Thread by @KumarSeshadri

Many liberals are amazed that people believe the obvious lies that the Modi government puts out about China. There's a clear inconsistency between Modi saying that China didn't take any territory and army commanders regularly meeting their Chinese counterparts to negotiate.

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They're practically begging the Chinese to leave, and the Chinese are refusing. If that were not the case, there would be no need to talk.

Also, the #Indian #Military position MUST BE WEAK, otherwise we would have kicked out the #Chinese. We simply cannot.

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So why isn't the Indian public angry with #Modi?

For the same reason they were not angry with #Nehru in 1962.

#Heroworship.

Indians have a tendency to place their heroes on a pedestal and worship them. As long as they are on that pedestal, they can do no wrong.

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For a long time, we put #Gandhi on a pedestal. His time on the pedestal ran out a while ago.

#Nehru fell off the pedestal sometime in the 1980s.

Today, it is #Modi's turn on the pedestal.

#Ambedkar warned us about this hero-worshipping tendency of Indians.

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#Nehru lost a war against #China because he didn't take them seriously enough.

Krishna Menon, Nehru's defense minister, had very clear intelligence that the Chinese would not tolerate India's "#ForwardPolicy," but he assured Nehru that the Chinese would not attack.

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After the war ended, the truth of what had happened became clear to everyone in the government - that this was a failure of leadership that went right to the top - but everyone conspired to hide the truth and protect Nehru.

To protect Nehru, they even changed our textbooks.
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Nehru's party, the Congress, rewrote history to make it seem that Nehru was never at fault. He had stretched out a hand of peace to China, and the treacherous Chinese had stabbed India in the back.

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A popular narrative in India is that as the Chinese attacked an unprepared Indian army that thought our neighbors were friends, they actually maliciously and villanously shouted "Hindi Chini bhai Bhai" as they thrust their bayonets into the Indians.

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"Hindi Chini bhai bhai" means "Indians and Chinese are brothers," and was one of the slogans made popular by Nehru.

To keep this fiction alive, the government has refused to release the report on the war commissioned by the Army, the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat (HBB) report.

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But many of the contents of the report were finally known to the world when Australian journalist #NevilleMaxwell, who had been posted in New Delhi and seen the HBB report, wrote a book based on it, titled, "India's China War."

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The book made it clear, based on the HBB report, that India was responsible for the war, and not China - hence, "India's" war.

The Indian government, rather than deny the claims in the book or dismiss it as a work of fiction, issued an arrest warrant for Maxwell...

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...for violating the Official Secrets Act - in effect, confirming the truth of his claims!

But the Congress government's propaganda has worked exceedingly well among Indians. Even though the Congress government lost power, first between 1998-2004...

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...and later, from 2014 to now, its rival who has replaced it, the #BJP, first under PM AB #Vajpayee, and now under PM #Modi, did not declassify the HBB report, even though its contents were now known to the world through Maxwell's book.

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The reason is that, for the last 60 years, everyone who has studied history in textbooks in schools has studied the version pushed by the Congress government. So every Indian, almost to a person, believes that the Chinese stabbed us in the back and are untrustworthy.

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That includes the Indian PM, #Modi, the head of the "cultural" organization that he belongs to, the #RSS, #MohanBhagwat, and most political leaders of every party in India.

Even those who find fault with Nehru don't accuse him of provoking a war but of being gullible.

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Nehru's fault is seen today not as being reckless in leading India into an unwinnable war, but as being too believing in an evil and treacherous China's assurances.

Interestingly, Modi finds himself repeating Nehru's mistakes.

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Just as Nehru needlessly provoked the Chinese with his Forward Policy, Modi has provoked the Chinese of today by criticizing the Chinese #Covid response; joining the US-led anti-China grouping, the #QUAD; &by Amit Shah saying in Parliament that Aksai Chin is part of India.

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And, just as Nehru paid the price for his hubris (Mao actually later said that he thought Nehru was strutting about too much and wanted to bring him down a notch or two), Modi today is paying the price for his hubris.

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Xi clearly wants to deflate Modi, especially because Modi refuses to stop provoking China. So China will not even consider vacating the area they have occupied since 2020 and, if India continues its hostile posture, Xi will continue to punish Modi, maybe by taking more.

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And, because Modi completely controls the media in India through his industry cronies, he is able to manage his people's anger or deflect it, just as Nehru and his successors could control the narrative after 1962.

The losers, sadly, are the people of India.

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