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Neville Maxwell does us a favor
The inquiry report on the 1962 war with China, known popularly as the Henderson Brooks report, has reached the public domain — partly, at least. This has happened too close to the April-May poll in India to miss a furious polemical mud-slinging ensuing.
It was a war that India lost under a Congress government and today the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party spokesmen seek to reinforce the refrain that national security suffered under UPA rule. A dispassionate observer would say it’s an unkind, unwarranted and unfair judgment, but then all is fair in Indian politics.
The polemics of the past 2-3 days over the HB report threw up two issues. One, why is it that the HB report still remains ‘classified’?
Two, who is responsible for the 1962 debacle - the civil or the military leadership? Then, not entirely unrelated would be a third question that is yet to be asked: why would Neville Maxwell, the author of the highly acclaimed (and much-maligned) masterly study India’s China War do such an audacious thing now?
There is a loud clamor for ‘declassifying’ the HB report – in the name of transparency in public discourses on national security. But one main reason why the report still remains classified is that appended to it are detailed maps running into volumes (which Maxwell has apparently withheld).
Ironically, these are brutally frank maps that depict an authentic outline of the border with China, but they actually weaken our public claims in the border dispute and show us to be indulging in doublespeak, and, even worse, they vindicate the Chinese stance.
Of course, transparency and honesty is desirable in discourses relating to national security, but the issue here is something else. Is the Indian public (especially our pundits) mentally prepared to absorb the whole truth and nothing but the truth about India’s ‘border dispute’ with China?
The right-wing nationalist lobby in the country, which in recent years has dominated public debates, will go ballistic if it transpires that India is not exactly the aggrieved party in the 1962 war.
Thus, the BJP spokesman Hardeep Puri deftly sidestepped the issue and refrained from parroting the call for ‘declassifying’ the HB report by dawn tomorrow. (Indian Express).
Put simply, Puri, a former diplomat, would know that the country is just not ready to drink from this chalice of poison.
But on the other hand, another former diplomat who is also an opposition politician today, Natwar Singh, thought it expedient to join the clarion call. (Mail Today).
Curiously, this is also an extraordinary moment insofar as Natwar Singh casts a stone at Jawaharlal Nehru’s “flawed” China policy. (Puri ignores Punditji.)
Puri instead takes to the heights and surveys the landscape in systemic terms — the civil-military ‘disconnect’, which he says continues to the present day.
Natwar Singh’s article is insightful, though, because he is reflecting today after over 5 decades on a slice of history that he witnessed from the sidelines. He gives a rare first-hand account of the fateful visit of Premier Chou En-Lai to Delhi in 1960 in a last-ditch Chinese attempt to settle the border problem in a spirit of give-and-take.
The account makes ghastly reading today. The despairing part is of course that India famously goofed up and failed to rise to the occasion. If at all the border dispute with China is ever to be settled, India’s best hope lies in the broad framework that Chou had proposed.
But at that point in 1960, India was not in a mood to listen and instead cold-shouldered Chou’s mission and went on to moot the disastrous ‘forward policy’ aimed at ‘evicting’ Chinese ‘occupation’.
Natwar Singh narrates the highly irresponsible (anti-national) role played by Morarji Desai and the Indian media, especially the Indian Express newspaper.
The tragedy is that today no one bothers to bring into perspective the role of players like Desai or Frank Moraes and the vested interests they represented while vitiating the climate of India-China relations in an international setting when the foreign policies pursued by Nehru were anathema to the western world.
Natwar Singh hints that the ‘forward policy’ was due to force of circumstances in Indian politics in the late 1950s. Congress Party was already a slowly-diminishing presence in India’s electoral politics and early traces of fatigue were appearing.
Most certainly, Nehru’s command of the party and the government was weakening. Desai had become uncontrollable. In sum, Nehru ‘caved in’ — arguably, against his better judgment.
What is often called today as the ‘naivete’ of Nehru (or Krishna Menon) regarding China was more a matter of their innate conviction based on a profound understanding of international politics that it was not in India’s interests to have an unfriendly China.
Therefore, the decision not to keep minutes of the crucial meetings regarding ‘forward policy’ probably betrays an acute awareness at the political level of the dubious course India was embarking upon.
At the end of the day, what matters today is that India has not changed very much. Consider the following — the failure to push ahead with a Kashmir settlement with Pervez Musharraf; the pointless controversy over the Sharm El-Sheikh talks with Pakistan and the irrational attitudes toward any dialogue process with Pakistan; the mule-like obstinacy that Siachen belongs to India and the refusal to move forward on any ‘doable’ issue with Pakistan; the ruckus in the parliament over the LOC tensions and the braying for A. K. Antony’s blood; the fog that envelops the backdrop to the Depsang incident (to this day) — and, of course, the stellar role played by some television anchormen to whip up xenophobia in the public opinion.
Has anything really changed? This brings us to Maxwell. He has been consistent in making the point that India precipitated the 1962 war. Indians don’t like to hear him say that, and they fail to grasp that he is not actually maligning India so much as cautioning India that history should not repeat.
His essay on the Dapsang incident did sound a timely warning. And his timing now in bringing the HB report into public domain just ahead of the parliamentary poll, his act of partially declassifying the HB report — but withholding the annexures that would lethally wound India’s case — needs to be properly understood.
Given the ascendancy of ultra-nationalist elements in India and the prevalence of highly irresponsible media that vicariously feed into nationalist sentiments, the new Indian leadership should be watchful not to be hustled into making irrational decisions regarding China.
By M K Bhadrakumar – March 21, 2014
The inquiry report on the 1962 war with China, known popularly as the Henderson Brooks report, has reached the public domain — partly, at least. This has happened too close to the April-May poll in India to miss a furious polemical mud-slinging ensuing.
It was a war that India lost under a Congress government and today the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party spokesmen seek to reinforce the refrain that national security suffered under UPA rule. A dispassionate observer would say it’s an unkind, unwarranted and unfair judgment, but then all is fair in Indian politics.
The polemics of the past 2-3 days over the HB report threw up two issues. One, why is it that the HB report still remains ‘classified’?
Two, who is responsible for the 1962 debacle - the civil or the military leadership? Then, not entirely unrelated would be a third question that is yet to be asked: why would Neville Maxwell, the author of the highly acclaimed (and much-maligned) masterly study India’s China War do such an audacious thing now?
There is a loud clamor for ‘declassifying’ the HB report – in the name of transparency in public discourses on national security. But one main reason why the report still remains classified is that appended to it are detailed maps running into volumes (which Maxwell has apparently withheld).
Ironically, these are brutally frank maps that depict an authentic outline of the border with China, but they actually weaken our public claims in the border dispute and show us to be indulging in doublespeak, and, even worse, they vindicate the Chinese stance.
Of course, transparency and honesty is desirable in discourses relating to national security, but the issue here is something else. Is the Indian public (especially our pundits) mentally prepared to absorb the whole truth and nothing but the truth about India’s ‘border dispute’ with China?
The right-wing nationalist lobby in the country, which in recent years has dominated public debates, will go ballistic if it transpires that India is not exactly the aggrieved party in the 1962 war.
Thus, the BJP spokesman Hardeep Puri deftly sidestepped the issue and refrained from parroting the call for ‘declassifying’ the HB report by dawn tomorrow. (Indian Express).
Put simply, Puri, a former diplomat, would know that the country is just not ready to drink from this chalice of poison.
But on the other hand, another former diplomat who is also an opposition politician today, Natwar Singh, thought it expedient to join the clarion call. (Mail Today).
Curiously, this is also an extraordinary moment insofar as Natwar Singh casts a stone at Jawaharlal Nehru’s “flawed” China policy. (Puri ignores Punditji.)
Puri instead takes to the heights and surveys the landscape in systemic terms — the civil-military ‘disconnect’, which he says continues to the present day.
Natwar Singh’s article is insightful, though, because he is reflecting today after over 5 decades on a slice of history that he witnessed from the sidelines. He gives a rare first-hand account of the fateful visit of Premier Chou En-Lai to Delhi in 1960 in a last-ditch Chinese attempt to settle the border problem in a spirit of give-and-take.
The account makes ghastly reading today. The despairing part is of course that India famously goofed up and failed to rise to the occasion. If at all the border dispute with China is ever to be settled, India’s best hope lies in the broad framework that Chou had proposed.
But at that point in 1960, India was not in a mood to listen and instead cold-shouldered Chou’s mission and went on to moot the disastrous ‘forward policy’ aimed at ‘evicting’ Chinese ‘occupation’.
Natwar Singh narrates the highly irresponsible (anti-national) role played by Morarji Desai and the Indian media, especially the Indian Express newspaper.
The tragedy is that today no one bothers to bring into perspective the role of players like Desai or Frank Moraes and the vested interests they represented while vitiating the climate of India-China relations in an international setting when the foreign policies pursued by Nehru were anathema to the western world.
Natwar Singh hints that the ‘forward policy’ was due to force of circumstances in Indian politics in the late 1950s. Congress Party was already a slowly-diminishing presence in India’s electoral politics and early traces of fatigue were appearing.
Most certainly, Nehru’s command of the party and the government was weakening. Desai had become uncontrollable. In sum, Nehru ‘caved in’ — arguably, against his better judgment.
What is often called today as the ‘naivete’ of Nehru (or Krishna Menon) regarding China was more a matter of their innate conviction based on a profound understanding of international politics that it was not in India’s interests to have an unfriendly China.
Therefore, the decision not to keep minutes of the crucial meetings regarding ‘forward policy’ probably betrays an acute awareness at the political level of the dubious course India was embarking upon.
At the end of the day, what matters today is that India has not changed very much. Consider the following — the failure to push ahead with a Kashmir settlement with Pervez Musharraf; the pointless controversy over the Sharm El-Sheikh talks with Pakistan and the irrational attitudes toward any dialogue process with Pakistan; the mule-like obstinacy that Siachen belongs to India and the refusal to move forward on any ‘doable’ issue with Pakistan; the ruckus in the parliament over the LOC tensions and the braying for A. K. Antony’s blood; the fog that envelops the backdrop to the Depsang incident (to this day) — and, of course, the stellar role played by some television anchormen to whip up xenophobia in the public opinion.
Has anything really changed? This brings us to Maxwell. He has been consistent in making the point that India precipitated the 1962 war. Indians don’t like to hear him say that, and they fail to grasp that he is not actually maligning India so much as cautioning India that history should not repeat.
His essay on the Dapsang incident did sound a timely warning. And his timing now in bringing the HB report into public domain just ahead of the parliamentary poll, his act of partially declassifying the HB report — but withholding the annexures that would lethally wound India’s case — needs to be properly understood.
Given the ascendancy of ultra-nationalist elements in India and the prevalence of highly irresponsible media that vicariously feed into nationalist sentiments, the new Indian leadership should be watchful not to be hustled into making irrational decisions regarding China.
By M K Bhadrakumar – March 21, 2014
