The 1962 Albatross

A day after the Henderson Brooks Report on the Indo-China war is made public, a tell-all website is blocked. What makes India so nervous about examining Nehru?

So many years after the 1962 defeat to China, the war continues to rankle and wound India. In the history of modern India, illuminated with victories over Pakistan and involvement in Bangladesh, the 1962 rout has come to be remembered as its most inglorious chapter. It is perhaps for this reason that those interested have sought to keep the role of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru away from scrutiny— to keep away from any serious examination or possible injury the image of a man Indians are often taught is India’s greatest political statesman.

This is most evident with the fate of the 1963 Henderson Brooks report, authored by two Indian Army officers, Lieutenant General TB Henderson Brooks and Brigadier PS Bhagat, part of which was leaked recently. The report, supposed to review what led to the defeat, moved beyond its mandate of looking at military preparedness to eventually blame the political leadership. The report has since been classified. Periodically, demands to make the report public have been made, unsuccessfully. In April 2010, Defence Minister AK Antony refused to entertain such pleas when he told the Lok Sabha, “Based on an internal study by the Indian Army, the contents are not only extremely sensitive but are of current operational value.”

Officially, it is believed that only two copies of the 1963 report exist, one with the office of the Defence secretary, and the other in the Indian Army’s Military Operations Directorate. It has, however, been rumoured that a former Times journalist, Neville Maxwell, had a third copy of the report, since he quoted from it in his 1970 book, India’s China War. A few days ago, Maxwell put up a large section of the report on his website. It is perhaps not surprising that since the report was made public, the website has been blocked.

There has been such fear over examining Nehru’s role in the defeat that even after the report was made available to media houses, many years after the event, nobody dared touch it. While uploading parts of the report, Maxwell mentioned how in 2002, he approached and made available the report to the editors of five top Indian publications, who refused to publish it. The editors told him that the Government would turn its rage upon the publishers. He wrote, ‘The reasons for long-term withholding of 1962 war report must be political, probably partisan & perhaps familial.’

What is it that makes the report so sensitive? Among other things, the report faults Nehru’s Forward Policy, which came into existence a year before the war. According to the report, while this Policy in itself was desirable, the country was militarily in no position to implement it.

The Policy was a response to China’s patrolling along the McMahon Line and intermittently entering parts of India. Under this policy, India started creating outposts behind Chinese troops who had moved into Indian territory so as to cut off their supplies. In all, 43 of 60 such outposts were set up to the north of the McMahon Line. This made China see red.

For all his greatness as a statesman, Nehru practised a disastrous foreign policy with China, just as he had with Tibet earlier.

At first, he did not believe Beijing would take over Tibet—a country with which India shared a long border and which had accepted the McMohan Line—and when it did, despite sound entreaties to intervene, he did not believe Beijing would have a border row, and later a war, with India.

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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