Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Was I surprised by the silly chest-beating the BJP spokesmen indulged in while baying for the blood of Jawaharlal Nehru and the three generations of the Indira Gandhi parivar for having sat over the six-decade old Henderson Brooks report on India’s debacle in the Sino-Indian military conflict of 1962 engulfing the entire length of our border with China, from Ladakh in the North to the entire North-East region.
Not one whit, given the BJP’s myopic view of the Nehru years, the country’s first Prime Minister, who led the government for 16 years, I would have been surprised had the BJP boldly explained why even its own government during the six years it ruled under Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s leadership, chose to keep the Henderson Brooks report, a damning indictment of the leadership of the day, both at political and military levels, under the wraps. Above all it had been the result of an abysmal failure on the part of our intelligence agencies, military and civil.
Sauce for the Congress goose obviously cannot be sauce for the BJP gander.
Officially the report continues to be wrapped in secrecy even today, yes, even after the bulk of it was put on his website web by Neville Maxwell, an old India hand and a long time India Correspondent of the Times of London.
Maxwell, obviously now settled in Australia, posted 100 pages of the still classified Henderson Brooks report on his website. Maxwell has written extensively on India and has authored a book on India-China relations. His latest endeavour testifies to the deep interest we Indians have had in the Brooks report, commissioned by Nehru, and the first hundred pages of which were lapped up by many before the Indian government last week got wise to the extent of interest in the web posting and sought a stay; there were no further postings for the next two days which doesn’t however mean there won’t be many more. A fresh debate has in the meantime been triggered on India’s monumental failure in the 1962 war, and New Delhi’s persisting reluctance to permit a transparent review of the decision-making in the lead up to the war. The 100-page section posted by Mr. Maxwell includes four chapters but not the “secret” second volume which highlights sensitive correspondence on decision-making: the betrayal as it were of the Indian Army by the Defence Ministry headed by Nehru’s long-time ally V.K. Krishna Menon.
How an ill-equipped, poorly trained (for high altitude warfare), poorly led (Lt. Gen. B.N. Kaul, the corps Commander) ill-advisedly, needlessly, some say, made the forward push to our own side of the border, giving the Chinese a pretext to mount their human wave attacks across the border. I remember how bravely our soldiers fought to hold their ground in the Ladakh region unlike in the north-east, where to an out-of-depth Kaul had to be flown out of the war zone (for an unknown illness) and a semblance of a fight put in thereafter. The Chinese had prepared well to repel any forward push by the Indians and in the event withdrew to their earlier positions.
Our ordnance factories, under Krishna Menon’s short-sighted stewardship, had meanwhile been producing coffee percolators, transistor radios, buckets et al. I remember the harrowing tales which we encountered, of our soldiers fighting at high altitudes (in freezing temperatures) nearly shoeless, presumably without socks as well. The four chapters seen on the website show there were many assessments from commanders on the ground which if considered by the Government would have led to the revision of the ill-advised ‘forward policy’ and probably helped avoid the debacle. A closer reading of the report shows that the primary cause for the debacle lay on the failure of command and control at every level, from top to bottom, making it an outright failure militarily, politically and diplomatically. Instead of foolishly choosing to prevent a full disclosure of the Brooks report there is a need for its thorough reading and drawing lessons on our inexplicably ostrich-like approach to archival material of such great import.
Across time, the lesson needs to be taken is not the roll call of culpability though that is a matter for necessary study. Nehru paid personally (physically as well) for his ill-advised coterie’s lack of vision in this great Himalayan misadventure. Menon may have lost Nehru’s confidence but had caused a major dent in the Prime Minister’s undoubted stature which continued to haunt him and even his memory.
There is no point, though, in the BJP now holding forth on why the Brooks’ report was not declassified. Its government (1998 and 2004) did precious little to open up access to official documents. The Chinese thrust across the McMahon Line into Indian Territory, before withdrawing, tells us that our capability along that border even today ill-speaks of our preparedness in the face of our northern neighbour’s periodic assertions of claims to our territories including Arunachal Pradesh.
The lingering shock of 1962 invasion is exacerbated by the fact that India’s leadership has never quite leveled with the people in an open accounting for what exactly happened and how. The limping UPA II government’s refusal to declassify the Henderson Brooks report even now or making relevant portions of it available to serious scholars and historians seems out of the question, for the time being. If only for the sake of our future preparedness one hopes the new government makes the Henderson Brooks report public. Why hide a 60-year-old report. Is it that some stupid minion in the Ministry of Defence headed by lack-lustre A.K. Antony chooses to look the other way, unwilling to admit past failures and to learn lessons from these? Antony somehow does not look to be a man to take risks, not to speak of annoying his leader Sonia Gandhi.
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