23. Red China & Justifying an attack
Valmiki Faleiro
23. Red China & Justifying an attack
On 6 December 1961, Portugal asked Britain to intervene in the Goa Case. Britain was caught, as seen before, between a Commonwealth partner (India) and an ages-old ally she was pledged to help (Portugal). Britain made some diplomatic noises, played neutral and effectively did nothing.
When in India, the British were wary of China, next only to Tsarist Russia. Britain suspected that Russia might make a dash across her interests in the sub-continent for the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. China came second as a potential enemy. Britain ensured that Tibet remained independent – as a buffer between British India and China. The world's most populous country was a monarchy and, after a revolution in 1912, became republican.
Following another revolution in 1949 (after 'a century of humiliation'), China turned communist and swallowed Tibet. China began asking India to open border negotiations, refusing to recognise the borders settled by ‘British imperialists’ with monarchial China and tacitly accepted by republican China. Beset with his own problems, Nehru paid no heed to the requests.
From 1952 to 1957, China built a road from Sinkiang (now Xinjiang) to Lhasa in Tibet. A length of 160 kilometres of this road was in Indian land at Aksai Chin. India protested that China took no ‘permission’ to build the road inside India and howled that the Chinese workers who entered India to construct the road and those now using it did not apply for Indian visas.
Chairman Mao Tse-tung (now Mao Zedong) and Premier Chou En-lai (now Zhou Enlai) were astute and practical men, unlike urbane Nehru and flamboyant Menon. China saw some Indian political leaders as éminences grises and some senior Indian army officers as chair-borne soldiers and decided to teach them ‘a lesson’. Under a deceptive sheen of bonhomie, China secretly began preparations from 1959 to attack India.
Portugal turned to China. Visão História (Volume 14, 2011, Pages 36-37) quoting the then Portuguese Minister for Overseas, Adriano Moreira, said Portugal offered Goa’s Dabolim airport and Mormugao seaport to China – in the hope of deterring India’s plans of aggression. The go-between was Ho Yin, father of latter-day Macao President Edmund Ho. The Chinese premier Chou En-lai said that the proposal interested him but that there was a lot of time, since Nehru would not attack Goa and fritter away his world image as a pacifist.
Chou En-lai was wrong. India invaded Goa within eight days. (China would invade India in ten months, but that is another story. It is said, however, that China was emboldened to attack India by India's use of force in Goa.)
Three days before Portugal approached China, Indian Defence Minister Krishna Menon told the Lok Sabha on 7 December 1961: "Reports have been pouring in for the last two weeks of intensified firing activity, oppression and terrorism in Goa, of heavy reinforcements of Portuguese armed forces... There was a report of 2,500 troops having been deployed along the Goa border... also a report of a fleet of two Portuguese frigates standing guard. ... 3,000 more troops from African and other places have also arrived. ... It was also reported that dawn-to-dusk curfew had been imposed. ... The Portuguese armed forces are thus poised near the border at various points to overawe and intimidate both the residents of Goa and those living in the border villages on the Indian side. Hit-and-run raids across the border already seem to have started. A raid in a village near Sawantwadi was reported two days ago".
Save the continuing police oppression within Goa, all were unadulterated lies.
Nothing of the kind that Menon mouthed was actually happening on the ground ... no troop reinforcements, no frigates, and no curfew. Salazar had been told, as early as 1954, that it was militarily impossible to defend Goa (defending would be "a suicide mission in which we could not succeed"). Following The Hague's verdict of 12 April 1960 in the Dadra and Nagar Haveli 'Rights of Passage' case, Salazar, like Chou En-lai, believed that India would not attack Goa. He reduced troops in Goa (12,000 in 1955) three times from 1958.
The last reduction of troops in 1960 followed the visit and a recommendation of Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Francisco da Costa Gomes, then Portugal’s Undersecretary of War (and later, post the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the second President of Portugal). This last reduction, done on the basis that Goa was militarily indefensible, left 3,300 ill-trained troops in Goa. They were deployed in three more or less battalion-sized formations, each HQed at Old Goa (Agrupamento D. João de Castro), Mormugao (Agrupamento Vasco da Gama) and Aquem Baixo near Margao (Agrupamento Afonso de Albuquerque).
The best troops were shifted to Angola and Timor. What remained in Goa was a ragtag band of men, soldiers only in name and uniform. Squadron Leader (later Air Marshal) S Raghavendran, staff officer to the AOC-in-C Air Vice Marshal Ehrlich Pinto during Op. Vijay, commented in a Bharat-Rakshak article, Eye Witness to the Liberation of Goa, "I have never seen such a set of troops looking so miserable in my life. Short, not particularly well built and certainly very unsoldierlike”. Worse, this remainder in Goa was armed pathetically. There was no artillery, no armour, and no air defence.
Of the four warships in Goa, three frigates – NRP Bartolomeu Dias, NRP Gonsalves Zarco and NRP João de Lisboa – had been shifted out. Only the ageing destroyer (the Portuguese called her a cruiser, a larger vessel) NRP Afonso de Albuquerque remained in Goa. She was armed with four 120 mm cannons (each capable of firing about one round a minute, or aggregately five times a minute) and four multiple Pom-Pom guns. There were three small patrol vessels each armed with a 20 mm Oerlikon gun: Sírius in Goa, Antares in Daman and Vega in Diu. There were no other men-of-war, surface or underwater. The only other vessels in Goa were merchant ships, Japanese carriers coming for mineral ore, motor launches, ferryboats, some sailboats, and plenty of canoes.
The Governor declared Emergency on 14 December 1961, only after Indian troops surrounded Goa.
That such a tiny, inexperienced and badly equipped Portuguese force could even think of launching raids across the border or threaten to bomb Indian cities – as also reported by Indian newspapers, on cue from Krishna Menon – was fanciful, to say the least.
-- Excerpted from revised text of the book, Patriotism In Action: Goans in India’s Defence Services by Valmiki Faleiro, first published in 2010 by ‘Goa,1556’ (ISBN: 978-93-80739-06-9). Revised edition awaits publication.
TAILPIECE: India unveiled the maiden issue of Blue Helmet Odyssey: Defining India’s UN Footprints in New Delhi on Army Day 2022. The annual journal is devoted to the United Nations Peacekeeping Force (UNPF) the world over. India, a founder-member of the UN, stands tall among the 100 countries that embody the UNPF.
The colours of the UN are white and blue. All UNPF vehicles are painted white. UNFP soldiers wear blue-coloured helmets, berets or turbans. Thus, the name of the journal, launched by the Chief of Army Staff in the presence of the Vice Chief, Deputy Chief and the Chief Editor, Major General Michael Anthony Jude Fernandez, VSM – a Goan-origin serving officer from Saligao.
Blue Helmet Odyssey Vol. 1 features 21 interesting articles in a mix of senior military leadership perspectives, mission news and personal experiences, spanning across its 132 delightfully produced pages. Such material merits a wider audience and could be made easily accessible on online fora such as Bharat-Rakshak. One hopes this highly readable inaugural edition is only a curtain raiser! Best to Maj Gen Fernandez and his editorial team, all men in uniform. (ENDS)
Braz Menezes
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Valmiki Faleiro
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Braz Menezes
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Valmiki Faleiro
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