News China

Neville Maxwell interview: the full transcript

Monday, 31 March, 2014, 5:31am
Debasish Roy Chowdhury debasish.roy@scmp.com
In his first interview after a Snowden-style disclosure of the contentious secret report on
the 1962 China-India war, Neville Maxwell tells Debasish Roy Chowdhury of the South
China Morning Post what the 50-year-old document means for the future of China-India
relations.
Post: The Henderson Brooks-Bhagat Report (HBBR) was filed in 1963. You, it appears, gained
access to it soon after. What took you so long to come out with it?
NM: I had been trying for years to get the report on to the public record. In 2012, Id made the text
available to several newspapers in India.
Post: What reasons did they give you for not carrying it?
NM: Well, they agreed it should be made public, but they thought that had to be done by the
government. If the press did it, the result, they said, would be a fierce row, accusations of betrayal
of national interest, fierce attacks on the journals who had leaked. In short, nothing good, a lot bad.
So it had begun to look as if the report might never be published, and I thought that would be
dreadful, wasting all the efforts of the authors, denying historians access to a crucial aspect of that
unnecessary but hugely consequential border war - so I decided to do it myself.
I must apologise, by the way, for the clumsy way in which it was done. The blog collapsed under its
own weight soon after it was launched, not because of government censorship, as was thought in
India. I saw reports in India on speculation that the government was blocking the site.
Post: Why have you disclosed only a chunk of Volume I of the report? Wheres the rest?
NM: 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.
Post: What do you hope to achieve with this disclosure?
NM: I hope to achieve what I have been trying to do for nearly 50 years! To rid Indian opinion of the
induced delusion that in 1962 India was the victim of an unprovoked surprise Chinese aggression,
to make people in India see that the truth was that it was mistakes by the Indian government,
specifically Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that forced the war on China.
My putting the report online now deprives the government of India the excuse theyve used to keep
it secret, the false claim that it was to preserve national security. Its clear to anyone who reads the
report that it has no current military or strategic significance. So there is no good reason for the
government to persist in refusing to declassify the whole report, including Volume Two, which I
never saw.
Post: Thats not how Indians see it.
NM: Start with seeing that India inherited a border dispute with China, it was congenital to
independent India. The British created it in the mid-1930s when they decided that for strategic
reasons they should push their north-eastern frontier out some 60 miles. They knew China would
not agree to that, because theyd failed to persuade Beijing to give them that belt of territory by
diplomatic pressure in the Simla Conference in 1914, and so beginning about 1936 they just took
it, by force.
China was too weak to put up any military resistance but it was late in the day for the Empire to get
away with that sort of action. The British parliament wouldnt stand for it. So they falsified the record
of the Simla conference by withdrawing and pulping a volume of the series recording Indias
treaties and replacing it with a forged version that indicated that at Simla in 1914, China had
accepted the new border alignment that they now called the McMahon Line, after the man who had
in fact failed to get that agreement at Simla!
Post: Why would independent India follow Britains line?
NM: It was a Faustian offer: You keep quiet about what we did, and you get to keep the McMahon
frontier: baulk, expose our trickery, give up the McMahon frontier territory, and what would your
public and opposition think about it, Mr Nehru?
Post: Why do you hate Nehru so much? Didnt you start off as an admirer?
NM: 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. I was twice the head of the foreign correspondents
association, and that brought me into personal contact with him, and as the Times man, I could
sometimes get in to talk to him.
That access and friendliness shows, to my shame, in my reporting of the dispute with China as that
developed throughout I took the Indian side, never seeing what should have been obvious, that
China was not aggressive but was consistently trying for a settlement on mutually beneficial terms.
I became a marked man in Beijing, they said the Times correspondent must be either stupid or
hired. I wasnt either, but I was blinded by ideologyliberal anti-communism. Youll see the same
affecting many journalists today, as American policy continues the Cold War.
Post: Ever wondered why Nehru, a known China ally, took such a strong line?
NM: 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 Zhou Enlais insistence on
negotiations as they felt it impugned Indias character as an ancient nation with defined
boundaries.
Post: Ok, back to HBBR. Whats the significance of this 50-year-old report today?
NM: It proves that all that talk about Chinas unprovoked aggression is utterly false, the truth is
that India was the aggressor in 1962. But of course its 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.
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 Indias borders was a matter for
India alone to decide, unilaterally, privately and definitively.
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 advisers 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.
Post: Your book Indias China War, whose account of the Indian Armys collapse, was obviously
based largely on the HBBR, challenged the entrenched aggressive China notion. The book came
out in 1970, Richard Nixon visited China in 1972 how much do you think your book influenced
Western thinking on China?
NM: A great deal, and indeed Nixon personally! Kissinger read the book, in 1971 I suppose, when
it came out in America and it changed his thinking on China, and he pressed the book on Nixon
all thats on the record now, in the transcripts of Nixon-Kissinger-Mao talks. While Kissinger was in
Beijing, Zhou Enlai sent me a personal message to tell me that Kissinger had said to him,
Reading that book showed me I could do business with you people.
You have to remember, the belief that China had suddenly attacked an innocent India had really
blackened the international view of the PRC, so my revelation that it was a frame-up came like a
flash of light everywhere. At a banquet in Beijing, Zhou publicly told me: Your book did a service to
truth which benefited China.
Post: Your book, Indias China War, didnt go down very well in India when it first came out in
1970. Whats been the reaction like this time?
NM: I always saw the danger that if I published the report, there would be another outbursts of
animosity against me but in fact theres only been one such - and oddly enough from an old friend.
Otherwise, theres been concentration on the content and implications of the report.
Post: Any charges laid on you yet? After all, you are messing with one of Indias top national
secrets.
NM: Not that I know of, this time. The Indian government had laid charges against me, breach of
Official Secrets Act, soon after Indias China War came out. I was asked by the British government
More on this:
Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into 1962 border war [1]
Revealing India's failures in 1962 war with China can help clear the air [2]
to keep out of India to avoid request [for arrest] - and for eight years I did so! Until at last Morarji
Desai as prime minister annulled the charges, enabling me to return.
Post: Now that India and China seem to be talking again, do you see the border problem as ever
being solved?
NM: Yes, I certainly do, and my hopes are rising. I noted with great relief that the magic phrase,
the hey presto or abracadabra, package deal has recently emerged as jointly used in the official
correspondence.
That points to the only, but simple and obvious, solution to the dispute: India recognises that since
there is no legal foundation for the McMahon Line, it must be submitted to re-negotiation but
knows that China will accept the basic McMahon alignment. And China is glad to negotiate the
western sector, knowing that in those negotiations India will retreat from its absurd, ahistorical
claim to ownership of Aksai Chin. The negotiations will have to be lengthy, but both parties will
know from the outset that at their conclusion lies the precious, buried treasure of the Sino-Indian
friendship which Nehru once sought.
Source URL (retrieved on Jun 15th 2014, 5:30pm):
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1461102/neville-maxwell-interview-full-transcript
Links:
[1] http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1461099/neville-maxwells-revelation-reveals-india-was-
hiding-nothing-over-its-1962
[2] http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1461062/revealing-indias-failures-1962-
war-china-can-help-clear-air