(Image source from: Revealed: Nehru)

Two weeks back, the veteran Australian journo, Neville Maxwell, rattled the hornet's nest, after he made a confidential part of Henderson Brooks report public by putting it up on his blog.

Henderson's classified war report on the 1962 Sino-Indian detailed an internal inquiry into Indian Army's rout in the 1962 war with China. Maxwell worked as the New Delhi correspondent for The Times, London, during that time. Henderson's report on the War of 1962 revealed that the war wasn't triggered by “unprovoked Chinese aggression”. Rather, it was Jawaharlal Nehru who “forced the war on China”.

In the last 51 years of its existence, none of the Indian governments have had the stomach to publish the report — authored by Lt Gen Henderson Brooks and Brig PS Bhagat (then commandant of the Indian Military Academy ). It was commissioned by Lt General J N Chaudhuri who had just taken over as chief of Army staff in 1962. Only two copies of the “classified” report exists today, although Maxwell too has a copy of it.

In his first interview to the Indian media since he made the report public, the now 88-year-old Maxwell said how he has been trying to make the report public for years, but no publisher had the nerve to make it public. He also revealed that he only has Volume I of the report, minus 45 pages, and that he has never ever seen Volume II of the report.

While the report does not contain significantly new revelations about the poor state of India's forces during the war, it discusses "how the Army was ordered to challenge the Chinese military to a conflict it could only lose."

In April 2010, India's defence minister AK Antony told the Parliament that the contents of the report are "not only extremely sensitive but are of current operational value."

Maxwell, who posted a controversial blog on his website, accounting India for the war, revealed that he had eagerly waited for the Indian government to declassify the report. However, he decided to put a large part of the report in the public domain because of India's constant unwillingness to release it.

While the Nehru government's forward policy has been widely analyzed and criticized for trigerring the war, Maxwell's blog reveals that India's first prime minister was personally responsible for the war. "The reasons for the long-term withholding of the report must be political, indeed probably partisan, perhaps even familial," says Maxwell.

No matter how untimely Maxwell's report on Indo-Sino War might seem now, it could add to the armory of BJP against Congress.

Congress analysts, on the other hand, would want to dismiss the contents as irrelevant, but harp on the progress that the country has made since then.

AW: Suchorita Choudhury