Neville Maxwell’s decision to put portions of the Henderson Brooks report on the internet, 44 years after he came out with his book on the war titled India’s China War, owed to his feeling that the Indian Government is not keen to make the report public.
He also makes it clear the report nowhere touches on issues that could have current strategic or tactical relevance, an assertion that flies in the face of the Government which has time and again been taking the same pretext in not making it public.
While the Brooks report is still classified, Maxwell claims to have gained access to it while writing his book, which hit stands in 1970. Now 88, Maxwell covered the 1962 war for some British newspapers and the general perception is that many portions in his book are authentic parts from the Henderson Brooks report.
He also mentioned in February this year that those who gave him access to the Henderson Brooks report while researching study of the Sino-Indian border dispute laid down no conditions as to “how I should use it”.
“That they would remain anonymous went without saying, an implicit condition I will always observe, otherwise how the material used was left to my judgement. I decided that while I would quote freely from the Report, thus revealing that I had had access to it (and indeed had a copy), I would neither proclaim nor deny that fact; and my assumption was that the gist of the report having been published in 1970 in the detailed account of the Army’s debacle given in my India’s China War, the Indian Government would release it after a decent interval,” he said.
Maxwell then went on to say the passing of years showed that assumption to have been mistaken and “left me in a quandary. I did not have to rely on memory to tell the falsity of the Government’s assertion that keeping the Report secret was necessary for reasons of national security, I had taken a copy and the text nowhere touches on issues that could have current strategic or tactical relevance. The reasons for the long-term withholding of the report must be political, indeed probably partisan, perhaps, even familial.
While I kept the Report to myself I was therefore complicit in a continuing cover-up.” “As I see it now I have no option but, rather than leave the dilemma to my heirs, to put the report on the internet myself,” he said. Interestingly, he also claims he had given the report to three Indian editors, who unanimously decided not to publish it.
Meanwhile, the lone copy of the report submitted to the government by Brooks, an Englishman who continued to serve in the Indian Army till he retired as lt General, and then Brigadier PS Bhagat, remains under lock and key in the Defence Secretary’s room at the heavily guarded South Block.
The Defence Secretary is also not allowed to take the report home and has to go through it in his office, sources said here, adding all the Defence Secretaries have to read it. Once the top official has finished the report, he hands it over to the security officials who in turn lock it in a specially made cupboard and sources said it is double locked.