2.1.2. Setback with China: 1962

One of the key elements of a foreign policy based on the idea of nonalignment was the limitation of high defence expenditures. Such a policy weakened the hard power capabilities of India. It was tested most acutely in its relations with People’s Republic of China (PRC). India gave refuge to the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama in 1959 and negotiations with the PRC reached a dead end in 1960. Consequently, India adopted, in the words of Sumit Ganguly, a “strategy of compellence designed to restore what it deemed to be the territorial status quo along the disputed Himalayan border”. It involved sending in lightly armed, poorly equipped and ill-prepared troops to high altitudes without adequate supply lines. This policy, however, was proved to be ill conceived.

When in 1962 the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the PRC invaded India with extensive force, the Indian military was unprepared to face the assault. The PLA inflicted considerable losses on the Indian forces and then withdrew from some of the areas that they had entered. However, they did not vacate Axai Chin, an area of more than 14,000 square miles, that they had initially claimed and it remains a bone of contention in India’s relation with China.