Veteran Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has said he decided to release a classified 1962 Sino-Indian war report to rid Indian opinion of the “induced delusion” that India was the “victim of an unprovoked surprise Chinese aggression”.
Parts of the still-classified Henderson Brooks Report (HBR), accessed by Maxwell, have found serious faults with Jawaharlal Nehru’s Forward Policy and the Indian Army for carrying it out without the necessary wherewithal.
The report proves that talk about China’s “unprovoked aggression” is “utterly false” and that India was the aggressor in 1962, Maxwell said in an interview to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.“But of course it’s (HBR) not spelled out in those terms, the political conclusion is buried in dense military jargon, written by soldiers for soldiers, the report is hard reading for unversed civilians,” he said.
To a question what he hopes to achieve by revealing HBR, Maxwell said: “I hope to achieve what I have been trying to do for nearly 50 years! To rid Indian opinion of the induced delusion that in 1962 India was the victim of an unprovoked surprise Chinese aggression, to make people in India see that the truth was that it was mistakes by the Indian Government, specifically Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that forced the war on China.He said his putting the report online deprives the Government of India “the excuse they’ve used to keep it secret, the false claim that it was to preserve national security”.