1962 Sino-Indian war still stirs bitter controversy
BJP seeks to make political mileage out of leaked report that New Delhi deems too sensitive to officially release
India's defence ministry says a controversial report about the country's defeat by China in a brief, bloody 1962 border war will remain classified due to its "sensitive" nature.
The comments came after excerpts from the Henderson Brooks Report analysing the causes of India's defeat were uploaded on the internet by veteran Australian journalist Neville Maxwell.
The report could not be accessed from India, and there was no immediate explanation for why the website was blocked. But India's NDTV television network website cited passages from the document it said were posted by Maxwell, who reported extensively on the war.
The conflict was painted in India as Chinese aggression across the Himalayas. But the leaked report commissioned by the Indian military said Delhi's policy of forward deployment in the high mountains had increased the chances of conflict.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, the front-runner in elections beginning next month, demanded the government release the report by former army officer Henderson Brooks so the country would know how the government of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru pushed the military into a war it could only lose.
The investigation said that in the months leading to the war, Nehru's government ordered the military to patrol and establish posts far into the disputed border as part of a forward policy to deter the Chinese.
It accused the top military brass of failing to stand up to the government and tell the politicians that it did not have the resources to support aggressive deployment and that troops would be too thinly spread out.