The Role of India in the Korean War

The role of India in the Korean War is relatively little known either in Korea or India. For a student of Indian Studies in Korea and a student of Korean Studies in India of our time, a study of the role of India in the Korean War might provide one more useful perspective to understand the relations between Korea and India. So, it is worthwhile to analyze the subject, especially on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War and suggest that India needs to provide its disinterested objective vision as it did during the Korean War, and help in resolving the complex issues of the Korean peninsula such as North Korea's nuclear proliferation problem etc. Even before the Korean War India played a crucial role for the independence of the whole of Korea, and after the War it provided medical assistance on humanitarian grounds instead of sending its armed force to South Korea under the UN command. Later it sent the Indian Custodian Force as the Chairman of NNRC, which initially was resented by South Korea but whose task was later appreciated by it.