Neville Maxwell discloses document revealing that India provoked China into 1962 border war

At an official banquet in Beijing in 1971, Neville Maxwell had the shock of his life. Premier Zhou Enlai and Pakistan's then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rose from the head table and walked to the foreign correspondents' table, where The Times reporter was seated.

"Mr Maxwell," said Zhou through his interpreter, "your book has done a service to truth, and China has benefited from that." Zhou called for a glass of mao-tai and offered him a toast.

"That moment at the banquet is deeply engraved in my memory, failing as it sometimes is," Maxwell said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

The 87-year-old Australian journalist and historian likes to make jokes about his supposedly fading memory. But he won't let India forget its past errors which, he says, led to the 1962 Sino-Indian war.

For nearly half a century he has been going against the grain of Indian collective memory that remembers the humiliating defeat in the month-long border war as an unprovoked act of aggression by a country it considered a friend.