State of the Union
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was oracular in his prophecy : “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago”. Sixty- two years after the Sino- India border conflict, the Indian state remains obtusely paranoid about making the Henderson Brooks Report public.
The author of India’s China War, Neville Maxwell, in a blog dated February 7, 2014 and titled “My Henderson Brooks Albatross” — accessible on www.indiandefencereview.com — put out in the public domain the version of the report available with him. The version underscores that the Henderson Brooks Report was an operational review instituted by the then Chief of the Army Staff on December 14, 1962 “to go into the reverses suffered by the Army, particularly in the Kameng Frontier Division of NEFA ( now Arunachal Pradesh)”.
The review was carried out by Lt. Gen. T. B. Henderson Brooks, assisted by Brig. P. S. Bhagat. The terms of reference of the review were ostensibly to inquire into what went wrong with training, equipment, system of command, physical fitness of the troops and capacity of commanders at all levels to influence the men under their command. The review of the functioning of the Army Headquarters was purportedly not carried out on the advice of the Chief of the Army Staff. This precluded the examination of the relationship between the defence ministry and Army Headquarters and the directions given by the former to the latter.
The object perhaps being that Lt. Gen. Brooks could not have been expected to possibly evaluate the conduct of his superiors, eminently desirable, as it may have been.
A perusal of the report even with pages 112- 157 and the annexures omitted only underlines the fact that it was a professional exercise done without any predetermined intent to absolve some and blame others for the operational lapses that happened.
Yet, 58 years later, on April 19, 2010, in a reply to a question tabled in the Lok Sabha by the writer on making the report public, the then defence minister stated: “Henderson Brooks Report is a top- secret document based on an internal study by the Indian Army, contents of which are not only extremely sensitive but are of current operational value.”
Four years later, on July 8, 2014, the current defence minister, Arun Jaitley, responding to a similar question in the Rajya Sabha, stated, “This is a top- secret document and has not been declassified so far. Further release of this report, fully or partially or disclosure of any information related to this report, would not be in national interest.”
Paradoxically, on March 19, 2014, Mr Jaitley, then the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, made a strong pitch for making the report public in an article available on www. bjp. org. He wrote: “Are archival records to be kept away from public gaze indefinitely? If the document pertains to internal security there may be some public interest served in keeping them a secret for some time. However, to keep these documents ‘ top- secret’ indefinitely may not be in public interest… The security