# Nehru was the architect of Article 370, with which he burdened India to placate a hurt Sheikh Abdullah. # The Chinese occupation of Tibet should have forced a reassessment of the threat to India. After they enforced their suzerainty on Tibet in 1951, the threat deserved greater attention. But when General K M Cariappa met Nehru to discuss the defence of the North East Frontier Agency, he was bluntly told to mind only Kashmir and Pakistan as his concerns for defence and leave China to the politicians and the diplomats.
As Lieutenant General S P P Thorat recounts in his autobiography 'From Reveille to Retreat', "When [in 1959] I, as GoC-in-C Eastern Command, met Menon in Delhi, I opened the subject [of defence against the Chinese] with him. In his usually sarcastic style he said that there would be no war between India and China and [if there was] he was quite capable of fighting it himself at the diplomatic level." # Nehru learnt no lessons from the war in Kashmir. Practicality always took a back seat in his mind, which was dominated by idealism. He went on emotionally in his rhetoric of 'Hindi Chini bhai bhai', all the while considering himself a superior international statesman and India an elder brother of China.