Indischer
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Hey buddy, 好久不见! Hope you're doing well!
The interesting thing is that the facts in the (still classified) Henderson-Brooks report seem to largely match the information that is publicly available and used in the general academic discourse surrounding the 1962 War.
Yet there are still a huge number of Indians who say that: "China attacked India out of the blue, for no reason at all!"
The opinion from the Indian media seems to be that this above viewpoint was propagated by the ruling Congress Party in India, to cover for Nehru's mistakes, which would have showed their own party in a bad light.
No doubt the upcoming Indian elections had everything to do with the "timing" of when this report was released.
Hopefully this will improve the general level of debate regarding the 1962 War, a tragedy that could have otherwise been avoided.
Purely from an Indian standpoint:
To me, the biggest blunder was Indian recognition of Tibet as sovereign Tibetan territory. It deprived us of all legitimacy with regards to the McMahon line in AP/South Tibet and the Johnson line in Aksai Chin, which the British had negotiated with a de-facto independent Tibet. But recognizing Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, we lost the legitimacy of these borders, to which China was not party and had always failed to validate them.
The next big blunder was in our failure to 'understand' the psyche of PRC/CCP. It didn't help that Nehru was an idealist lost in his merry non-alignment and his advisors were spineless sycophants. They collectively lived in denial that they had a hot-cake stuck in their throat, and when the offensive finally began, it was a sudden and shocking surprise, which should never have been the case had they been pragmatic like their CCP counterparts.