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Neville Maxwell

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For the Irish Olympic rower, see Neville Maxwell (rower).

Neville Maxwell
Born1926 (1926)
London
Died23 September 2019(2019-09-23) (aged 92–93) [1]
OccupationJournalist
NationalityAustralian
Alma materMcGill University
University of Cambridge
Notable worksIndia's China War

Neville Maxwell (1926–2019) was an English-born Australian journalist and scholar who covered South Asia for The Times of London during 1959–1967, and one of the few who have seen the Henderson-Brooks Report, which was India’s internal report of the 1962 border war with China, which is still currently being classified by the Indian government, and publicly unavailable to Indians.[1] After five decades of the Indian government failing to declassify the Henderson-Brooks report, Maxwell later uploaded part of the report online and authored the book India's China War.[2][3] The book is considered a revisionist analysis of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, putting the blame for it on India.[4] His views received praise in People's Republic of China and in the Richard Nixon administration.

Early life

Maxwell was an Australian born in London.[5] He studied at McGill University, Canada, and the Cambridge University. After graduation, he joined The Times of London, and got posted to its Washington bureau.[6]

Career

In 1959 he was posted to New Delhi as the South Asia correspondent, shortly after the Longju incident, the first Sino-Indian border clash. During the next few years, he reported on the emerging Sino-Indian border conflict, then the end of the Nehru era and the post-Nehru developments in India.[7] 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.[8]

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 when the book was published in 1970. He remained at Oxford for at least ten years, and created a visiting fellowship programme for journalists from developing countries.[9][10][11]

Regarded as a comprehensive revisionist study, India's China War contradicted the then prevalent understanding of the war as a product of Chinese "betrayal and expansionism",[4] and set out to prove that it was "in fact of India’s making, that it was 'India's China War'".[12] The book drew extensively from India's classified Henderson Brooks–Bhagat Report, an internal operational review of India's military debacle, which Maxwell was able to obtain a copy of.[13] Due to the lack of available information from China, Maxwell had to rely on inferences based on official Chinese statements with regards to China's perceptions.[14]: 1  He did not attempt to evaluate the accuracy of these perceptions.[14]: 3 

India's China War 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.[15] On the other hand, Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew considered it "revisionist, pro-China history".[16][15][2] In India, the Indian government charged him with breach of the 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.[17]

The book was apparently instrumental in bridging the gulf between the US and China. Henry Kissinger had read the book, and recommended it to Richard Nixon. He told Zhou Enlai, "Reading that book showed me I could do business with you people."[17] Nixon too is said to have discussed the book with Zhou Enlai during his 1972 visit to China.[18] Chinese leaders heaped praise on the book. In a banquet in 1971, Zhou En-lai and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto walked up to Maxwell and raised a toast. Zhou said, "your book did a service to truth which benefitted China."[2][17]

Anti-Indian biases

Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, who was a reporter for The Times during the same time that Maxwell was its correspondent in Delhi, says that Maxwell had deep an anti-Indian bias, labelling it an "understatement". He likened him to a British colonial. At the same time, Maxwell was said to have had full praise for China's authoritarian regime.[19] Others that knew him echo similar sentiments.[5]

In 1967, he wrote a series of articles claiming that India's democracy was "disintegating". He said the famine was "threatening", the administration was "strained" and universally believed to be corrupt, the government and the governing party (Indian National Congress) had lost public confidence etc. The experiment of developing India within a democratic was said to have failed. He predicted that the next general election (for the 4th Lok Sabha) would be last one.[20]

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.[21] 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.[13] After the Indian government refused to release the report for over 50 years, Maxwell decided to make it public.[13][17][21][22]

Reception

Scholars regard Maxwell's India's China War as a revisionist account of the Sino-Indian War. The earliest accounts of the war regarded China as the aggressor that unleashed its forces on an unsuspecting India. Maxwell inverted the blame, by asserting that India was the aggressor and China the victim.[15][4][23][24]

The book received negative reviews in India. Historian Parshotam Mehra commented that "deeply-rooted prejudice" oozed out of its every sentence, with examples such as:[12]

Hostilities were provoked by India’s reactionary ruling clique which, itself successor to a hateful imperialist regime (British Raj), had been guilty of continuing the latter’s unabashed aggression against a peaceful neighbour....worse still at places, Indian troops in the East crossed the McMahon Line into China’s Tibet region. Nor was that all. For towards Peking’s oft-repeated offers to negotiate and settle the dispute in a spirit of mutual understanding and mutual accommodation, New Delhi’s attitude was one of arrogance, even intransigence. It laid down impossible pre-conditions, including the ridiculous one that China should withdraw from the territory which New Delhi claimed! Provoked beyond patience itself, the Chinese frontier guards fighting in self-defence, wiped out New Delhi’s armed aggression all along the 2,000-mile frontier.

— Neville Maxwell, India's China War

To sustain his narrative, Maxwell cited those facts alone that were convenient and omitted the others. Well-known scholarly analyses such as the Himalayan Battleground[25] or Francis Watson's The Frontiers of China were missing from Maxwell's bibliography, and so too were the writings of men who had first-hand knowledge, such as Sir Olaf Caroe.[12] Notwithstanding these defects, Mehra believed that the book made a contribution as an "alternative point of view to an understanding of the events" that led to the hostilities.[12]

Historian Sarvepalli Gopal, himself a key player in the Sino-Indian dispute as the Head of Indian MEA's historical division, wrote a lengthy rebuttal in The Round Table. He pointed out that the Indian case for its border definition was set out in considerable detail in the Report of the Officials, which Maxwell dismisses with a one-liner and no real analysis.[26]

Historian Srinath Raghavan, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, called India's China War a "seminal revisionist account". He argued that Maxwell "overreached" and that he "curiously interpreted Delhi's actions almost as Beijing would have viewed it". Raghavan recommended "post-revisionist" accounts, such as Steven Hoffman's India and the China Crisis.[27]

Shekhar Gupta praised Maxville as a "relentless journalist and scholar" over his findings of the Sino-Indian war.[28] K. N. Raghavan described the book as the "most authoritative work" on Sino-Indian war but also noted that "the pronounced anti-India bias" of Maxwell's work "ensured the book was denied the credibility that such an account should have deserved".[29]

In 2002, Rediff News included a book extract from India's China War in its "Remembering a War" series, with the comment "no account of the 1962 war would be complete without Neville Maxwell's authoritative analysis."[30]

American political scientist John Garver wrote that Maxwell shaped the orthodox scholarly view, which was also reached by American scholar Allen Whiting, regarding China's perception of and response to India's Forward Policy: "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 pointed out that Maxwell did not have access to Chinese documents or archives which would have given him insights into their policy making process.[14]: 29 

Publications

Books

  • India's China War. London: Cape. 1970. ISBN 978-0-224-61887-8.
  • Maxwell, Neville (1979). China's Road to Development. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press. ISBN 978-0-08-023140-2.
  • Maxwell, Neville (1980). India, the Nagas, and the North-East. London: MRG. ISBN 978-0-903114-19-6.
  • Maxwell, Neville; McFarlane, Bruce J. (1984). China's Changed Road to Development. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press. ISBN 978-0-08-030849-4.

Selected articles

  • "China and India: The Un-Negotiated Dispute". The China Quarterly. 43: 47–80. 1970. doi:10.1017/s030574100004474x. S2CID 154434828.
  • Maxwell, Neville (1971). "India's Forward Policy". The China Quarterly. 45: 157–163. doi:10.1017/s0305741000010481. S2CID 153895462.
  • Maxwell, Neville (January 1971). "The Threat from China". International Affairs. 47 (1): 31–44. doi:10.2307/2614677. JSTOR 2614677.
  • Maxwell, Neville (1999). "Sino-Indian Border Dispute Reconsidered". Economic and Political Weekly. 34 (14): 905–918. JSTOR 4407848.
  • Maxwell, Neville (2001). "Henderson Brooks Report: An Introduction". Economic and Political Weekly. 36 (14/15): 1189–1193. JSTOR 4410481.
  • Maxwell, Neville (2003). "Forty Years of Folly". Critical Asian Studies. 35 (1): 99–112. doi:10.1080/14672710320000061497. S2CID 146537027.
  • Maxwell, Neville (2006). "Settlements and Disputes: China's Approach to Territorial Issues". Economic and Political Weekly. 41 (36): 3873–3881. JSTOR 4418678.

References

  1. ^ "Embarrassing details of slip-ups during 1962 war in Henderson Brooks report". The Times of India. 20 March 2014. ISSN 0971-8257. Retrieved 20 June 2023.
  2. ^ a b c Debasish Roy Chowdhury (31 March 2014). "Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into 1962 border war". South China Morning Post. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014.
  3. ^ Pandalai, Shruti (2 April 2014). "Burying Open Secrets: India's 1962 War and the Henderson-Brooks Report". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 20 June 2023.
  4. ^ a b c Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (1990), p. 3: "The earliest accounts by academic authors looked upon India as the victim of Chinese betrayal and expansionism, and a pro-Indian school of thought was thereby established. Contrary ideas about the historical-legal side of the dispute were soon introduced by the British historian Alastair Lamb. But a more favourable image of China vis-a-vis India did not appear until 1970, when Neville Maxwell's comprehensive revisionist study was published."
  5. ^ a b Veenu Sadhu (20 March 2014), "Newsmaker: Neville Maxwell", Business Standard, archived from the original on 21 March 2014
  6. ^ John K. Fairbank (22 April 1971), "How Aggressive is China?", The New York Review
  7. ^ Maxwell, India's China War (1970), pp. 12, cover.
  8. ^ Gregory Clark. "Book review: India's China War". gregoryclark.net.
  9. ^ Maxwell, India's China War (1970), p. cover.
  10. ^ Founder of the journalist fellowship programme has died, Reuters Institute/University of Oxford, retrieved 4 April 2023.
  11. ^ K. S. Subramanian, Neville Maxwell (1926-2019): My Academic Advisor at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, NewsClick, 29 May 2020.
  12. ^ a b c d Mehra, Parshotam (October 1970). "India's China War". India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs. 26 (4): 410–416. doi:10.1177/097492847002600406. S2CID 151144048.
  13. ^ a b c Pandalai, Shruti (2 April 2014). "Burying Open Secrets: India's 1962 War and the Henderson-Brooks Report". Foreign Policy. Archived from the original on 8 April 2014.
  14. ^ a b c Garver, John W. "China's Decision for War with India in 1962" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 March 2009.
  15. ^ a b c Kai Friese (22 October 2012). "China Was The Aggrieved; India, Aggressor In '62". Outlook India.
  16. ^ "What's the Big Idea?". Today (Singapore). 23 September 2013.
  17. ^ a b c d Debasish Roy Chowdhury (31 March 2014). "Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript". South China Morning Post. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014.
  18. ^ Arpi, Claude (January 2011). "1962 War: Why keep Henderson Brooks report secret?". Indian Defence Review.
  19. ^ Nayar, Kuldip (22 March 2014), "Neville Maxwell and Brooks' Report", Mainstream Weekly, vol. LII, no. 13
  20. ^ Ramachandra Guha (17 July 2005). "Past & Present: Verdicts on India". The Hindu. Archived from the original on 21 September 2007.
  21. ^ a b Unnithan, Sandeep (18 March 2014). "Henderson Brooks report lists the guilty men of 1962". India Today.
  22. ^ "India's Top Secret 1962 China War Report Leaked". The Diplomat. March 2014.
  23. ^ Kiernan, V. G. (April 1971), "India's China War. by Neville Maxwell", International Affairs, 47 (2): 456–457, doi:10.2307/2614016, JSTOR 2614016: "To anyone at the time of the Sino-Indian dispute who tried to think about the case on its merits it was manifest that the faults were, at least, not all on China's side. But very few in the West made this effort.... [Maxwell's] book is designed to rectify this."
  24. ^ Das Gupta, Amit R.; Lüthi, Lorenz M., eds. (2016), The Sino-Indian War of 1962: New perspectives, Taylor & Francis, p. 13, ISBN 978-1-315-38892-2: "Dorothy Woodman in Himalayan Frontiers in 1969, like Fisher, put the full blame for the war on China. ... On the contrary, Neville Maxwell in his India’s China War focused on the faults of the Government of India, maintaining that it was mostly the latter’s provocative border policy that was responsible for a major escalation."
  25. ^ Fisher, Margaret W.; Rose, Leo E.; Huttenback, Robert A. (1963), Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh, Praeger, archived from the original on 30 September 2014
  26. ^ Gopal, S. (2008). "Sino‐Indian relations". The Round Table. 62 (245): 113–118. doi:10.1080/00358537208453008.: 'Mr. Maxwell, however, brushes aside the whole complex Indian argument with half a sentence. "The Indian officials' report, which to a quick or unquestioning reader does seem a massive documentation of the Indian case..." (p. 218). How, one might ask, does it appear to a slow and questioning reader, such as, one presumes, Mr. Maxwell believes himself to be; but he does not bother to tell us.'
  27. ^ Raghavan, Srinath (2006). "Sino-Indian Boundary Dispute, 1948-60: A Reappraisal". Economic and Political Weekly. 41 (36): 3882–3892. JSTOR 4418679.
  28. ^ Gupta, Shekhar (22 March 2014). "National Interest: Who's afraid of Neville Maxwell?". The Indian Express.
  29. ^ Raghavan, K.N. (2012). Dividing Lines: Contours of India-China Conflict. Platinum Press. p. 348. ISBN 978-93-81836-75-0.
  30. ^ Neville Maxwell (18 October 2002). "Remembering a War: "If Nehru had declared his intention to attack, then he Chinese were not going to wait to be attacked"". Rediff.com.

Bibliography

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