Neville Maxwell

Neville Maxwell
Born	1926 (age 97–98) London, England
Occupation	Journalist
Citizenship	Australia
Alma mater	McGill University University of Cambridge
Subject	Sino-Indian War
Notable works	India's China War

Neville Maxwell (born 1926 in London) is a retired Australian journalist and author of the 1970 book India's China War, an analysis of the 1962 Sino-Indian War .

As the New Delhi-based correspondent of a British newspaper, Maxwell presented a pessimistic portrayal of India in the 1960s, predicting the early collapse of Indian democracy and the break-up of India.

The renowned Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar, by contrast, pointed out in his landmark study that Mao Zedong planned the attack on India systematically to achieve a swift, decisive victory and to teach India a lesson. MacFarquhar's study, discrediting the thesis that Maxwell argued in his book, called the 1962 armed conflict "Mao’s India War".

Much before Maxwell published his book, his gloom-and-doom journalistic despatches from New Delhi about India had already generated intense controversy. As a well-known Indian newspaper editor wrote in 2014, "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)." The editor then said: "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."

Maxwell's book continues to stimulate lively debate on the factors that prompted the 1962 Chinese attack, which caught India by complete surprise. Almost 44 years after he published his controversial book, the 88-year-old Maxwell publicly released a portion of a classified report prepared by two Indian Army officers, Lieutenant General T.B. Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P.S. Bhagat. Maxwell apparently received the classified report from one of its two authors, or from another high-level source in the Indian Army, in the 1960s, underscoring the military leaker's interest in disseminating the findings of the report. Maxwell relied on this report and on Chinese government briefings to write his opinionated account of the war. By releasing sections of the report, Maxwell has, paradoxically, helped to demystify and deflate a report which, by being kept under wraps for so long, had acquired a specious reputation of offering valuable military insights, as if it were the “definitive” account of the war.

The Henderson Brooks–Bhagat Report was supposedly an "operations review" of the causes of the Indian Army's humiliating rout by the invading People's Liberation Army. The report, instead of pinpointing the military aspects of the failure, palmed off the blame on the political leadership by going beyond the limited mandate the two army officers had been given to inquire into troop training and fitness, equipment, and command structure. Worse, on the advice of the Army chief, the report did not go into the functioning of the Army Headquarters, with the result that the "relationship between the Defence Ministry and the Army Headquarters and the directions given by the former to the latter" were not examined.

Furthermore, as the report itself admits, its two investigating officers had no access to documents in key Indian government departments, including the Prime Minister's Office and the ministeries of defence and external affairs. Nor were any classified or public hearings held. Yet, within four months, the two officers submitted a heavily opiniated report that conveniently sought to shift the focus from the Army's accountability for a miserable performance in the war to the "interference" of the political leadership in military matters. Pinning the blame on the political leadership for the military defeat fitted well with the Indian Army's reluctance to own up institutional responsibility for the rout in a war that the Army should have seen coming, given the gradual rise in mlitary tensions after the Dalai Lama's 1959 flight to India.

In passing political judgments, however, the two Army officers entered the political domain in a manner military officers rarely do in any established democracy. This was one of the reasons why the Indian government kept the controversial 1963 report classified. India has still no answers as to whether the defeat resulted from incompetence at the political level (the then Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had assiduously courted China right through the 1950s, despite the Chinese annexation of the historical buffer, Tibet) or at the military level (the then army chief, in particular, was widely seen as being out of his depth).

Maxwell, in February 2014, released Part I of the two-part report where the two Army officers had recorded their opinions on the purported shortcomings in India's political approach and policy in the period leading up to the Chinese military attack. The report, for example, blamed the Indian political leadership for pursuing what the Chinese had called "forward policy" on the borders, without the report explaining that this policy was a belated attempt by India to forestall further loss of land to a China that had annexed the sprawling Tibetan plateau and was assertively nibbling at Indian territory. (The report's second part deals with the enduring lessons India should draw from the 1962 Chinese aggression.)

In his book, by focusing on India's purported "forward policy," Maxwell glosses over the fact that at the root of the China-India war was China's elimination of the historical buffer by gobbling up the Tibetan plateau. This annexation constituted not only a successful forward policy by China, but also brought Han Chinese troops to India's Himalayan borders, where they sought to nibble at more land. The resulting Indian reaction to prevent the loss of more territory set the stage for China's surprise attack in October-November 1962.

India's China War

An Australian born in London, Maxwell was educated at McGill University in Canada and the University of Cambridge in England. He joined The Times as a foreign correspondent in 1955 and spent three years in the Washington bureau. In 1959 he was posted to New Delhi as the South Asia correspondent. In the next eight years he traveled from Kabul to East Pakistan and Kathmandu to Ceylon, reporting in detail the end of the Nehru era in India and the post-Nehru developments. During the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Maxwell wrote for The Times from New Delhi, and did not accept the official Indian account of events regarding the war. This eventually led to his "virtual expulsion" from India.

In 1967 Maxwell joined the School of Oriental and African Studies in London a senior fellow in order to write his book India's China War. He was with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford University at the time when the book was published in 1971. The book was widely praised across a diverse range of opinions, including British historian A. J. P. Taylor, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. However, Maxwell was perceived as hostile to the Indian narrative of victimhood and received ferocious personal attacks in India.

View on Indian democracy

In the 1960s Maxwell incorrectly predicted that India would not remain a democracy for much longer. While serving as the South Asia correspondent of The Times of London, Maxwell authored a series of pessimistic reports filed in February 1967. In the atmosphere leading up to the 4th Lok Sabha elections, he wrote that "The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed. [Indians will soon vote] in the fourth—and surely last—general election."

External links

• China, India, and the fruits of Nehru's folly Interview with Neville Maxwell by Venkatesan Vembu, Daily News & Analysis, June 6, 2007