Maxwell said that the dispute between India China was created by the British in the mid-1930s. Maxwell said that the dispute between India China was created by the British in the mid-1930s.

In his first ever interview following his outing of the controversial Henderson Brooks report on the 1962 Indo-China war, veteran Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has once again set the cat among the pigeons.

In the interview to South China Morning Post, Maxwell said that the dispute between India China was created by the British in the mid-1930s "when they decided that for strategic reasons they should push their north-eastern frontier out some 60 miles. They knew China would not agree to that, because they'd failed to persuade Beijing to give them that belt of territory by diplomatic pressure in the Simla Conference in 1914, and so beginning about 1936 they just took it, by force. Read: Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report



"China was too weak to put up any military resistance but it was late in the day for the Empire to get away with that sort of action. The British parliament wouldn't stand for it. So they falsified the record of the Simla conference by withdrawing and pulping a volume of the series recording India's treaties and replacing it with a forged version that indicated that at Simla in 1914, China had accepted the new border alignment that they now called the McMahon Line, after the man who had in fact failed to get that agreement at Simla!" Also Read: 1962 Indo-China war veteran Brigadier Lakshman Singh shares his experience



When asked why independent India would follow Britain's line, he said, "It was a Faustian offer: "You keep quiet about what we did, and you get to keep the McMahon frontier: baulk, expose our trickery, give up the McMahon frontier territory, and what would your public and opposition think about it, Mr Nehru?"

Neville, a known China apologist, while explaining the significance of the 50-year-old report, claimed that "all the talk about China's 'unprovoked aggression' is utterly false, the truth is that India was the aggressor in 1962. But of course it's not spelled out in those terms, the political conclusion is buried in dense military jargon, written by soldiers for soldiers, the report is hard reading for unversed civilians.

"But nevertheless, the story emerges. From its very beginning as an independent state, India, which is to say Nehru in this context, took the view that the alignments of India's borders was a matter for India alone to decide, unilaterally, privately and definitively.

"Without for a moment considering that good sense and good international manners pointed to the need to bring Beijing in to discuss their common border, Nehru and his close advisers selected the alignment themselves and put out new maps showing them as full, formal, final international boundaries...and including an area beyond what Britain had ever claimed, the Aksai Chin.