Reviving Revolutionary Momentum } 181
for the Americans. Just as the Americans learned in 1950 in Korea to take se-
riously Chinese power and threats, Indian leaders learned in 1962 that PRC
leaders were prepared to use China’s substantial military power to uphold
what they deemed China’s vital interests. From this perspective, both 1950
and 1962 were expensive but perhaps necessary payments for China’s rise as
a great power.
On the cost side of Beijing’s ledger, 1962 gave rise to an enduring Indian
narrative of Chinese betrayal. According to this Indian narrative, India had
befriended China in the 1950s, but China had repaid Indian friendship with
treacherous attack. Over the fifty years after 1962, Chinese diplomacy and
propaganda would attempt to erode this Indian narrative of Chinese betrayal,
but with only partial success. The memory of 1962 and the underlying sense
of Chinese treachery and betrayal remains strong in India. 1962 dominates
the Indian historical memory of Sino-Indian relations much as the memory
of Japan’s aggression in the 1930s dominates China’s historical narrative of
Sino-Japanese relations. Even in 2014, when Beijing was struggling to pre-
vent India’s alignment with Shinzo Abe’s Japan, China’s deployment of the
Japanese history issue to influence Japan had little resonance in India, partly
because World War II is overshadowed (in the Indian memory) by 1962. That
year is the “history issue” for Indians.
The 1962 war also resulted in an Indian military development effort that
turned India into a far more potent military threat to China, especially to
“China’s Tibet.” 1962 shattered the earlier Gandhian-Nehruvian belief that
war was anachronistic. India began for the first time a serious and sus-
tained military modernization effort, so that by, say, 1971, when China feared
Indian intervention in Tibet, the military balance between India and China
had shifted decisively in India’s favor. One component of India’s post-1962
shift in defense policy was the formation of what would eventually become
an eleven-battalion force (about 10,000 troops) of professionally trained and
well-armed Tibetans officered by Indian Army officers and designed to con-
duct long-range commando and guerrilla operations deep inside Tibet.^38 This
force, initially code-named Establishment 22, was maintained under condi-
tions of deep secrecy and could work jointly with conventional Indian forces
in the event of another Sino-Indian war, plus a possible call for a Tibetan
national rising in an attempt to topple Chinese rule over Tibet. For several
years after the 1962 war, India worked closely with the CIA in setting up
Establishment 22. By 1965, the CIA had reportedly drawn up a plan for the
liberation of Tibet employing Establishment 22. With Establishment 22, India
had given itself a far more potent weapon that might challenge Chinese con-
trol over Tibet.
1962 also altered India’s policy of non-alignment with major powers.
While India continued to play a pivotal role in the non-aligned movement,
it adopted a de facto policy of aligning with the superpower most willing