The recent uproar over Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi quoting from former Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane’s unpublished memoir has echoes of another storm that broke out in Parliament over another book on India-China relations.

In 1970, Australian journalist Neville Maxwell, then the New Delhi correspondent for The Times, published India’s China War, a book that questioned the role of the Nehru-led political leadership during the 1962 war with China.

Even before Maxwell’s book came out, there were three prominent books already in the market — The Untold Story (1967, by Lt Gen BM Kaul), The Guilty Men of 1962 (1967, by veteran journalist D R Mankekar) and Himalayan Blunder: The Curtain-Raiser to the Sino-Indian War of 1962 (1969, by Brigadier JP Dalvi) — all critical of the role of the political and military leadership during the war. But unlike the others, Maxwell’s book quoted excerpts from a classified document: the Henderson Brooks Report prepared by the Operations Review Committee set up by the Army after India’s loss to China in the 1962 war.

The report was authored in 1963 by Lt Gen T B Henderson Brooks and Brigadier Premindra Singh Bhagat. Henderson Brooks, who was born in Burma, was commissioned into the British Indian Army in 1929 as a King’s Commissioned Indian Officer. During the 1962 war, he commanded the Army’s........

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