By Anirudh Prakash
Do they ever learn? Within minutes of the top secret Henderson Brooks report into the 1962 Chinese debacle being put on a website, the government moved fast to block access. That was foolish. For, neither can the government block access to Neville Maxwell’s website outside the country, nor could it have ensured that in the brief while it was there on the web, some Indian had not already downloaded it. Besides, nothing prevents one from accessing the report on the internet outside the country.
Neville Maxwell was the correspondent of The Times, and operated from New Delhi. He was anti-India would be an understatement. His hatred towards the country was patent in his dispatches. For example, he wrote after second general election in 1957 that it was the last polls of the country because democracy was not suited to India’s genius. He praised China’s authoritarian regime. He honestly believed that it was India which attacked China and therefore titled his book as India’s War on China.
The utility of the book was the reproduction of certain portions of reports by Henderson Brooks, appointed by the government to probe into the reasons for India’s debacle in the 1962 war against China. He reportedly blamed New Delhi, particularly prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, for “shoving” India into a war against China when the former had not provided shoes for the soldiers who were moved from Kashmir to face the Chinese.
Nehru was never the same after the defeat and died early because he felt personally betrayed. Although Sardar Patel had warned him through a letter not to trust China which would one day attack India, Nehru was obsessed by a Socialist country which he, to his grief, could not transform India into that mould.
Nehru did not prepare the country and misjudged the Chinese design is an open secret. The then chief of the Army staff General Thapar had given in writing that India would face defeat if there was a war between India and China. Thapar submitted a long note for the procurement of weapons and rising up more troops. Nehru told him that the note was never put up to him.
New Delhi went into the disputed areas to establish its claim. The former home secretary B.N. Jha, had disclosed that it was “a bright idea” of B.N. Malik, the director of Intelligence Bureau, to establish police posts “wherever we could,” even behind the “Chinese lines”, so as to “register our claim” on the territory. “But,” then he said, “Malik did not realise that these isolated posts with no support from the back will fall like ninepins as soon as the Chinese push forward. We are unnecessarily exposing the policemen to death. Frankly, this is the job of the Army, but since they have refused to man the posts until full logistic support is provided, we have placed the policemen.”
The posts run in a zigzag line; 41 of them were established, a few policemen here and a few of them there, sometimes like islands in the multitude of Chinese predators. The massive Chinese attack and our puny efforts to cope with it were now plain for all to see. The government decided to play down the news of reverses which were pouring in endlessly. It was treating it like the September 8 intrusion in NEFA (Northeast Frontier Agency) which was officially described as the “appearance of some Chinese forces in the vicinity of one of our posts”.
The Sino-Indian border dispute was in the Union home ministry in early 1957. The East Pakistan border was also bristling with dangers. There were vague reports of China building a road through Sinkiang. The ministry of external affairs had been informed of the reports many times.
The government is keeping the Brooks’ report as classified. The defence ministry’s reasoning that the divulgence of the report would make public certain “tactics” which are still relevant. The tactics and even weapons employed in 1962 have no relevance today. Former chief of Army staff General V.P. Malik has said that the 1962 operation is not relevant today. He has asked for the publication of the report. But the Congress led government is under the wrong perception that Nehru’s image would be damaged and so would be that of the ruling party. Now that the excerpts of the report are already on the Internet, the government sounds churlish and undemocratic when it insists on keeping the report secret. New Delhi is happy to lock the gate after the animals have bolted.
Nehru, in fact, never recovered from his self- inflicted wound in 1962. His sentimental, even romantic notion of Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai was followed by his emotional outburst, just like a rejected lover’s, to teach the Chinese a lesson for betraying his trust, a decision which exposed the thorough unreadiness of India to confront the hugely well prepared and well supplied Chinese troops. Nehru had ordered the troops to vacate the Chinese aggression on the assurance of Mullick that the Chinese would not retaliate. Even the foreign office at the time had dittoed that assessment of the Intelligence Bureau Chief. That should give you an idea of what sort of top functionaries Nehru had surrounded himself with. His blind spot for Menon, a man of monumental arrogance and conceit without any connect with the ground realities, was his abiding failing. As was his soft spot for General Kaul, who had earned undeserved promotions in the army through his close ties with the prime minister.
All this and more lay buried in the Henderson Brooks report, who soon after retirement, migrated to Australia. By sheer coincidence, a few years after Henderson, Maxwell too settled in Australia. Henderson died in 1999. If Maxwell has now deemed it fit to lift the veil over the top secret report, he can only be commended.
More than half a century later, India is still not prepared to take on the Chinese dragon. And every now and then that dragon flexes its muscles, reminding India that the threat still persists, though our allocation for defence budget as a proportion of the GDP has actually come down. As we said, half a century after that national humiliation, all that we seem to be capable of is to recite the Kavi Pradeep- Lata Mangeshkar ode to the fallen solider, Aiy Mere Watan Key Logo…INAV