New Delhi, Aug. 15 -- In April 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, leaders from newly independent Asian and African states gathered to imagine a world outside the Cold War binary. Among them were Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, two men who then spoke the language of a "third force" between the superpowers. They shook hands, smiled for the cameras, and signed on to the spirit of "Panchsheel"- five principles of peaceful coexistence.

Seven-and-a-half years later, Chinese troops poured across the Himalayas. Whatever Bandung had promised dissolved in the snow-laden battlefield of 1962.

The war redrew the map of India's foreign policy, welding a reflexive suspicion of China into the country's ...