would have. He points readers to ‘post-revisionist’ accounts such as Steven Hoffmann’s India and the China Crisis. The journalist Bertil Lintner, in China’s India War, argues the real cause was Beijing’s anger over India’s Tibet policy after 1959, and that China was preparing in NEFA well before the Forward Policy. John Garver found that Chinese leaders read India’s border moves fairly accurately, but badly misread its Tibet policy as a plot.

In January 1963 the country mourned its dead in Delhi; Lata Mangeshkar’s rendering of Kavi Pradeep’s ‘Ae Mere Watan Ke Logo’ that week, which by her own account brought Nehru to tears, became the way most Indians remembered 1962.

The Army grew sharply and raised mountain divisions. Pakistan, which signed its own border deal with China in 1963, tried its luck in Kashmir and Punjab in 1965. In 1967 at Nathu La in Sikkim, Indian troops fought Chinese troops again and gave as good as they got. By 1971 the Army that had been routed in NEFA won the war that made Bangladesh; that story is told in our long read on 1971. And in 1999, on other icy heights, it threw Pakistani troops off the peaks of Kargil.

The border was never settled; China still claims Arunachal Pradesh as ‘South Tibet’. On 15 June 2020, in the Galwan valley in Ladakh, twenty Indian soldiers were killed in a hand-to-hand clash with Chinese troops; China later admitted four dead of its own. It was the first deadly fight on that border in 45 years.

In Punjab the war is remembered through its men. There is a statue of Subedar Joginder Singh in Moga, and in 2020 a memorial to him was unveiled at Bum La, a short walk from the ridge his platoon held. At Walong the names of 4 Sikh’s dead are on the memorial with the rest.

The lesson of 1962 is not that India’s soldiers failed. It is that they were sent up the mountains on a gamble by leaders who believed war would not come. The report that says so is still, officially, secret.