Talk:Sino-Indian War

message: Looking at the Mohan Gurswamy article again, which has been used here for all kinds of things, I find this rather surprising passage:
Even lay readers know that the MacDonald line goes beyond the Lanak La pass whereas the "Line of Actual Control" is at the Kongka Pass. It seems that this man does not really know his head from his tail. I am tagging all citations to his article as unreliable. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 21:50, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, Guruswamy's writings, especially his works hosted on Rediff, have several errors and inconsistencies. The Discoverer (talk) 07:39, 20 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  And, be aware this his book, coauthored with Daulet Singh and published by something called "Viva Books", has very much the same problems. And, another book by some one called "Anna Orton" (appears to be a fake name) has plagiarised large parts of it. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 11:48, 20 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Both of those book publishers, Viva and Epitome, are vanity press and can not be considered reliable sources, per WP:RSSELF. GA-RT-22 (talk) 17:41, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

text: Please do. Mohan Guruswamy cites are meant to be replaced. Even though this particular citation is actually harmless, there are plenty of others that are POV-ridden. I wouldn't him being entirely banished from this page. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 01:47, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mohan Guruswamy 

message: So I recently updated the section about Kongka Pass incident, without knowing there was this discussion here. In the write up, I tried to stay away from any controversial stuff (where's the border is/was, who shot first, etc), focused mostly on the facts on the ground, and mainly only used Indian sources -- the Indian published diplomatic white paper (memos between the 2 countries) & special edition of Indian Police Journal on the Police Memorial. Any objections to me just replacing Mohan cite for the sentence about Kongka camp incident? --Voidvector (talk) 00:28, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Please do. Mohan Guruswamy cites are meant to be replaced. Even though this particular citation is actually harmless, there are plenty of others that are POV-ridden. I wouldn't him being entirely banished from this page. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 01:47, 8 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kongka sentence 

message: Another heavily used source (some 52 times) is a paper/thesis by James Bernard Calvin, at the US Marine Corp Staff College. Admittedly, this is a good piece of work and covers a lot of the detail of the hostilities. However it is student research. Even if we deem it to be equivalent to a PhD thesis, as per WP:SCHOLARSHIP, it should be used cautiously. Statements like "According to James Bernard Calvin" have no place here. If the issue calls for judgement, a student's judgement cannot be taken as authentic or encyclopaedic. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:23, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: this is an article on military history and Calvin is a professional soldier, which is the expertise the other authors lack. He is writing at a major research center for military studies. Note that university history departments rarely have faculty who specialize in military history. Rjensen (talk) 08:41, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  James Bernard Calvin 

message: Used extensively for a total of 17 times to support mostly otherwise unsourced and somewhat controversial claims. I hardly think that a government source from one of the belligerents is appropriate for an article such like this. Similarly, this applies to the website of Chushi Gangdruk, which was an Indian backed Tibetian militant group.
Also quoted throughout the article are articles from various Indian newspapers, including Times of India, which is known to publish unverified news stories, paid news and right wing conspiracy theories. Given the pervasiveness in the article, India's low press freedom as well as a history of publishing unverified erroneous news, I believe that they should be replaced by alternate scholarly sources, or a review of articles conducted. Dark-World25 (talk) 00:48, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India and Indian media 

message: John Garver's book chapter called "China's decision for war with India" (2006) has been cited over 30 times on this page. In addition to this substantial work, he has written a book called Protracted Contest (2011), which is supposed to be about Sino-Indian rivalry, and another book called China's Quest (2015). Garver works in International Relations with special expertise in China's foreign policy .
His writings seem to be based mostly on Chinese sources, which are often not even cited, and the quality of these materials is questionable. Even top strategic experts in China rarely know what their government has actually claimed or done, and the government sources themselves just put out self-serving propaganda. One would expect a scholar relying on such materials to critically evaluate the sources and information which, in my view, Garver does not do. Here are some examples:
* In China's Quest, I notice the statements:  It is news to me that China ever regarded Aksai Chin as part of Tibet. It is officially marked as part of Xinjiang. (The difference matters, because we need to know which history is being used as the basis for the claim.)
* In China's decision for war, we see the statement:  The last clause gives the appearance that Garver evaluated the claim and found it to be accurate. No explanation can be found as to how he arrived at this conclusion.
: He is squarely contradicted by other sources. For instance, Hoffmann's India and the China Crisis states:  The Forward Policy was designed to forestall this possibility. In fact, no mention of the "1960 claim line" or its antecedent, the "1956 claim line", can be found in any of Garver's writings. He only knows of one "claim line". His Protracted Contest has a chapter called "The Territorial Dispute" without a single map of the contested border. This is ironic, because Hoffmann's book (as well Dorothy Woodman and even Neville Maxwell) has numerous maps, practically all of which document the various claim lines. Garver seems oblivious of all such subtleties.
: Garver knows that India disagreed with the claim. He writes:  But he seems disinterested in finding out what the truth is. (He cites Hoffmann off and on, but there is no evidence that he has processed his information.)
: To sum up, the Chinese claimed that the Indians were capturing their territory; the Indians claimed that they were capturing empty area. Garver, without explanation, sided with the Chinese claim. He is oblivious of other scholars who actually studied the issue.
* The passage that I found the most troublesome is this one (Protracted Contest, p.83): 
: This makes two strong historical claims, with absolutely no evidence and no citations. (The Chinese routinely make these same claims, again with no evidence.) Strangely, Garver himself gave the accurate route of the Dzungars on pp. 25-26, though he doesn't seem to realize that it is a different route that is well to the east of (what we now call) Aksai Chin.  The 1951 PLA cavalry also followed a similar route. They reached a place called Zhama Mangbao (Shenchen/Xianqian), where most of them perished due to some disease.Do you know this epic expedition?, inf.news, retrieved 15 November 2022.
In summary, I think Garver can at best be used to discuss China's foreign policy. He is unreliable for the Indian side of the dispute, and even more so for geographical and historical matters. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:12, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  John W. Garver 

message: What I do not understand is why there is no mention of the USAF squadron of C-130s with support personnel that was sent to New Delhi in November 1962 and stayed in India for several months is not mentioned. I was there, operating out of a hangar on the Military side of Palam Airdrome seven days a week from sometime in November until the early part of January '63. We made flights into Jammu and Kashmir and Leh in the Ladakh region and occasionally out to Assam.
I read things in the Wiki discussion saying that President Kennedy was to involved with the Cuban missile crisis to get involved with India on this matter but I strongly doubt that our division commander took it upon himself to rotate squadrons on aircraft to India for several months. Alas, trying to sort this out myself on Wikipedia is too complicated, especially as it seems there are people in India that don't want to include U.S. help in flying troops and supplies into the mountains and evacuating wounded. Sgt Toot (talk) 23:51, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Indo-Sino War 1962 

message: Isn't "Sino-Indian War" a bit pro-Chinese term? For Chinese conflicts, the prefix Sino- is used while for Indian conflicts, the suffix Indo-. I would propose that this article be moved to China–India War as a neutral title. Ayubist (talk) 2:01, 11 July 2023
:Per WP:AT, we use the common name. Cinderella157 (talk) 02:11, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name of the article 

message: According to the Indian general Niranjan Prasad, commander of 4 Division, the war began when General Kaul had begun the Indian assault on October 10. The Chinese wasn't going to wait to be further attacked and allow the Indians to build up strength for another assault. So that's when they did a preemptive charge but after that event. But if the Indians had done an assault first on October 10, that was repelled back, wouldn't October 10 technically be the correct start date of the war?
 We at the front knew that since Nehru had said he was going to attack, the Chinese were certainly not going to wait to be attacked” — and of course they didn’t. That’s how the war began. The Chinese attack was both reactive, in that General Kaul had begun the Indian assault on October 10</B>, and pre-emptive because after that failure the Indian drive had been suspended to build up strength for a resumed attackRaulgu (talk) 08:15, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Date war started?