alternatehistory.com

As the fourth year of the Great Asian War was drawing close, anyone who wasn't aware that India was going to end up on the losing side was either dead or too exposed to Indian propaganda. Yes, even the Indian Unitarian Party with Amrit Ahuya at the top were aware that any of their actions from this point onward will only be biding time, slowing the US down, worsen their casualties, but the hope of turning this around, pushing the Westerners to the sea, defeating the Chinese invasion, and eliminating the rebellions in Central Asia was a nigh unachievable probability. Everything would have to go perfect for the Unitarians from this point onward - and the first lesson of life is always "don't expect everything to go perfect"...

But, then an obvious solution may pop into one's head. What about a truce? After all, it's not like the US had not suffered a lot from the war as well. All of Southern China has been turned into rubble, the Westerners are losing hundreds of thousands far from their homeland, and it's debatable if their voter bases will endure this loss for long... If India were to play their cards right, maybe it was possible to negotiate a truce - it would probably involve losing all of their conquered territory and maybe a partial regime change, but it was still a preferable outcome, maybe?.. The problem was that Amrit Ahuya, fearing that any sort of negotiate truce will result in his removal and war crimes trial, had no plans to concede, and he was supported by the radical and conservative wings of the party, as well as many high-ranking generals, who had similar concerns. Peaceful negotiations in Lucknow were not going to cut it and even resulted in the arrest of a few moderate politicians for "weakening morale", so it was up to the Moderate wing of the Party, now led by former Director-General of the Aankhein Prakash Naidu, to resort to the hard option - a coup attempt.

The 1959 Indian coup attempt, sometimes known as "Bloody Sunday", was somewhat similar to the coup which took down the Revivalist regime in Lithuania, in that it was composed of an assassination plan to behead the current government and then have the conspirators take over the government to enact whatever they plan the future of the country be - it even had a war hero endorse the conspiracy, in India's case this being Bajirao Singham, - but it also had a few differences. For on, it was completely unrelated to the weak and disjointed anti-Unitarian dissent in India, and was rather solely the brainchild of the moderates in the Unitarian Party. Second, the Bloody Sunday coup was planned far more sloppily planned and executed, as the conspirators only had about two weeks to plan for this venture. Despite this, and far from everything being accounted for by that date, on November 21st, 1959, the coup attempt began to take charge. Rebellious military units began to surround Lucknow, a prepared "provisional government" with Singham and Naidu in charge arrived to the outskirts of the city, while a trained group of Aankhein assassins traveled to the depths of the capital to take out Amrit Ahuya and as many of his closest allies as possible.

However, loyalists within the Aankhein relayed the information about this assassination attempt to the Netaji hours before it began to take shape, while almost no soldiers in the Lucknow garrison (purposefully as well fed and equipped as possible to maintain loyalty) switched sides, turning the assassination attempt into a brief shootout, killing the three assassins, six guards and wounding Ahuya in the shoulder, while Lucknow itself became a warzone for hours. Indians clashing with Indians, the rebels trying to break towards the city's Sengupta station and postal office - and they succeeded, for half an hour, even successfully broadcasting a message to the city that the previous, "suicidal" government has been overthrown and a provisional government with the immediate goal of seeking an armistice has been formed. However, by then, it was too late to salvage the situation - reinforcements for the loyalists flowed into the city, while the rebels could not respond in kind. The Lucknow Sengupta Station was liberated and a new message informed the populace that stability has been restored in the city and the traitors have been crushed, most of the city blocks were retaken, and fearing capture, the planned provisional government dispersed, fleeing as far from Lucknow as possible. A hunt for the conspirators across the nation began - only a few minor participants successfully reached Arabia, the US front lines or Central Asia, the rest, including both Naidu and Singham, were captured in rural India and sentenced to death. However, the damage of the blow to the government's legitimacy could not be healed.

The late months of 1959, sometimes referred to as the Indian Time of Troubles, was a civil war in all but name. Despite heavy and immediate suppression of information by the Ahuya government, the news about the anti-war coup attempt and the old government's commitment to fighting until the very end spread across the underground like wildfire. This blow to stability coincided with what was perhaps one of the worst famines in Indian history - after a long time enduring the war, the fragile food system of the overpopulated Ganges basin collapsed in what ended up known as the "Doji bara", or the "Skull famine". The destroyed infrastructure of India meant that there was no way for the Unitarian government to quickly distribute food and resources to affected areas, and especially not to the many villages across Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and other areas, where people often died on the roads, dotting the lands with nobody left to scoop them up. Accompanying epidemics and disease were just as deadly as the hunger itself. People demanded answers and solutions, immediately, and the ongoing war was one of the few things they could lash out. Thousands of protesters took into streets in almost all towns across the nation, entire towns would stop working to protest cut wages and dropping living standards, and even those who remained in work would often have to work with little resources at hand - how are you going to bring coal or iron ore when you can barely send a single train? The situation was not much better in the front - entire divisions would desert or disperse, tired of the endless, meatgrinder war. The Indian government held no tolerance for these protests, and resorted to violence - so, in response, protesters, often armed by remnants of the anti-war conspiracy or raiding unguarded weapon stocks, would respond in kind. The biggest example of this was perhaps the city of Varanasi, which ended up completely seized by bands of Hindu extremists in open war against the Unitarian government, and held it for weeks - it took aerial bombardment and an entire landship division to put the rebellion down. Persia, Afghanistan and Baluchistan were fully lost causes - Unitarian officials and soldiers were fleeing those regions in mass to not be lynched or executed by the rebellions taking place.

Perhaps India would have managed to salvage the situation, if they also weren't fighting two fronts at once. Especially when the US was fully aware that this was the time to strike.


China's new military offensive, Operation Trident, had more problems with how to effectively travel from town to town as quickly as possible than with how to defeat the Indian forces before them. The Indians were more busy fighting each other, retreating, receiving no reinforcements and equipment or simply putting down their weapons and surrendering on sight - the situation in Southeast Asia was so critical that the many independence movements and guerrilla organizations sprawling across it could come out of the shadows of the jungle to start retaking their nations, before the Chinese even arrive, one town at a time. Operation Trident, as one might be able to tell from the name, was built upon three invasion spearheads, each one corresponding with a river valley to maximize the impact of the invasion, and leave the jungles and mountains to the resistance forces - these were the Irrawady, the Chao Phraya and the Mekong. Encirclements were planned in the pre-war territory of Lan Xang, Vietnam and Burma, and Yunnan was planned as the source of the operation. Additional air and land reserves were brought to the front to replace the losses taken during Operation Thunderbolt earlier in the year.

The Operation began on November 24th, three days after Bloody Sunday in Lucknow, and was met with immediate success. Chinese landships and hardened divisions spilled into Southeast Asia, defeating the Indian front line units in swift pitched battles and opening a number of gaps in the enemy lines, allowing the mobile divisions to easily encircle the rest, force out surrenders or simply send them fleeing. To many, this was the swan's song of 1940s lightning warfare. To avoid ending up in US hands by the time this is over, Unitarian officials, General-Overseers and anyone else scared of being lynched by angry Indochinese or sent to a war crimes court after the end of the war, fled to mainland India in mass. However, this flight suddenly turned a lot more difficult when on the second week of December, the Chinese broke through Indian, Khmer and Thai collaborator lines in the Battle of Lopburi, paving the way for the 2nd Landship Corps to march towards Ayutthaya itself and thus split the Commonwealth positions in the region in half. The capital of the Kingdom of Ayutthaya fell on December 18th, and in front of the rubble which used to be the Royal Palace, General Dong Zhenya shook hands with a one-armed, scarred Thaksin Thammasak, now the not just the leader of a few thousand rebels, but of a mass popular Thai uprising against the Unitarian regime. The rest of December and the first weeks of January were marked by fierce fighting in Burma and southeastern Indochina - here, the Indians and their allies, mostly their allies, were able to mount a stiff defense against the rapidly advancing, but exhausted Chinese. Now that the front has reached the homelands of the Commonwealth's puppet nations, it was the Unitarians which were on the defensive, and this gave a slight boost to the morale of the people in Burma and the Mekong Union. Still, the latter capitulated on January 15th and the former on the 19th. Bengal was about to be the next.

Success followed the Chinese in the sea as well. The three year long Battle of the South China Sea drew to a combination, as the mounting advantages in favor of the Shun navy simply overwhelmed their Indian opponents. The loss of many naval bases in Indochina, the cutoff of the Malacca Peninsula from the rest of the Indian hegemony thanks to Operation Trident, a constant Allied advantage in air superiority, the Western Allies joining the fight in their navies, all meant that after the last skirmishes in the Gulf of Thailand on November of 1959, the last remnants of the Indian Navy, now composed of only a few cruisers and a handful of auxiliary ships, was forced to retreat back to mainland India. Both sides could recognize that this was huge. For one, the Indian connection to Oceania and Aceh was severed for good - and while the former had only been tenuously supported by the Indians throughout the course of the war and thus did not feel much impact, it was much more trouble to the latter, who was reliant on Indian divisions, equipment and funding to even be able to stand a change against Nusantara by itself. Already, the Chinese were scouting out potential landing spots on Borneo and Sumatra, although defeating Aceh was only secondary importance to them when India was still alive and kicking.


Bajirao Singham's unexpected departure to Lucknow and subsequent failed coup attempt, as well as the beginning of the Indian Time of Troubles, sowed trouble and chaos in the Indian lines in the Deccan, and the Western members of the US used this to their advantage. Now with a new supreme land commander, Lithuanian general Henrikas Radauskas, replacing the duet of Franz Berlinger and Damien Robillard, who presided over Spring Thaw and subsequent operations, on September of 1959. Radauskas was a rare example of a Lithuanian general who did not serve as an officer in the Revivalist army - he only became one after the collapse of the totalitarian regime and rose in ranks as a non-political alternative to the many former militarists and Revivalists running around. In the field, he did not differ much from his predecessors when regarding tactics or strategic choices, but as an echo of the events taking place in Southeast Asia, he presented the plan to cover as much ground as possible before India is able to recover or, God forbid, use its nuclear arsenal. After some basic preparations, equipment hoarding and additional supplies brought in through Mogadishu, the Allies began Operation Breakstorm on mid November, in the form of a vast, all-front offensive.

However, the Westerners did not reach such absolute victories as their Eastern counterparts. This was because while India could realistically sacrifice Southeast Asia and keep going regardless, allowing the US to advance through the Deccan and seize core Indian territory was unacceptable. All available loyal reserves which were not busy stamping out dissent or soldier mutinies were sent to the South to stop or at least delay the Western advance - leading to a bunch of battles across Hydebarad, Orissa and Maharashtra, dragging out for weeks and draining the life and momentum from both sides. However, this turned out to be too little too late, and by late January of 1960, Western soldiers marched across the city of Nagpur, the capital of the province of Maharashtra, among the largest in India, and dubbed by Radauskas as "the gate to the Ganges River Valley". Not far was left until Lucknow.

It appeared that the Unified Indian State would be lucky to survive more than a year from here.