HENDERSON BROOK REPORT

Lessons from the Gate of Hell

From inside India’s western-most outpost, in that bleak winter of 1962, troops would have stared out across the sheet of ice at the shattered ruins of their retreating army, and at their the foes beyond. Murgo, it was called by the Yarkandi tribesmen who guided caravans across the great Karakoram pass, the Gate of Hell. The attack they must have feared never came. Chinese troops reached the line they claimed to be their border, just east of Murgo — and then stopped. For two generations since, soldiers have faced each other, prepared to kill on the roof of the world.

The online release this month of the first volume of the most closely-held 1962 war secret, Lieutenant General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier Premindra Bhagat’s searing indictment of the conduct of operations, has stoked deep fears Indians have nursed for over fifty years.

For critics of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, on the right of Indian politics, the release of the Henderson Brooks report has been an occasion to call for a more muscular military policy — holding him responsible for eviscerating India’s armed forces in the build-up to the defeat. Every historical text, though, has a context, and the context to this one shows that this would be precisely the wrong lesson to draw.

Scapegoating Nehru

The notion that that Mr. Nehru allowed the Indian military to slowly degenerate towards its catastrophic defeat in 1962 is an article of faith for many commentators on the war. Like much faith, though, it sits ill with fact. From 1947 to 1962, the Army expanded from 280,000 to 5,50,000, the doyen of Indian security studies K. Subrahmanyam pointed out in a 1970 paper. Expenditure on defence rose from Rs. 190.15 crore in 1951-1952 to Rs. 320.34 crore in 1961-1962 despite the enormous financial constraints that a fragile, just-born nation faced.

The Army, by the eve of the 1962 war, had acquired a division of state-of-the-art Centurion tanks and two regiments of AMX-13 light tanks which fought at Kameng against Chinese troops who had none, but could not prevent the routing of Indian troops. The Air Force bought six squadrons of Hunter fighter-bombers, two squadrons of Ouragons, and two of Gnat interceptors—all equipment far superior to anything flown by their adversary. The Navy had acquired an aircraft carrier, three destroyers, and eleven spanking new frigates.

Mr. Nehru might indeed, as critics contend, been an instinctive dove, but if this is true, the record suggests he also believed in keeping his talons sharp. Yet, India lost the war. “So long as we cling to these myths to explain away the debacle,”Mr. Subrahmanyam concluded, “the reasons for the debacle will not be adequately investigated and correct lessons drawn.”

The real problem wasn’t that India didn’t have an Army that could fight. It was that it ended up fighting the wrong kind of war, with consequences even the best-resourced militaries have faced.

Lessons to be learnt

So what went wrong? In 1957, China completed driving a road across the Aksai Chin plains, linking Xinjiang and Tibet. Land of little value now became a critical strategic asset for China. Following the 1959 revolt in Tibet, Chinese fears that India was aiding rebels added to tensions. Indian patrols headed to the Aksai Chin were detained, and on one occasion, fired at. In India’s North-East Frontier Area, troops received warnings to vacate their positions.

Then, in October 1959, Chinese troops opened fire on Indian border police at Kongka, in Southern Ladakh, killing nine and capturing 10.

From multiple Cold War sources, among them the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified history of the 1962 war, it is clear that the Chinese were hoping to push Mr. Nehru to accept a deal: swapping Aksai Chin for what is now Arunachal Pradesh. Mr. Nehru, the evidence suggests, was preparing Indian public opinion for such a swap. The Kongka incident, though, made it near impossible.

Mr. Nehru responded by authorising what has come to be known as the ‘Forward Policy.’ From December 1960, the Henderson Brooks report records that India began establishing small posts deep inside Chinese-held territory, opening up the prospect of “our eventual domination of the Aksai Chin highway.” By the summer of 1962, small pickets of Indian troops, often less than platoon-strength, were holding positions face to face with Chinese positions. India had little logistical infrastructure to support them, and no way to bring forward reinforcements to sustain these positions.

The positions served no military purpose. Their role, instead, was to serve as a bargaining chip in eventual negotiations. Mr. Nehru acted in the belief China would not use force to evict the Indian positions.

His guess was wrong, but not unreasonable. Fearing the United States’ military presence in East Asia, Mao Zedong warned his generals not to “blindly” take on India, despite China’s military superiority.

The Soviet Union was also working to rein in Beijing. In China for negotiations with Mao Zedong in October 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had delivered a testy message of protest against the Kongka clash. “You have had good relations with India for many years. Suddenly, here is a bloody incident, as result of which Nehru found himself in a very difficult position.” In October 1963, Mr. Khrushchev again told the Chinese ambassador to Moscow to avoid military action, arguing it would push India into the United States’ embrace.

Finally, the Army itself didn’t come up with viable alternatives to the Forward Policy for leaders besieged in Parliament and pilloried by the media. Lieutenant-General Daulet Singh, General-Officer-Comanding of the western Army advocated, the official war history records, that “the only safe course would be to leave for the time being the Chinese in possession of the Indian territory they had already grabbed, and to consolidate the areas still in Indian possession by pushing roads forward, building up strong bases and inducting a division of troops into Ladakh.”

“This strategy,” the scholar Srinath Raghavan has pointed out, “was obviously incapable of countering Chinese incursions near the boundary — incursions that were the main cause for concern to the political leadership.”

Last year, Indian and Chinese troops faced-off near Daulat Beg Oldi in Ladakh, in the worst flare-up of tensions in decades. Fears of growing Chinese nationalism, backed by military might, have spurred Indian military acquisitions. Narendra Modi, who may be India’s next Prime Minister, has cast China as an expansionist threat, a sentiment shared by many in other parties.

Mr. Nehru must take the blame for calling it ‘wrong,’ but responsibility also lies with the ill-informed public debate and media hyper-nationalism that drove his choices. India can’t afford to have to learn the same lessons again.

National Interest: Who’s afraid of Neville Maxwell?

Two generations of Indians, including yours faithfully, once brainwashed into believing propaganda and military mythologies. And an establishment that still chooses to hide the truth about the 1962 War from its own people. Let’s be grateful to that 88-year-old relentless journalist and scholar for the partial release of the Henderson-Brooks report — and hope the next government has the courage to do the rest.

I am of the vintage that grew up detesting Neville Maxwell as an utterly contemptible India-hater. Or worse. A pro-Chinese communist toadie, even an unreconstructed Trotskyist who should never have been allowed to set foot in India, least of all accredited as the New Delhi correspondent of The Times (London). And whose treacherous book, India’s China War, you heard, was banned by our government for good reason (these were pre-Shiv Sena years, so it wasn’t actually banned).

How dare a silly, ungrateful (for Indian hospitality) white man blame India for the Chinese “invasion” of 1962? How dare he insult Jawaharlal Nehru, even fellow communist Krishna Menon? What kind of man showed disrespect for Indian soldiers, who fought so bravely against humongous odds and neverending human waves? How dare he, most insulting of all, call it “India’s China War”? Just how could anybody, particularly a white man from a democracy, be so viciously nasty to democratic India as to question the very basis of its territorial claims, the McMahon Line — even to dismiss it as a colonial imposition on Tibet and China?

Remember, we were the children of the Sixties, fed on jingoistic propaganda and convenient military mythologies. We were the Ai mere watan ke logo generation that was easily persuaded to accept the “dus-dus ko ek ne maara (each Indian killed 10 Chinese before falling as he ran out of bullets)” understanding of that war.

Those who were suspected to have helped Maxwell were seen as traitors. Remember, Sam Manekshaw had, among the various “indiscretions” blamed on him, also the insinuation that he helped Maxwell access the Henderson Brooks committee report. Fortunately for India, he survived, thanks to one honourable fellow patriot, whom we know as Lt Gen J.F.R. Jacob and whom his friends, young and old, call Jake, who refused to give evidence against him, and the ever-maligned political class.

Two outstanding defence ministers, Y.B. Chavan and Jagjivan Ram, cleaned out the Augean stables as the armed forces rapidly rebuilt themselves and the moustachioed, hunched figure of Sam Bahadur in a Gorkha cap became the most abiding personification of Indian generalship, the hero of the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971.

It is curious but utterly true that defeat inspires a lot more literature and storytelling than victory. India is no exception. The stalemate of 1965 produced a few books, the most significant being Lt Gen Harbakhsh Singh’s War Despatches. The 1971 campaign produced little of note, except maybe Air Chief Marshall P.C. Lal’s My Years With the IAF. But the debacle of 1962? From disgraced Lt Gen B.M. Kaul’s The Untold Story to Brigadier J.P.

Dalvi’s Himalayan Blunder, the story of the greatest disaster of that war, the 7th Brigade that was pulverised under his command, leaving most of its men killed, wounded or taken PoW — including himself; from Maj Gen D.K. Palit’s War in High Himalaya to the then legendary but controversial intelligence super-czar B.N. Mullik’s My Years with Nehru trilogy, you could fill an entire shelf in a military academy’s library. Most of them were beautifully and convincingly written — maybe the fact that most of these generals had been trained in British academies had something to do with it. But we were also easy to convince, though noted journalist and The Indian Express commentator Inder Malhotra had dismissed this flurry of military literature as “a conspiracy of noise”.

We were hearing the story from our soldiers. A story of betrayal, a stab-in-the-back while screaming Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai. Political, intellectual and strategic discourse, popular culture — all built the same story. Until Maxwell’s book challenged it in 1970. It was widely believed that he had been given access to the secret Henderson Brooks committee report by an “insider”. The most likely “suspect” then was Henderson Brooks, and it did not help that he settled after retirement in Australia — Maxwell’s country.

Henderson Brooks, a wonderfully committed and patriotic officer, then commander of the Jalandhar-based 11 Corps, was hand-picked for the job and assisted by one of India’s most eminent soldiers, then Brigadier P.S. Bhagat, one of the few Victoria Cross winners then living. Nobody proved any insinuation then, but in the cloud of suspicion that persisted even after the decisive victory of 1971, Bhagat was inexplicably passed over, with Gen G.G. Bewoor being given a surprise extension of service. Nobody knows yet what that brilliant soldier was victimised for. He was too honourable a soldier to complain.

He faded away, like good generals of yore, to head the faraway Damodar Valley Corporation. Never seen on any stage again, except probably the golf course. Not in politics, not in courts and definitely not muckraking. For heaven’s sake, Bhagat was a soldier’s soldier, one of the finest India has produced. That is precisely why he had been chosen to assist Henderson Brooks. But Maxwell’s shadow has hung over both for six decades.

Although the reason their report is still classified “top secret” is not because it has anything of current tactical value — the lame excuse Defence Minister A.K. Antony gave to Parliament. It is to protect our carefully crafted and preserved mythologies of 1962. And it wasn’t just to protect the reputation of Nehru. Political decision-making wasn’t even in the inquiry’s remit. My information is that the Central Information Commission, under Wajahat Habibullah, called for the report following Kuldip Nayar’s repeated RTI requisitions for it. They found nothing wrong with making it public.

But the veto came from the army. Which is surprising, given that several former chiefs and veterans’ associations have demanded that it be made public.

Maxwell lives near Sydney and is now 88, which makes him a year older than L.K. Advani, and he is just as irrepressible. He never hid his left leanings, but it would be unfair to see him as an India-hater, though two generations of Indians have been brainwashed into believing that. I, too, hated him, and more so after I found his book in my small-town college library, where I would escape from Botany, Zoology and Chemistry.

One of my closest friends then had lost his father along with Brigadier Hoshiar Singh (MVC and probably the only modern military hero after whom a road is named anywhere in Delhi outside the cantonment), in the chaotic retreat to Bomdila. So any suggestion that India was anything but wronged, and its army betrayed by all, was an outrage. So strong was the indoctrination of the Sixties that, I confess, when Maxwell once got in touch with me in the early mid-Eighties and asked that I apply for a Reuters scholarship at Oxford, which he curated (particularly as he said he had seen my reporting for The Indian Express from the Northeast), it did not take me any time to say no.

I had been a reporter for almost a decade already, but my reaction to Maxwell was still one of embarrassingly non-journalistic hostility and suspicion. So let me now offer him an apology and a thank-you note.

Because age, experience and certainly the confidence inspired by an increasingly secure strategic environment help you see things differently, today it is possible to see Maxwell as a relentless, persistent scholar and journalist, still fighting to reveal the truth about one of the most crucial periods of our history as he knew it — obviously from us in this case. It is just that we have chosen to hide the same truth from our own people all these decades. You can only hope his doggedness, and now this partial release, will leave no excuses for South Block anymore. In fact, the NDA should promise to make the report public if elected to power.

If Maxwell is able to help us Indians face that bitter family secret and thereby find closure for 1962, in my book he will be listed as a friend of India, not an enemy. As for his allegedly red-hot left ideology, it has already been swept away in the entire world, India, and even more notably, in China.

Postscript: If you thought only the Indians and Pakistanis built super-military mythologies or wrote gallantry citations like commando comics, look elsewhere too. Some Chinese accounts of 1962 have now been published and translated into English. Two books deserve to be noted. One written by Chinese scholar Wang Hongwei, A Critical Review of the Contemporary Sino-Indian Relations, and the other, Recollections of the Sela-Bomdila Debacle, by Maj Gen Jaidev Singh Datta, a 1962 veteran of that sector, which also draws from many published Chinese accounts.

Many of the Chinese claims of PLA heroism would embarrass even the scriptwriter of a Sunny Deol war film. My favourite is the story of soldier Yan Shi Jin of the 33 Regiment, who “killed one Indian soldier after another” near Sela, exactly in Sunny Deol fashion, but unlike him, died in the end. How, we are not told. He was given a citation for Meritorious Service 1st Class, one of the PLA’s highest awards. More importantly, he was also granted his “last wish”, apparently expressed to his comrade as he breathed his last. That he should be made a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party posthumously. Of course, we have it on the authority of the PLA historian, the wish was granted! Proof, if any was needed, that the Chinese can be even more stupid than us.

Fear of the Past

Speaking in the Rajya Sabha on 9 November 1962, shortly after the war with China had broken out, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru observed, “People have been shocked ... [by] the reverses we suffered. So I hope there will be an inquiry so as to find out what mistakes or errors were committed and who were responsible for them.” Following on this assurance to Parliament, the government constituted an inquiry into the Indian army’s performance in the war against China. Just under six months later, the two-member committee comprising Lieutenant General T B Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P S Bhagat submitted the report to the army chief. Defence Minister Y B Chavan conveyed to Parliament a watered-down version of the key findings of the report. He also said that the report could not be published as it would “not only endanger our security but affect the morale of those entrusted with safeguarding the security of our borders”.

After five decades, the report is yet to be officially declassified despite periodic calls for its release. The government’s stonewalling has been supported by other institutions. In an egregious ruling issued in 2009, the Central Information Commission (CIC) held that “no part of the report might at this stage be disclosed” under the provisions of the Right to Information Act. Declassifying it would apparently “seriously compromise” India’s security and its relationship with China.

On the contrary, the main findings of the report have been known ever since the publication in 1970 of India’s China War, by Neville Maxwell who was the India correspondent of The Times at the time of the war. In an article published in this journal in 2001 (“Henderson Brooks Report: An Introduction”, 7 April), Maxwell confirmed as much. The operational aspects of the 1962 war have also been discussed threadbare in a host of memoirs and studies. Most importantly, the official history of the war commissioned by the Ministry of Defence draws on the Henderson Brooks Report and has been available on the internet for some years now.

The government’s decision to keep the report under the wraps is reflective of the obsession with official secrecy. Of course, it may be inadvisable to reveal some of the details of military deployments that remain relevant to date. But the government could have adopted a more forthcoming stance. For one thing, it could have released those portions of the report whose contents are already public knowledge. For another, it could have redacted sensitive details and declassified the report – a procedure routinely followed in many other democracies. By refusing to adopt such a course, the government had strengthened the feeling that the report has been buried for purely political reasons.

In this context, Maxwell’s decision to post large chunks of the document online has understandably evoked much interest and commentary. Much of the current discussion, however, is framed in simplistic terms about who were the “Guilty Men of 1962” (to borrow the title of a well-known book published in 1968) and is conducted with an eye to the election season. This is doubly unfortunate. A well-informed debate on the subject is long overdue – not least in the context of current bogeys about China’s “assertiveness”. Further, the ongoing discussion could have turned the spotlight on the limited availability of archival records pertaining to India’s foreign policy.

Indeed, the government’s obduracy over the Henderson Brooks Report is merely a specific instance of a wider problem: the absence of a system in which the 30-year rule for declassification is followed by the government. None of the ministries declassify and transfer records that are 30 years or older to the archives. The Ministry of External Affairs has belatedly begun the process of declassification; although documents pertaining to China (and much else of interest) continue to remain under lock and key. The Ministry of Defence has not even done this much. This is hardly surprising, given that most of the official histories commissioned by the ministry languish for decades before publication.

The claim that documents pertaining to a “live” issue cannot be declassified simply does not wash. The United States and United Kingdom governments have released hundreds of important documents pertaining to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even Israel has followed the 30-year norm for declassification and has opened up records pertaining to past conflicts that have a direct bearing on contemporary issues. Access to private papers remains as difficult as consulting official archives. For instance, to consult the papers of the former defence minister, V K Krishna Menon, permission needs to be obtained from none less than the prime minister of India.

This deplorable situation makes India singularly illiberal amongst mature democracies. Robust debates on contemporary history are crucial in a democratic polity. The core strength of a democracy is its capacity for self-correction. But this depends on its ability both to scrutinise the past and to understand how the present was shaped. Archives may not always throw up secrets, but they will afford perspective. Outdated notions of state secrecy should not be allowed to vitiate this vital task of democratic self-understanding.

Maxwell released report to expose Nehru’s mistakes that forced war on China

Veteran Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has said he chose to make public the classified 1962 Sino-Indian war report to “rid Indian opinion of the delusion” that the war had been the result of “an unprovoked Chinese aggression” and to expose mistakes made by Jawaharlal Nehru that “forced the war on China.”

In his first comments following his decision to make public last month the still classified Henderson Brooks war report, the release of which was first reported by The Hindu and subsequently triggered wide debate on the legacy of the war, Mr. Maxwell told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that by doing so he had “deprive[d] the Government of India the excuse they’ve used to keep it secret, the false claim that it was to preserve national security”.

He 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.”

Mr. Maxwell said in the interview he had been trying “for years” to make the report public, including by making it available to several newspapers in India in 2012. The newspapers chose not to publish. His website has, however, been inaccessible in India after The Hindu reported that the war report had been made public. He said the website “collapsed under its own weight” and “not because of government censorship” as some Indian media reports suggested.

Mr. Maxwell repeated his long-held view that “all that talk about China’s ‘unprovoked aggression’ is utterly false, the truth is that India was the aggressor in 1962” — views he expressed in his 1970 bookIndia’s China War .

Mr. Maxwell’s conclusions that China was all the while focussed on peaceful settlement and that India was to blame entirely for the war have, however, been questioned by other scholars, including John W. Garver.

Even in China, many scholars today see many factors, beyond Nehru’s mistaken “forward policy,” at play in China’s decision to launch an attack, from domestic turbulence in the wake of the 1958 Great Leap Forward famine to unrest in Tibet.