Neville Maxwell

Neville Maxwell (1926 – 23 September 2019) was a British journalist and scholar who authored the 1970 book India's China War, which is considered a revisionist analysis of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, putting the blame for it on India.[1] Maxwell has been praised for his objective view on the 1962 Sino-Indian War, but criticised for his pessimistic and often inaccurate views on Indian democracy.

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

Neville Maxwell
Born1926 (1926)
London, England
Died23 September 2019(2019-09-23) (aged 92–93)
OccupationJournalist
CitizenshipAustralia
Alma materMcGill University
University of Cambridge
SubjectSino-Indian War
Notable worksIndia's China War
Website
Neville Maxwell's Blog

Career

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 on the end of the Nehru era in India and the post-Nehru developments.[2] 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.[3] This eventually led to his "virtual expulsion" from India.[3]

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.[2]

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",[1] and set out to prove that it was "in fact of India’s making, that it was 'India's China War'".[4] 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.[5] 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.[6]:1 He did not attempt to evaluate the accuracy of these perceptions.[6]: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.[7] On the other hand, Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew considered it "revisionist, pro-China history".[8][7][9] 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.[10]

The book may have been instrumental in bridging the gulf between the US and China. According to Maxwell, Kissinger told Zhou Enlai, "Reading that book showed me I could do business with you people."[10] US President Richard Nixon too is said to have read the book and discussed it with Zhou Enlai during his 1972 visit to China.[11] Maxwell's contention that the war was "a frame-up" was "a flash of light everywhere." Zhou is said to have acknowledged to Maxwell, "your book did a service to truth which benefitted China."[10]

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."[12]

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.[13] 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.[5] After the Indian government refused to release the report for over 50 years, Maxwell decided to make it public.[5][10][13][14]

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.[7][1][15][16]

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:[4]

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[17] 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.[4] 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.[4]

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.[18]

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.[19]

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.[6]: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.
  • Maxwell, Neville (1971). "India's Forward Policy". The China Quarterly. 45: 157–163. doi:10.1017/s0305741000010481.
  • 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.
  • Maxwell, Neville (2006). "Settlements and Disputes: China's Approach to Territorial Issues". Economic and Political Weekly. 41 (36): 3873–3881. JSTOR 4418678.

References
  1. 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."
  2. Neville Maxwell, India's China War, Scribd.com
  3. Gregory Clark. "Book review: India's China War". gregoryclark.net. Retrieved 8 May 2013.
  4. Mehra, Parshotam (October 1970). "India's China War". India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs. 26 (4): 410–416. doi:10.1177/097492847002600406. ISSN 0974-9284.
  5. 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. Retrieved 8 April 2014.
  6. Garver, John W. "China's Decision for War with India in 1962" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 March 2009.
  7. Kai Friese (22 October 2012). "China Was The Aggrieved; India, Aggressor In '62". Outlook India.
  8. "What's the Big Idea?". Today (Singapore). 23 September 2013. Retrieved 26 December 2013.
  9. "Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into 1962 border war". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 16 August 2017.
  10. Debasish Roy Chowdhury (31 March 2014). "Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript". South China Morning Post.
  11. Arpi, Claude (January 2011). "1962 War: Why keep Henderson Brooks report secret?". Indian Defence Review. Retrieved 8 April 2014.
  12. Ramachandra Guha (17 July 2005). "Past & Present: Verdicts on India". The Hindu.
  13. Unnithan, Sandeep (18 March 2014). "Henderson Brooks report lists the guilty men of 1962". India Today. Retrieved 8 April 2014.
  14. "India's Top Secret 1962 China War Report Leaked". The Diplomat. March 2014.
  15. Kiernan, V. G. (April 1971), "India's China War. by Neville Maxwell", International Affairs, 47 (2): 456–457, 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."
  16. 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."
  17. Fisher, Margaret W.; Rose, Leo E.; Huttenback, Robert A. (1963), Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh, Praeger – via Questia
  18. Gopal, S. (2008). "Sino‐Indian relations". The Round Table. 62 (245): 113–118. doi:10.1080/00358537208453008. ISSN 0035-8533.: '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.'
  19. Raghavan, Srinath (2006). "Sino-Indian Boundary Dispute, 1948-60: A Reappraisal". Economic and Political Weekly. 41 (36): 3882–3892. JSTOR 4418679.

Bibliography
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