The Himalayan blunders of Nehru

Sharp polarisation, angry remarks, and walkouts by several Congress MPs from the Lok Sabha happened when Union Home Minister Amit Shah blamed Nehru for the creation of Pakistan Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (POJK).

“The problem of POJK occurred because of Pandit Nehru. Nehruji was responsible for POJK,” Shah said.
“Nehru ji said it was his mistake. It was not a mistake. It was a blunder to lose so much land of this country,” Shah added. Reacting to the opposition MPs walking out, Shah said, “They are so upset over the word blunder. If I had said ‘Himalayan’, they would have resigned and left.”

Jammu and Kashmir has suffered due to two “blunders” by Nehru, the first of them was announcing a ceasefire and taking the Kashmir issue to the United Nations (UN). According to several analysts, if the ceasefire had come after some days, the Indian Army would have driven out Pakistanis from the captured areas and POJK as also Gilgit-Batistan would have been a part of India today. The second blunder which Nehru committed was taking this issue to the United Nations (UN).

The ceasefire was declared at a time when the Indian Army was making rapid advances and the enemy was on the run. The blunder of halting a winning army in its pursuit of the enemy was done by Nehru mainly to help his friend Sheikh Abdullah who did not command any influence beyond the small Kashmir valley.

Another blunder that Nehru committed was trusting Sheikh blindly, so much so that he got Article 370 included in the Indian Constitution and gave a separate constitution to Jammu & Kashmir. This separate constitution fostered separatism and secessionism and engendered the special status syndrome, which was buried by Narendra Modi government on August 5, 2019.

The truly Himalayan blunder committed by Nehru was falling to deceptive lullabies of “Hindi Cheeni Bhai Bhai’’ slogans. Trusting the treacherous Chinese then led to a situation where we lost 38,000 sq km of area now called Aksai Chin in the 1962 war. Alluding to this area, Nehru once said in Parliament that “not a single blade a grass grows there, and the Parliament should not waste time on this’’.

Besides, Nehru had rejected the offer made by the US for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) made in 1950. Instead, Nehru offered this seat to China which has used it multiple times to use veto powers against India! To quote just one example, China used this UNSC position conferred by Nehru to block declaration of Masood Azhar of Jaish e Mohammad (JeM) as a global terrorist.

Another blunder that Nehru committed was refusing an offer made by US President John F Kennedy to help India develop nuclear weapons much before China. Nehru had then argued that India wanted to remain peaceful and needed no nuclear arsenal. Had Kennedy’s offer been accepted, China could not have dared a 1962 attack on the Indian positions and grabbed Aksai Chin.