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You really need to read up on Indian history my friend.

The first and second article you link to is Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence. At that time, India was not even a nuclear power.

The third article (about Bangladesh liberation) was not because "India was actively arming and training insurgents inside what was at the time Pakistan". Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

The issue was that Pakistan itself was an aggressor which caused massive migration crisis (similar to what is happening now in Syria). With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict. Even to this day there are hundreds of thousands of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who have settled in India (who fled from the atrocities of East Pakistan).

About Siachen conflict: What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor? I really think you have superficial understanding of India's policy towards it's neighbors.

I can counter all your points with just 1 point: During the 1971 Indo-Pak war (with Pakistan as the clear aggressor), Indian army not just defeated Pakistan, but it also marched all the way to Lahore, Pakistan and occupied parts of Lahore. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

India could have kept the occupied territory to itself (like how Pakistan has done with Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir and China with parts of Arunachal). However, it chose to honor a ceasefire agreement that was about to be signed (Note: "about to be signed". Pakistan continues to violate that ceasefire agreement to this day) and returned parts of the city of Lahore back to Pakistan. Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

We also returned 90,000 odd war prisoners to Pakistan with dignity and respect (Read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_(1971)_pris...). See a video of the surrender here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI6qymVwkVA

Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Allies after WWII. Returning prisoners of war is required by LOAC.

Allies after WWI? How about the Treaty of Versailles? India and Pakistan signed the Simla accord as equals; not an unjust treaty.

> You really need to read up on Indian history my friend.

Probably true. I need to read up on almost every topic in existence.

> Indian territory that was re-acquired after India's Independence

Please see my response to AkshayGenius at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12866503

> At that time, India was not even a nuclear power

That's not relevant to the veracity of the "was never the aggressor" claim, which was not conditioned on nuclear anything.

> Are you seriously so naive to buy into Pakistani propaganda?

It's possible that the sources cited in Wikipedia for this claim are all Pakistani propaganda, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukti_Bahini#cite_note-47 doesn't obviously look like it to me.

> With a massive influx of East Pakistani's into Indian soil, India had no choice but to get involved in the conflict.

Now we are back to deciding at what point national interest justifies military action, yes?

I'm not claiming the action was not justified, because I do not have sufficient knowledge to make that determination. But the original post I replied to wasn't talking about "justified" aggression either.

> What part of the conflict do you think India was an aggressor?

If Wikipedia is to be believed, and maybe in this case it's not, then the situation here was as follows:

1) The territory in question was disputed, and not generally permanently occupied by either side.

2) Pakistan was granting permission to mountaineering expeditions into the territory, based on various maps claiming that parts of the territory were in Pakistan as opposed to correctly showing that the border was not agreed on.

3) India responded by sending a military-sponsored (but not clear whether "military" in the sense of "armed") expedition .

4) Pakistan decided to establish a more permanent military presence in the area.

5) India found out about this plan and acted first to move its military into the area.

6) Pakistan attempted to dislodge the Indian troops.

etc. As I said, hard to decide who exactly is the aggressor here, as in most slowly-escalating disputed-area conflicts.

> I can counter all your points with just 1 point

I think you misunderstood my points. You seem to be responding to a strawman "India is an aggressive country out to get its neighbors" claim that I never made. As I said elsewhere in this thread, I think India has done a pretty good job of not being a military aggressor, and I think Pakistan has clearly been the aggressor a number of times in wars with India. I also think the claim that India was _never_ an aggressor is wrong.

> You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore_Front

That's about the 1965 war, not the 1971 one. It also says India did not occupy Lahore, though it did get quite close to doing so. But to your larger point....

> Have you ever heard of any country that returned conquered land back, on it's own volition, immediately after occupying it?

Assuming we're still talking about the 1965 war, Wikipedia's article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965 claims:

"Hostilities between the two countries ended after a United Nations mandated ceasefire was declared following diplomatic intervention by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration."

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965#Cea... talks about some of the same.

If we're talking about that situation, then the 1956 capture and return of the Gaza Strip and Sinai by Israel is a similar situation.

Going a bit further back in time, Prussia returned almost all of the territory that it controlled at the end of the Franco-Prussian war of 1872, though they extracted a monetary indemnity for doing so. Even further back, in 1814 the Sixth Coalition restored the territorial integrity of France after exiling Napoleon.

Again, India acted honorably here, and such actions are reasonably rare. They're not unique.

> Heard of any country that returned captured war prisoners (especially of that magnitude)?

Sure. At the end of World War I, millions of POWs were released by the various belligerents. Numbers from back then are not very reliable, but http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_o... lists somewhere in the 300k-400k range for just German prisoners of war held in France.

Returning prisoners of war at the end of the conflict is the _normal_ thing that happens. Not always, of course; an obvious counterexample is the Soviet Union after World War II, and to a lesser extent the other Allies at the end of that war. But nevertheless, it's the expected behavior. Obviously it's to India's credit that it did that, but it's a much lower bar than the return of territory, in my view.

How can you possibly compare the Indian armed action to regain occupied territory and her sovereignty back from the Portuguese to anything else? It was the only time India had to resort to military action, and it was shortly after her independence.

> How can you possibly compare the Indian armed action to regain occupied territory and her sovereignty back from the Portuguese to anything else?

Quite easily. The claim was that India was never the aggressor, not that all the aggressions were justified by some extenuating circumstance or national interest or whatnot. The "never the aggressor" claim clearly doesn't hold for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Portuguese_India. I'm not saying that India shouldn't have done it, note, just that India has in fact used military aggression when it felt its national interests warrant it, which is perfectly normal for nation-states.

We can have a long discussion about whether we expect such situations, where national interests are judged to warrant military aggression, to arise in the future. But that's a discussion that should be had, not dismissed by appealing to untrue claims about history.

> It was the only time India had to resort to military action

Did you stop reading halfway though my comment?

Seriously, I think India has done a quite good job, as nation-states go, at not attacking its neighbors. But claiming things like "it was the only time India had to resort to military action" just doesn't look like it's supported by the facts to me. "One of the few times", yes.

By this definition is Ukraine the aggressor in eastern Ukraine?

By which definition? The "you could argue" definition that I don't agree with? Or my "personally, I would consider" definition?

By the latter, if country A is arming/training/providing insurgents in country B with no previous attacks by B on A, then A is the aggressor. So in the eastern Ukraine case Russia would be the aggressor.

How do you classify overt and covert military activity by a nation whose territory has been annexed towards the nation that did the annexation? Is it an act of aggression?

Given no more information than that, I would say the annexation was the act of aggression and the action in response is defense.

In fact, annexing another country's territory without any provocation is pretty much the definition of "a war of aggression".

Thanks for clarifying your points.

I understand what you're saying, but I feel the "aggressor" is the party that first commits an unwarranted action. India was in the process of decolonization and the Portuguese refused to leave, despite prior repeated non-violent requests. If the cops are called on an individual for trespassing, would you call the cops the aggressor for trying to remove the individual?

> but I feel the "aggressor" is the party that first commits an unwarranted action

That right there is a problem at the heart of the concept of "aggressor": what time point do we pick as the baseline such that actions that lead to changes after that are aggression but actions before that are the status quo?

This played out in Europe with Alsace-Lorraine, where the Germans felt that the French took it away from them in 1919, while the French felt that the Germans took it away from them in 1871 and they just recovered it in 1919. Oh, but the Germans felt like the French had taken that territory away from them in the 17th and 18th century...

This is obviously a situation that is somewhat different from that of the Portuguese possessions in India. But it highlights the fact that "unwarranted" can be hard to define objectively. In practice, it tends to get defined by the victors writing the history books, though nowadays it can get decided by self-determination referenda and _then_ the victors (possibly of the referendum, possibly of resulting armed conflicts) writing history books.

From our point of view at the beginning of the 21st century, the Portuguese possession of Goa in the mid-20th was unwarranted but the British possession of the Falklands right now is... well, depends on whom you ask, but generally considered warranted. How much of that is because the population of the Falklands is happy being British subjects, and how much is because the British won the Falklands War? I wish I knew. :(

> If the cops are called on an individual for trespassing, would you call the cops the aggressor for trying to remove the individual?

No, I would not. But this isn't a perfect analogy either. I think it would be _very_ apt as an analogy if India had gotten a UN resolution that the Portuguese need to leave; even more so if UN security forces then threw the Portuguese out. Yes, I realize that this was not realistic at the time, for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was the US explicitly saying it would veto any such resolution, if I read the history correctly.

But as it was, the situation is more akin to the owner of the property being trespassed on seeing that the courts and the police won't help him out and personally kicking the trespasser off the property. Would that be described as "aggression"? It starts to depend on your biases, especially if the trespasser had been there for a while. This last is why the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession exists in English common law, so arguments over squatting and tresspassing won't continue ad infinitum. To some extent this gets applied in the international arena. Of course it doesn't always; then you get wars over territorial changes that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago; no shortage of those in recent history.

Anyway, at the time, there were a number of countries that condemned the Indian military action, including some which in principle supported the idea that the Portuguese possessions in India should become part of India. That is, they felt that the ends were good, but that the means were in fact military aggression and needed to be called out as such. We could try to fit that sort of dynamic into the individual trespasser being removed scenario; that would involve there being a dispute about whether the trespasser was in fact now more like a squatter, as well as dispute about whether forceful removal now, as opposed to peaceful removal, or at least removal by police, after some period of time gaining support for the removal was the better course of action...

Where all that leaves me personally is that I consider violent attacks on a previously broadly accepted status quo as "aggression" but I then have to allow that some "aggression" must be morally acceptable when the status quo either was unjust or has become unjust and no other solutions are available. Unfortunately, "unjust" is not an objective judgement either. :(

The situation with the Portuguese possessions falls into the "has become unjust" bucket for me, assuming the population of those areas wanted the Portuguese out. The Portuguese did not put this to a vote at the time, which is somewhat telling; I'm willing to assume based on time period and general zeitgeist that in fact the population did want them out.

Of course I would be happier to assume that sort of thing if I didn't know about counterexamples like the Falklands and Gibraltar. :( But as a point of comparison, Gibraltar _did_ have a vote on the matter in 1967, which is a pretty similar timeframe; presumably the Portuguese didn't put things to a vote because they were fairly certain they would lose.

> what time point do we pick as the baseline such that actions that lead to changes after that are aggression but actions before that are the status quo?

Not just the point in time, there's also the level of aggression. Many wars have a set of ever-increasing nonmilitary conflicts leading up to them. If you're not defining aggression as a concrete military action, you have to choose a baseline for this too.

If you're allowing governmental-agression-that-may-incite-war to be counted as a "first aggression", then India is doing this right now in Kashmir. Yes, I know, that situation is more complex (and I'd prefer not to discuss it online; there's a lot of nuance lost and it's frustrating), but there are similarities in the situation.

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Anyway, the definition of "aggression" to be used in this context depends on the context of the original statement, which was the argument that India is less likely to be a security threat because it has never been the aggressor. In this context, it is about military aggression, the argument being that a country more likely to escalate a civil issue to war is more likely to escalate to nukes in this modern age. To be clear, I don't feel that India is at all likely to escalate to nukes, due to various other reasons (including possibly personal bias). But I don't think that "India was never the first aggressor" is a valid argument in support of that.

So, would you count the civil wars and the war of independance as wars in which USA was the first aggressor? Oh nvm, that won't make a dent to the size of that list.

> would you count the civil wars and the war of independance as wars in which USA was the first aggressor?

Civil wars are hard to classify in terms of "who is the aggressor", but none of my examples were civil wars.

The American Revolution can plausibly be argued to be a US aggression, but it doesn't really match any of my examples either.

Of course I would never make the totally daft claim that the US was never the aggressor in a military action, since that claim is quite obviously and demonstrably false.

So, India fighting to regain parts of the remaining colonial territories cannot be matched to the war of Independence?

Of course I never claimed you did, I just made a clever remark.

> India fighting to regain parts of the remaining colonial territories cannot be matched to the war of Independence?

It's a hard call. For example, is it more of an analogue for the fighting in New York, or more of an analogue for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Quebec_(1775) ? Would your answer be different if the Continental Army had managed to hold on to Quebec and it had become part of the United States?

Or, given the time lags involved in both cases, is it more like the US invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, which I view as a US war of aggression? Again, that invasion failed, but had it succeeded would that make it less a war of aggression?

Note that there is a significant difference here in that the US that was invading Canada in 1812 had no reasonable claim along the lines "we are all one polity that was just colonized by different people and should be a single state" to justify its attempt to annex part of Canada. But that same issue applies to the rest of the war of independence too.

As a native of Goa, my forefathers fought very hard against the colonizing Portuguese. I have lost countless relatives to the oppressive Portuguese rules. Goa was part of India always.