6.26 — The Wars: 1947, 1962, 1965, 1971, 1999

In December 1971, in thirteen days, the Indian Army took Dhaka and 93,000 Pakistani troops surrendered — the largest military surrender since the Second World War. A country of 75 million people was created.

Nine years earlier, the same army had been routed by China in four weeks and had lost the ability to defend its own northern frontier.

The difference between those two performances is the subject of this chapter, and it is a study in what a state learns from defeat.

1947–48: the first Kashmir war

Covered in Chapter 6.25. Tribal invasion with Pakistani backing in October 1947, accession, Indian airlift, fourteen months of fighting, and a ceasefire on 1 January 1949 leaving the Line of Control.

What it settled: India held the Valley, Jammu and Ladakh; Pakistan held the western and northern areas.

What it did not settle: everything else. And it established the pattern for the next fifty years — Pakistan using irregular forces with deniable state backing, and India responding with regular forces.

1962: the China war

Covered in Chapter 6.24 as a policy failure. Here is what happened militarily, because the details explain the outcome.

The disputed areas were two, and they were different. Aksai Chin in the west — a high, cold, empty plateau across which China had built the road linking Xinjiang and Tibet, which China needed and India had not noticed. And the eastern sector, along the McMahon Line drawn at the 1914 Simla Convention, which China had never accepted.

Indian forces were catastrophically unprepared. Posts placed under the Forward Policy were small, isolated, and supplied by air drop. Troops were in cotton uniforms at altitudes above 4,000 metres. They had bolt-action rifles of Second World War vintage against Chinese semi-automatics. There were no roads to the forward positions, while the Chinese had built them.

And the command failed. The professional advice of officers who said the positions were untenable was overruled; senior appointments had been made politically; and the Army Chief was not fully consulted on the deployments he was ordered to make.

The Chinese offensive began on 20 October 1962, in both sectors simultaneously. Indian positions were overrun within days. In the east the Chinese advanced through Tawang, broke the defence at Se La and Bomdi La, and reached the edge of the Assam plain.

On 21 November China declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew in the east to the McMahon Line, keeping Aksai Chin.

Why China stopped is worth stating: the Himalayan winter was closing, its supply lines were extended, the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended so international attention was returning, and it had achieved its objective — Aksai Chin and a demonstration.

Indian casualties were around 1,400 killed and about 4,000 captured. The political effect was total: Krishna Menon resigned, the Army leadership was replaced, and Nehru's standing never recovered.

What India did afterwards is the important part. Defence spending roughly doubled as a share of the budget. The army was expanded from about 550,000 to over 800,000. Mountain divisions were raised and trained specifically for high-altitude war. Border roads were built. The military was rearmed, largely with Soviet equipment, and the professional advice of the service chiefs was given weight it had not previously had.

The 1962 defeat is the reason 1965 and 1971 went the way they did.

1965

Pakistan's assessment after 1962 was that India was weak and that Kashmir's population would rise if given a spark.

Operation Gibraltar, August 1965: several thousand Pakistani soldiers in civilian dress infiltrated into Indian Kashmir to organise an uprising. The uprising did not happen. Local Kashmiris reported the infiltrators to the Indian authorities in many cases, and the operation failed within weeks.

Pakistan then launched Operation Grand Slam, an armoured thrust toward Akhnoor aimed at cutting the road link to Kashmir.

India's response was to widen the war — crossing the international border toward Lahore and Sialkot, which forced Pakistan to divert forces from Kashmir. This was a deliberate escalation and it worked strategically.

The largest tank battles since the Second World War were fought in the Sialkot sector at Chawinda and in the Khem Karan sector at Asal Uttar, where a Pakistani armoured thrust with American-supplied Patton tanks was destroyed in flooded sugarcane fields by Indian defensive positions.

It ended in a stalemate. A UN ceasefire on 23 September, and the Tashkent Declaration in January 1966, brokered by the Soviet Union, returned both sides to their pre-war positions. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Indian Prime Minister, died of a heart attack in Tashkent hours after signing.

What it settled: that Pakistan could not take Kashmir by conventional force, and that Kashmiris would not rise for Pakistan in 1965. Both parties claimed victory; neither achieved its objective.

1971: the war that changed South Asia

This one began as a political crisis inside Pakistan and it is impossible to understand without it.

Pakistan's two wings were separated by 1,600 kilometres of India, and East Pakistan — Bengali-speaking — had the larger population and received the smaller share of resources, development spending and military and civil service posts. The imposition of Urdu as the sole national language in 1948 had already produced the Bengali Language Movement, in which students were killed in 1952 — commemorated now as International Mother Language Day.

In the December 1970 elections, the Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won 160 of 162 East Pakistani seats and an absolute majority in the national assembly.

The assembly was not convened. Negotiations failed, and on 25 March 1971 the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight in Dhaka — a military crackdown that began with attacks on the university, the police lines and Hindu neighbourhoods.

What followed was a nine-month campaign of mass violence. Bangladeshi estimates of deaths run to 3 million; independent scholarly estimates range from several hundred thousand to over a million. The number is genuinely disputed and the scale is not. Systematic rape was used as an instrument, with estimates of victims in the hundreds of thousands, and the Bangladeshi state later designated survivors Birangona, war heroines, in an attempt to remove the stigma. Hindus were targeted disproportionately, and the American consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent a dissent cable to Washington calling the policy genocide and protesting American silence — for which his career was ended.

Around 10 million refugees crossed into India, overwhelmingly into West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. That is the fact that made Indian intervention inevitable — no state can absorb 10 million people and treat it as somebody else's problem.

India's preparation was methodical, and this is the contrast with 1962. Indira Gandhi resisted pressure to attack immediately in March. The Army Chief, Sam Manekshaw, told her the army was not ready, that the monsoon would make the terrain impassable, and that the Himalayan passes needed to be snowbound so China could not intervene. She accepted the professional advice and waited eight months. India trained and armed the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali guerrilla force, through that period, and signed a treaty with the Soviet Union in August 1971 to secure a veto in the Security Council and a deterrent against Chinese or American action.

The war proper began on 3 December 1971 when Pakistan launched pre-emptive airstrikes on Indian airfields.

The eastern campaign took thirteen days. Indian forces bypassed strongpoints rather than reducing them, used helicopter-borne troops to cross the rivers of the Bengal delta, and drove for Dhaka. The Indian Navy attacked Karachi and blockaded East Pakistan. On 16 December, Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi surrendered with about 93,000 personnel.

The United States sent a carrier task force into the Bay of Bengal in a demonstration intended to deter India; a Soviet naval group shadowed it. Nothing happened militarily and the episode shaped Indian threat perceptions for decades.

The Simla Agreement of July 1972 returned the prisoners and territory, converted the Kashmir ceasefire line into the Line of Control, and committed both sides to resolve disputes bilaterally. India's decision to return 93,000 prisoners without extracting a Kashmir settlement is the standard criticism of Indira Gandhi's diplomacy, and the standard defence is that a humiliated Pakistan forced to concede Kashmir would have produced a permanent revanchist state — which is an argument about counterfactuals.

What it settled: Bangladesh exists. Pakistan lost more than half its population. And the two-nation theory — that religion was sufficient basis for a state — was refuted by Muslims seceding from a Muslim state over language and economic grievance.

The nuclear dimension

India tested a nuclear device on 18 May 1974, called it a "peaceful nuclear explosion", and did not weaponise for two decades. The test triggered the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and long-running technology sanctions against India.

Pakistan began its own programme immediately — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's line about eating grass if necessary is the standard quotation — and A. Q. Khan, who had worked at a European enrichment consortium, supplied stolen centrifuge designs. Khan later ran a proliferation network supplying North Korea, Libya and Iran, which is one of the worst security failures of the era.

In May 1998 India conducted five tests at Pokhran and declared itself a nuclear weapons state. Pakistan tested within weeks.

Both maintain arsenals estimated at roughly 170 warheads each. India declares a no-first-use policy with a caveat regarding chemical or biological attack; Pakistan explicitly does not, because its doctrine relies on nuclear weapons to offset India's conventional superiority.

1999: Kargil

In the winter of 1998–99, Pakistani soldiers and irregulars occupied unoccupied high-altitude positions on the Indian side of the Line of Control in the Kargil sector, above the highway linking Srinagar to Leh. The positions had been vacated seasonally by both sides for years because they are uninhabitable in winter.

India discovered the intrusion in May 1999, after months of it going unnoticed, which is an intelligence failure of the first order.

The fighting was extraordinarily difficult — assaults uphill against prepared positions at altitudes above 5,000 metres, where every position had to be taken by infantry because the terrain permitted nothing else. Indian casualties were around 500 killed.

Two decisions defined it. India did not cross the Line of Control, despite the military disadvantage this imposed, in order to keep the international position unambiguous. And the United States, in a change from previous alignments, pressed Pakistan to withdraw — Nawaz Sharif's meeting with Bill Clinton on 4 July 1999 produced the withdrawal.

The war took place a year after both had tested nuclear weapons, which is the reason it is studied internationally: it demonstrated that nuclear weapons do not prevent conventional conflict, and may enable limited conflict under a nuclear umbrella. Political scientists call this the stability-instability paradox.

Pakistan's army chief Pervez Musharraf, who planned the operation, overthrew Sharif in a coup three months later.

Since then

The pattern shifted from wars to terrorism and to limited strikes.

The insurgency in Kashmir from 1989, following the rigged 1987 state election (Chapter 6.25), with cross-border support that Pakistan denied for years and that senior Pakistani figures have since acknowledged.

Major attacks: the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, which produced a ten-month military standoff; the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which ten gunmen from Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 166 people over three days; Pathankot and Uri in 2016; and Pulwama in 2019.

India's responses have escalated in visibility: the declared "surgical strikes" across the Line of Control in 2016, and the Balakot airstrike inside Pakistani territory in 2019, which was followed by an aerial engagement and the return of a captured Indian pilot.

What the wars actually show

Three findings.

Preparation and professional advice decide outcomes. 1962 was lost by ignoring the army; 1971 was won by listening to it and waiting eight months. That is the clearest single lesson in Indian military history.

Pakistan's strategic assumption has consistently been wrong. Four times it has assumed that Kashmiris would rise, that India would not escalate, or that a limited action could be contained. Each time India escalated horizontally, and each time the population did not rise as expected.

And Kashmir has not been settled by any of it. Five military engagements, two nuclear arsenals, and the position on the ground is roughly what it was on 1 January 1949. Chapter 12.10 places this among the world's frozen conflicts and asks what actually resolves such things.

Where this shows up in your life

Defence spending. India is consistently among the largest arms importers in the world, and its defence budget is a permanent claim on resources that a country with India's development indicators would otherwise use elsewhere. Chapter 9.14 counts that cost.

And the human cost is ongoing. Soldiers on the Siachen glacier, at altitudes above 5,000 metres, have died in larger numbers from cold, altitude and avalanche than from enemy fire — on both sides, for a position of contested strategic value, continuously since 1984.

What the next page covers

In June 1975, twenty-eight years after independence, the Prime Minister of India suspended democracy. Chapter 6.27 covers the Emergency — how it happened, what was done during it, the forced sterilisation programme, the censorship, and the extraordinary thing that ended it: an election in 1977 that the government did not have to call and that it lost. It also covers what came after, including 1984, the Mandal and Ayodhya conflicts, and the question of how robust Indian democracy actually turned out to be.