Neville Maxwell

Neville Maxwell
Born	1926 (age 97–98) London, England
Occupation	Journalist
Citizenship	Australia
Alma mater	McGill University University of Cambridge
Subject	Sino-Indian War
Notable works	India's China War

Neville Maxwell (born 1926 in London) is a retired Australian journalist and author of the 1970 book India's China War, which is considered a controversial analysis of the 1962 Sino-Indian War because of its pro-China slant. Chinese Premier Hua Guofeng in 1976 gifted Maxwell's book to visiting Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, but Lee refused to take the "revisionist, pro-China history" book, telling his host: “Mr. Prime Minister, this is your version of the war. There is another version, the Indian version. And in any case, I am from South-East Asia — it’s nothing to do with us”.

As the New Delhi-based correspondent of a British newspaper, Maxwell presented a pessimitic portrayal of India in the 1960s, even predicting the early collapse of Indian democracy. He went from being an anti-Communist to becoming a frank admirer of Maoist China, developing a reputation, as one of his interviewers noted, as "an apologist for China". Maxwell's "Marxist orientation and deep-seated prejudice against India coloured his writings", and even though he admitted that China attacked India, he claimed that China was provoked into attacking India to defend its honour and dignity. The renowned Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar, by contrast, pointed out in his landmark study that Mao Zedong planned the attack on India systematically to achieve a swift, decisive victory and to teach India a lesson. MacFarquhar's study, discrediting the thesis that Maxwell argued in his book, called the 1962 armed conflict "Mao’s India War". Much before he published his book, Maxwell's gloom-and-doom journalistic despatches from New Delhi about India had already generated intense controversy. Maxwell's book, however, continues to stimulate lively debate on the factors that prompted the 1962 Chinese attack, which caught India by complete surprise.

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 traveled 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 [lacks any reference]. This eventually led to his "virtual expulsion" from India.

In 1967 Maxwell joined the School of Oriental and African Studies in London a senior fellow in order 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 1971. 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. However, Maxwell was perceived as hostile to the Indian narrative of victimhood and received ferocious personal attacks in India.

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."

External links

• China, India, and the fruits of Nehru's folly Interview with Neville Maxwell by Venkatesan Vembu, Daily News & Analysis, June 6, 2007