Why is the 1962 report still a secret?

How much longer must the Indian Army’s internal assessment, the Henderson Brooks report on the debacle at the hands of the Chinese, be kept secret? What purpose does it serve to keep it under wraps? Does it apportion blame where it must, or does it let India’s first Prime Minister off the hook, and like the Kargil report, do much the same for the Army?

The BJP may have jumped on the bandwagon, trying to score points in an election year by screaming “cover-up”. But can it explain why, when the NDA government was in power and had full access to the report, it kept silent? Cheap shot or not, though, the BJP has a point. Defence minister A.K. Antony’s 2010 argument, that the contents of the report done within a year of the Sino-Indian war and leaked by Australian journalist Neville Maxwell online this week, are not only “extremely sensitive but of current operational value”, must be shown up for what it is — an attempt by the UPA government to protect Pandit Nehru’s reputation as the Grand Old Man of India’s foreign policy, when in 1962 he was tested and found wanting.

And that is no secret. China was Nehru’s blind spot. The Army, clearly, did not have a measure of the Chinese then. And going by the repeated infringements of the People’s Liberation Army and its obsessive preoccupation with Pakistan, it does not have it now.
The scars that 1962 left on Nehru is well documented; as is the fact that the Indian Army reclaimed its mojo only after its 1971 Bangladesh triumph, and after dispatching Pakistan’s “irregulars” during Kargil.

Neville Maxwell’s deliberate leak, in fact, is a timely reminder of the need to reassess the manner in which the 1962 war has coloured perceptions in India about China. Maxwell’s book India’s China War, in addition, draws heavily on a report that only a handful in this country have access to, thereby precluding a much-needed debate without which there can be no lessons learnt. In his book, Maxwell dwells on the dominance of Nehru’s favourite, IB chief B.N. Mullick, the primary mover behind Nehru’s “forward policy” of setting up forward posts, and the pliant Army under Gen. R.N. Thapar, which failed to make the case that this policy would invite swift Chinese retaliation.

What Maxwell’s book had done is to nail the lie that the Chinese were the aggressors, and India the victim. Today, with New Delhi and Beijing attempting to recast relations, the leak may be more an opportunity to do just that, rather than see it as the embarrassment that the establishment wants to keep buried for all time.