Centre must declassify report on 1962 war
Given that significant portions of the Henderson Brooks-PS Bhagat report, which went into India's operational failures in the 1962 war with China, are in the public domain, it makes no sense for the Union Government to continue keeping the findings officially under wraps on the pretext of national security. With three months or so to go before a new regime takes charge, the incumbent Government is unlikely to declassify the report. It is hoped that its successor will formally make the findings public. Why should the report not be made knownIJ There is no shame in admitting to failure. Besides being the morally right to do, the gesture would lead to better preparedness, both political and military. A country that runs away from troubling history is destined to repeat it. The renewed focus on the report has come after Australia-based journalist Neville Maxwell recently loaded large parts of the secret document on the Net. In the past too, the subject has been often discussed and debated, leaving little to imagination on what the report contains. The Congress bristles at any suggestion that then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had erred gravely in handling the crisis which led to India's humiliating defeat at China's hands. Much as the party may protest, the reality is just that, and the report confirms it. Nehru's ‘Forward Policy', which led to the Army establishing posts along the border with China without having adequate forces to meet the retaliation, is one of the fundamental flaws that led to the fatal confrontation. Congress leaders may argue that Nehru had only gone by the advice of his senior-most military officers, but the fact is that he was being told what he wanted to hear from hand-picked officials. His Defence Minister Krishna Menon, then Army chief PN Thapar and Chief of General Staff and head of the IV Corps lt Gen BM Kaul together blundered and led Nehru up the garden path and convinced him that the Chinese would not forcefully retaliate.
While Nehru later admitted to his judgemental errors, he could have seen the disaster coming if he had only listened to the dissenting voices, including those from the Western Command. But the then Prime Minister was so enchanted by his Defence Minister and the cronies that called the shots in the Defence Ministry as well as in the Army headquarters that he believed they could do no wrong. To compound the errors that were being committed one after the other, was the Defence Minister's decision not to maintain the minutes of the crucial meetings he had with Army commanders. Clearly, a concerted effort was on to keep accountability to a bare minimum — just like it was done later, when successive Governments refused to declassify the report.
While the biggest villain to emerge out of the classified document is lt Gen Kaul, who gave the disastrous order to “evict the Chinese” from a position near Dhola post in the naïve belief that Beijing would take it lying down, and who made a complete mess of the command of the new corps he took charge of during the confrontation, the findings of the report — as evident from the portions in public view — also underline the ineptness of the political leadership as well as the military mandarins located (and backed by the Government) in Delhi. The report tellingly remarks: “The mistakes and lapses of the staff sitting in Delhi…are more heinous than the errors made by commanders in the field of battle”. This finds a disturbing echo in how the Union Government even today continues to handle issues of military preparedness and civil-military relations.