A taste of censorship during 1962 war

IN October 1962, I was studying in Class III in my village school. My father was in the Army. With the outbreak of tensions at the India-China border, 9 Punjab Regiment was moved from Secunderabad to Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, then called NEFA (North East Frontier Agency). My family became anxious on learning that my father had been sent to the war zone.

In those days, the only source of news in the village was a panchayat radio. The antenna was a wire mesh tied and spread between poles on the rooftop. The speaker was strapped on a long bamboo pole to make the sound audible to as many listeners as possible. As there was no supply of electricity in our area, the radio operated on a dry battery for the morning and evening news.

My family would listen to the war updates as we had hardly received any letter from my father in recent weeks. The post office was 3 km away in the adjoining village. The postman would visit our village only when he had letters to deliver. My mother wanted me to go to the post office daily after school. The foot track to that village was narrow and mostly remained secluded. There was tall and dense vegetation all along. After school, I would run to the post office.

Most of the times, the postman would give a dejected look from a distance. Once in a while, there was a letter for me. I would immediately open it and try to read it, but found many lines blackened and the text unreadable. I would ask the postman why some lines had been blackened; he would tell me that the letter had been censored by the Army. Any war-related information considered sensitive by the military authorities was blackened; this process was called censorship. That is how I, a village lad, learnt the meaning of ‘censor’. I would run back home with a sense of achievement. The family would feel elated on getting some news about my father.

My grandfather, who served in the British Indian Army, would celebrate with drinks in the evening. All these incidents got etched in my memory. I got obsessed with the 1962 war and wanted to know more about it. I read The Untold Story by Lt Gen BM Kaul while I was studying in Class XII. While reading it, I would try to corroborate its contents with what my father had told me. Later, during my career in the CRPF, I read Himalayan Blunder by Brig JP Dalvi, India’s China War by Neville Maxwell and 1962: The War That Wasn’t by Shiv Kunal Verma.

I had long discussions with my dad, who would aptly sum up the reasons for India’s defeat — unpreparedness, an inadequate and outdated weapon system, troops ill-equipped for the severe winter, a lack of road infrastructure and, most importantly, the failure of the military and political leadership.