Lessons from the 1962 war report

Pic courtesy: Inchin Closer

Fifty years after it was submitted, the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report on the 1962 India-China war, has been partially released by Australian journalist Neville Maxwell, who was based in New Delhi when the war took place. The committee was mandated to look at the operational aspects of the war, and essentially blames the military leadership and intelligence apparatus for the debacle – one that has traumatised our national psyche since then.

However the report also indirectly points to a failure on the part of the political leadership at the time. The military and intelligence establishments which functioned under the instructions of the political establishment, shared the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s rather utopian outlook on China. While much has been written about Nehru’s naïve views, it would serve us well to examine how those views influenced the formulation and implementation of India’s policy towards China.

Read more here.

India’s China policy under Nehru was my M.Phil dissertation. Based on this, I had published an article in the South Asian Survey in 2007. The article can be accessed here.