Many years ago, Air Marshal B.D. Jayal (Retd), former Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, South Western Air Command, one of the most thoughtful airmen around, recalled how he and his mates of 1 Squadron sat in their transonic Mystere IVA fighter-bombers lined up on the Tezpur airfield in Assam, their frustration mounting by the minute, awaiting the order to take off against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that never came. Jayal’s experience came to mind when reading Air Chief Marshal N.A.K. Browne’s comment on the 50th anniversary of the 1962 war that but for the non-use of Indian Air Force (IAF) India might not have lost. It is an arguable thesis.
Had the IAF been ordered into action, the advance of PLA across the Thag La Ridge would have been hindered but not halted. Indian planes would have fought unopposed in the air, leaving the pilots to concentrate on releasing the on-board ordnance at the right moment in their dives, but only until the Chinese interceptors and bombers arrived on the scene. Air intelligence passed on by the British to the Indian government had indicated no active Chinese air activity in Tibet, and indeed very few serviceable air strips — no more than three or four on the entire plateau. But the IAF aircraft would have had to contend, especially in the East, with steep mountainsides, and the bomb drops very likely would have missed their targets, most of the time. It wouldn’t have helped that the targets were mainly infantry columns, foot soldiers making up the “rifle and millet corps” comprising the PLA at the time. For reasons of terrain, the IAF aircraft might have been more effective in the West in the Aksai Chin, where the relatively gentler mountain topography would have permitted sustained strafing runs to negate swamping PLA infantry tactics.
The outcome of the war, in other words, may not have been very different even with the IAF in full cry. But this assumes Mao Zedong, who had invested his personal political capital in “teaching India a lesson”, would have desisted from deploying the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) once it became clear that affording the IAF a free run could cost him success. In that situation, the IAF would have had to deal with the more numerous Chinese MiG-15s as against the fewer, but more advanced, Hawker Hunter and the Mysteres — MiG-17 equivalent — in its own employ. One cannot be too sure how that face-off would have turned out, considering the Chinese Air Force had greater, and more recent, operational experience of flying against the US Air Force and carrier-borne US Navy aircraft in the Korean War (1950-53).
This to say that the result of using the IAF might not have been all that clear-cut as Browne suggests, even with the other advantage Indian pilots had of taking to the air, fully fuelled and loaded, unlike their Chinese rivals who, because of the thin air of the Tibet plateau would have compromised on ammunition (for on-board 23mm canons on MiG-15s) and quantum of fuel. The only way India could have secured a distinct tactical advantage is, if in the first hours of the Chinese invasion, New Delhi had sanctioned IAF bombing runs on the PLA staging areas in Tibet with the Canberra medium-bombers, 70-80 of which aircraft were in the Indian inventory by then. That would have had a devastating effect of taking out pre-positioned stores for the planned invasion. It would have demoralised the PLA troops going into battle but also, most definitely, have brought the PLAAF in and the region would have witnessed a major air war. The IAF Canberra medium-bombers would have outshone the Chinese Illyushin-48s, and the Indian Hawker Hunters — one of the finest fighter aircraft of its generation — and Mysteres might have had the better of the Chinese MiG-15s, the first of the swept-wing fighters that had given the American F-86 Sabres a run for their money in Korea. But one cannot be certain. It is an interesting scenario to game to determine the “what might have-beens”.
Even better, though, would be to game the exact situation, but update the gaming parameters by incorporating the latest aircraft in the two air forces and the rival border infrastructures. The question in 1962, however, as in all conflicts the Indian military has been involved in since, remains the same — the infirm political will of the Indian government. On the Chinese side was Mao, a stalwart military leader of repute and resolve. On this side was Jawaharlal Nehru with, and this is not widely known, a keen military sense — his take on the Indian Army progress or the lack thereof during the 1947-48 Kashmir operations are incisive, but non-existent will. He was collaterally unnerved by the prospect of Indian air action broadening the war, perhaps, inviting retaliatory Chinese bombing raids on Calcutta, which the then chief minister of West Bengal, B.C. Roy, warned would lead to the end of the Congress Party rule in that state come the next state elections.
Update the scenario and we have Hu Jintao in China — not as bloody-minded as Mao for sure but no shrinking violet either when it comes to using force. Political commissar, Hu, dealt ruthlessly with the helpless Tibetans in their benighted country under Chinese military occupation since 1949. And in New Delhi, we have Manmohan Singh who, as a senior official in the National Security Council secretariat told me, believes it is good for the country to possess hard power — latest guns, ships and combat aircraft — but not to use it. If conventional military capability, too, is to be reduced to the same unusable deterrent status as India’s nuclear weapons, then it will face the same dilemma — what happens if it fails to deter? The conventional military, fortunately, can be fielded; it just needs a bit of prime ministerial spine. Indian nuclear armaments, in contrast, have no such fallback position what with over-zealous adherence to the “no first use” principle and Indian government officials and military Chiefs of Staff iterating the self-defeating view that these are not weapons for war fighting, reducing what little credibility they have.

The writer is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi