Nehru declared 1962 war, claims Australian journalist Neville Maxwell

New Delhi: Veteran Australian journalist Neville Maxwell said that then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's forward policy provoked China into using force against India during 1962 Sino-Indian war. Maxwell has said he decided to release a classified 1962 Sino-Indian war report to rid Indian opinion of the "induced delusion" that India was the "victim of an unprovoked surprise Chinese aggression" . Classified Henderson Brooks Report accessed by Maxwell, have found serious faults with Jawaharlal Nehru's Forward Policy and the Indian Army for carrying it out without the necessary wherewithal. Maxwell said that the dispute between India China was created by the British in the mid-1930s "when they decided that for strategic reasons they should push their north-eastern frontier out some 60 miles. While the Nehru government's forward policy has been widely analyzed and criticized as being a contributor, Maxwell says on his website that the report holds India's first prime minister personally responsible for the war. Then the Nehru government applied the forward policy to the McMahon Line eastern sector and when the Chinese blocked that too India in effect declared war with Nehru's announcement on October 11 that the Army had been ordered to "free our territory", which meant to attack the Chinese and drive them back. To a question why he disclosed only a chunk of Volume I of the report and that where was the rest, Maxwell said: "I uploaded what I had. I never saw Volume Two. I understand it is mainly memos, written statements and other documents on which the authors based the report." Answering a question whether he hated Nehru, he said "hate" is "too strong a word". "I have only criticised his border policy. I knew Nehru well and liked him immensely, he was a man of great charm. The report proves that talk about China's "unprovoked aggression" is "utterly false" and that India was the aggressor in 1962, Maxwell said in an interview to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. "But of course it's (HBR) not spelled out in those terms, the political conclusion is buried in dense military jargon,written by soldiers for soldiers, the report is hard reading for unversed civilians," he said. He said his putting the report online deprives the Government of India "the excuse they've used to keep it secret, the false claim that it was to preserve national security". "But nevertheless, the story emerges. From its very beginning as an independent state, India, which is to say Nehru in this context, took the view that the alignments of India's borders was a matter for India alone to decide,unilaterally, privately and definitively. When asked why Nehru, a known China ally, took such a strong line, Maxwell, who worked in India at the time as Time Correspondent said: "On that, I have come to some answers, guided by scholars like David Hoffman and Perry Anderson. Their reading is that the Indian leaders felt insulted by (late Chinese premier) Zhou Enlai's insistence on negotiations as they felt it impugned India's character as an ancient nation with defined boundaries." Regarding the current border negotiations between India and China, Maxwell said he is hopeful of a settlement. "Without for a moment considering that good sense and good international manners pointed to the need to bring Beijing in to discuss their common border, Nehru and his close advisors selected the alignment themselves and put out new maps showing them as full, formal, final international boundaries...and including an area beyond what Britain had ever claimed, the Aksai Chin", the area captured by China in 1962 war. He had been trying for years to get the report on to the public record, Maxwell said, adding that in 2012, he made the text available to several newspapers in India, who agreed it should be made public but thought that had to be done by the government.