dear mr. deshpande, i must say you have an extremely polite way of disagreeing with others' views & i respect that very much. specifically wrt the wikipedia entry that you are referring, i have to say that its credibility is questionable due to the following facts: 1) the fact about wikipedia being a free-for-all. i do rely on this site for a lot of useful info, but i always make it point to do reference checks on them, especially critical aspects of an article. FYI, wikipedia itself contains a statement in this context which says that the chinese retreated after claiming what they thought was their land occupied by india. they cud hv advanced, but they chose not to based on diplomatic considerations. 2) i hv no reason to disbelieve your statement that the US sent an aircraft carrier at the said time. but the contention that the purpose was to pressurise teh chinese is a little hard to digest. the US had sent their carrier in 1971 as well. people perceive to this day that it was to pressurise india in their stand-off versus pakistan. but the perception has a corollary too - the action may have been to pressurise pakistan frm doing anything stupid. can any1 vouch for or against either of these viewpoints ? 3) the media of that time may not have been any different frm wat it is today. a couple of papers may have presented both sides of the view - the carrier being there to pressurise china / india. relying on perceptions which are multi-dimensional is questionable. 4) in
