Departures of note

Neville Maxwell, an English-born Australian journalist and scholar, is best known for his 1970 book India's China War, which argued that India, not China, was responsible for the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict. The book drew extensively from the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat Report, an internal Indian military review of the war that had been classified as top secret. Maxwell obtained a copy of the report and, after the Indian government refused to declassify it for over five decades, he posted the first part of it online in March 2014.

Maxwell was born in London in 1926 and studied at McGill University and Cambridge University. He joined The Times of London and was posted to its Washington bureau before becoming its South Asia correspondent in New Delhi in 1959, shortly after the first Sino-Indian border clash. During the 1962 war, he reported from New Delhi and was the only correspondent there who did not uncritically accept the official Indian account of events. In 1967, he left journalism to become a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, to write his book. He later moved to Oxford University, where he remained for at least ten years and created a visiting fellowship programme for journalists from developing countries.

India's China War was widely praised, including by British historian A. J. P. Taylor, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger read the book and recommended it to President Richard Nixon, telling Zhou Enlai, 'Reading that book showed me I could do business with you people.' Zhou raised a toast to Maxwell at a banquet in 1971, saying, 'your book did a service to truth which benefitted China.' However, the book was criticized in India, where historian Parshotam Mehra said 'deeply-rooted prejudice' oozed from its every sentence, and Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew called it 'revisionist, pro-China history.' The Indian government charged Maxwell with breach of the Official Secrets Act, forcing him to stay out of India until the charges were annulled by Prime Minister Morarji Desai eight years later.

Maxwell's work was considered a seminal revisionist account of the war, shaping the orthodox scholarly view that China's leaders were responding to India's Forward Policy of establishing military outposts in disputed territory. However, scholars noted that Maxwell lacked access to Chinese documents and relied on inferences from official Chinese statements. Historian Srinath Raghavan argued that Maxwell 'overreached' and 'curiously interpreted Delhi's actions almost as Beijing would have viewed it.' Maxwell died on 23 September 2019 at the age of 92 or 93.