Neville Maxwell

India's China War

An Australian born in London, Maxwell was educated at McGill University in Canada and the University of Cambridge in England. He joined The Times as a foreign correspondent in 1955 and spent three years in the Washington bureau. In 1959 he was posted to New Delhi as the South Asia correspondent. In the next eight years he travelled from Kabul to East Pakistan and Kathmandu to Ceylon, reporting in detail the end of the Nehru era in India and the post-Nehru developments. During the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Maxwell wrote for The Times from New Delhi, and was the only reporter there who did not uncritically accept the official Indian account of events. This eventually led to his "virtual expulsion" from India.

In 1967, Maxwell joined the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London as a senior fellow to write his book India's China War. He was with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford University at the time when the book was published in 1970. The book draws extensively from India's top-secret Henderson Brooks–Bhagat Report, which Maxwell obtained a copy of. Due to the lack of available information from China, Maxwell, like other foreign scholars, had to rely on inferences based on official Chinese statements with regards to China's perceptions. He did not attempt to evaluate the accuracy of these perceptions.

The book was widely praised across a diverse range of opinions, including British historian A. J. P. Taylor, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. On the other hand, Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew considered it "revisionist, pro-China history". In India, the Indian government charged him with breach of Official Secrets Act, forcing him to stay out of India to avoid arrest, until the charges were annulled by Prime Minister Morarji Desai eight years later.

View on Indian democracy

In the 1960s Maxwell incorrectly predicted that India would not remain a democracy for much longer. While serving as the South Asia correspondent of The Times of London, Maxwell authored a series of pessimistic reports filed in February 1967. In the atmosphere leading up to the 4th Lok Sabha elections, he wrote that "The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed. [Indians will soon vote] in the fourth—and surely last—general election."

Leak of the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report

On 17 March 2014, Maxwell posted the first part of the Henderson Brooks–Bhagat Report on his website. The report was written by two Indian army officers in 1963 to examine India's defeat in the Sino-Indian War. It has been classified as top secret by the Indian government, but Maxwell acquired a copy and his India's China War contains the gist of the report. After the Indian government refused to release the report for over 50 years, Maxwell decided to make it public.

Influence

One commentator in India declared that "No account of the 1962 war would be complete without Neville Maxwell's authoritative analysis." American political scientist John Garver wrote that Maxwell shaped the orthodox scholarly view, also reached by American scholar Allen Whiting, regarding China's perception of and response to India's Forward Policy, namely that "in deciding for war, China's leaders were responding to an Indian policy of establishing Indian military outposts in territory claimed by both India and China but already under effective Chinese military occupation." Garver also pointed out that Maxwell did not have access to Chinese documents or archives which would have given him insights into the policy making process.

Srinath Ragvan, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly, calls India's China War a "seminal revisionist account," but argues that Maxwell "overreached" and that he "curiously interpreted Delhi's actions almost as Beijing would have viewed it." Ragvan points to "post-revisionist" accounts, such as those by Steven Hoffman.

United States President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger both read India's China War, and discussed it with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai on their 1972 visit to China. In a 2014 interview Maxwell said Zhou Enlai related Kissinger’s remark, "Reading that book showed me I could do business with you people." Maxwell added that "my revelation" that blaming China for the war was "a frame-up" came like "a flash of light everywhere." At a banquet in Beijing, he continued, Zhou publicly told him "Your book did a service to truth which benefitted China."

Selected publications