To counter Rahul Gandhi’s China, US jab, Modi brings up a book on JFK. What does it say?

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During his response to the debate on the Motion of Thanks to the President’s Address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday mentioned how then PM Jawaharlal Nehru sought the United States’s assistance during the 1962 Chinese aggression. “If someone is really interested in foreign policy and wants to understand, I would recommend a book, ‘JFK’s Forgotten Crisis’,” the PM said.

“This book mentions correspondence between India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru and then US President John F Kennedy and also decisions taken at the time. The book brings out the games being played in the name of foreign policy at a time the country was facing a lot of challenges,” Modi said, without directly mentioning the 1962 India-China War, which the book talks about.

The 2015 book that Modi mentioned was written by former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official Bruce Riedel, and is called ‘JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA and the Sino-Indian War’. Citing letters written by Nehru to Kennedy in November 1962, the book says Indian leadership was ill-prepared and taken aback, and sought fighter jets to stem the Chinese aggression in 1962.

As India was fast losing its territory to China and suffering heavy casualties, Nehru said in his letter that India needed “air transport and jet fighters to stem the Chinese tide of aggression… A lot more effort, both from us and from our friends will be required”. Soon after, Nehru wrote another letter to Kennedy, which was hand delivered by B K Nehru, the then Indian Ambassador to the US, on November 19.

“Nehru was thus asking Kennedy to join the war against China by partnering in an air war to defeat the PLA (People’s Liberation Army of China). It was a momentous request that the Indian Prime Minister was making. Just a decade after American forces had reached a ceasefire with the Chinese Communist Forces in Korea, India was asking JFK to join a new war against Communist China,” the book says.

“A minimum of 12 squadrons of supersonic all-weather fighters are essential. We have no modern radar cover in the country. The United States Air Force personnel will have to man these fighters and radar installations while our personnel are being trained,” Nehru wrote in the letter, quoted by Riedel. In addition, he requested “two squadrons of B-47 bombers” to strike in Tibet.

Nehru also assured Kennedy that these bombers would not be used against Pakistan, but only for “resistance against the Chinese”.

The website of the US Department of State’s Office of the Historian, under the section on ‘Foreign Relations of the US, 1961-1963, South Asia’, also cites a telegram from the Embassy in India to the Department of State on November 19, 1962.

The text quoted by the State Department archival site, on the telegram to be delivered by B K Nehru, says, “The letter conveyed in telegram 1891 was the first of two letters sent by Nehru to Kennedy on November 19. The second was delivered to the White House by the Indian Ambassador on the evening of November 19. The text of that letter was transmitted to the Embassy in New Delhi in telegram 2167, November 19.”

“These letters have not been declassified by the Indian government,” the State Department’s website says.

A day earlier, the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had called India’s dependence on Chinese products a major national security concern. He also linked the failure of the ‘Make in India’ initiative to the presence of Chinese forces inside Indian territory.

While speaking on the foreign policy an INDIA bloc government would follow, Gandhi also said, “When we talk to the US, we would not send our Foreign Minister to invite our PM to his (US president’s) coronation. We will not send him three or four times… ‘please invite our PM’. Because if we had a production system and if we were working on these technologies, the American president would come here and invite the PM.”

In a statement on X, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar described Gandhi’s claim as “falsehood”, saying: “At no stage was an invitation in respect of the PM discussed. It is common knowledge that our PM does not attend such events.” He said that Gandhi’s “lies” may be intended politically but “damage the nation abroad”.