1962 and the McMahon Line Saga

Fifty years ago, India went through a tragic event which has remained a deep scar in the country’s psyche: a border war with China. During the author’s archival peregrinations on the Himalayan border, he goes into some relatively little known issues, such as the checkered history of Tawang; the British India policy towards Tibet and even the possibility for India to militarily defend the Roof of the World. The author also looks into why the Government still keeps the Henderson Brooks Report under wraps and what were Mao’s motivations for ‘teaching India a lesson’. Throughout this series of essays, the thread remains the Tibet-India frontier in the North-East and the Indo-Chinese conflict. The more one digs into this question, the more one discovers that the entire issue is intimately linked with the history of modern Tibet; particularly the status of the Roof of the World as a de facto independent nation. British India had a Tibet Policy, Independent India, did not. This led to the unfortunate events of 1962.