 "Neville Maxwell")
This week, an 87-year-old man who lives in the town of Mittagong located between the volcanic peaks of Mount Gibraltar and Mount Alexandra, about 110 km south-west of Sydney, caused an eruption in India's already charged up political environment. By making public sections of the "top secret" Henderson Brooks Report on India's defeat in the 1962 war with China, Neville Maxwell has invited as much attention to himself as to Jawaharlal Nehru whom he has, for years, held squarely responsible for the debacle.
In the five decades that have gone by since the war, Maxwell, who was a foreign correspondent of The Times in Delhi in the 1960s, has been vociferous and passionately unflinching about his stand: China was the victim and India the aggressor. An Australian born in London in 1926 who arrived in India as a "liberal anti-communist", Maxwell soon turned into an admirer of Mao's China, so much so that some would call him "an apologist for China" - a journalist who kept predicting the disintegration of the Indian democracy and managed to lay his hands on the Henderson Brooks report, only two copies of which are known to exist. His 1970 book, India's China War, was based on the report.
"He was a quintessential Colonial with a weakness for China," says Delhi-based journalist Rahul Bedi. Maxwell was Bedi's tutor at the Thomson Reuters Foundation Fellowship Programme at Oxford in 1985. It was he who had started the fellowship for journalists in 1983. Another senior journalist who was at Oxford around that time but was not part of Maxwell's course remembers the contempt with which he would treat officers of the Indian Administrative Service who would come on the Commonwealth Scholarship. "He had no time for the visiting IAS officers. At formal dinners or seminars, he would ignore them totally if they asked him a question or he would tell them, 'that's not an intelligent question'." They hated him and he hated them back, says the journalist. "But he was fine with other Indians and would interact with them a lot."
Those who have known him or interacted with him remember him as competent and thoroughly professional, though also short-tempered and difficult. "He was quite a bitter man. He felt as a journalist, life should have given him a better deal," says an acquaintance. "He had a love-hate relationship with India. His days as a journalist in Delhi were probably his most fruitful, but despite his conviction and predictions that India would collapse, the country had managed to survive. It was almost as if he was angry that India hadn't gone the Pakistan way," says he.
Since he put the Henderson Brooks report out, Maxwell's website has become inaccessible. Divya Arora, the managing director of Natraj Publishers, which brought out a revised edition of his book, India's China War, in 2013, says Maxwell has made it clear to her that he is not willing to speak further on the issue. "He's very sharp, clear, decisive and strong-headed. A 'no' from him means a 'no'," she says. Bringing out the book for him, she says, was quite an experience. "He knew just what he wanted and he wouldn't compromise on it at all. He's practically rewritten the entire book, adding things he couldn't add earlier."
No one really knows who gave him a copy of the document which the governments have been holding on to so firmly. "Somebody in the army headquarters is said to have given it to him" says Lt Gen JFR Jacob (retd), former Army Commander. "I have read his book. It's by and large correct," says Jacob who, like many others, believes the report hasn't been released for political reasons. "It blames Nehru," he says. Like the US, UK and China, India declassifies secret files after 25 to 30 years. Maxwell has set the ball rolling. Part of the report is now in the public domain. Says a defence analyst: "It's only a matter of time before the remaining parts come out too."
