Darkness of 1962

Dealing with the raw memory of being found defenceless involves revisiting the circumstances and events of that episode. Officialdom has never quite mustered the confidence to do so,and a symbol of that failure to address that war fully in the public domain remains the refusal to make the Henderson Brooks report public. Commissioned by General J.N. Chaudhuri after he took over as chief of the army after the 1962 debacle,the report was to examine the conduct of military operations leading up from the outbreak of hostilities till Chinas unilateral ceasefire of November 20. The report,prepared by Lt General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P.S. Bhagat,was submitted in April 1963,and thence forwarded on to the defence ministry. And there it has presumably remained,with the Centre failing refusing to declassify it. In the absence of a detailed reading of the report,the public domain has been flooded with speculation about where the authors have situated Indias key failing its spare equipment and weapon stores,the quality of military planning,the dynamic between the military and political leadership or even the type of resistance offered on the ground before abandoning key posts. However,the declassification by the American authorities recently of letters written by Prime Minister Nehru to President Kennedy,reprinted first in this newspaper,is ample documentation of how grave the situation appeared in those hours leading up to Chinas surprise withdrawal on November 20. It does our democracy no good to disallow scholars from reading official accounts of that very difficult month in Indian history.

To be fair to the establishment,it cannot be easy to publicly undertake an evaluation,because the Chinese threat never vanished. Indeed,in the past few years Beijing has periodically amplified its claims on Arunachal Pradesh. Yet,New Delhi will not be able to alter the public tendency to see the issue as being framed by the 1962 War if it does not allow a more informed scrutiny of that time. The fiftieth anniversary and Indias national interest demand it.