The writer, a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review, has made a name for himself through his writings on Asian politics, especially that relating to the region between India's Northeast to Thailand and how China rubs against this region. In this book, he has anchored his account of the Sino-Indian friction on the 1962 Sino-Indian war that resulted in a disastrous defeat for India. The title tells part of the story, it is 'China's India War' and its inspiration comes from Neville Maxwell's detailed but flawed account, India's China War, which shaped historiography for decades because of his access to the postwar documents and papers that formed the official Henderson Brooks-Bhagat inquiry on the war. That document is still classified, though Maxwell has since put the copy of the report he had on the Internet.

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This writer did his bit to get a better understanding of the subject by obtaining and putting the Indian official history of the war on the Internet in 2000. After readying it for publication in the early 1990s, the government developed cold feet and kept the manuscript under wraps. There are Chinese accounts, such as that of the China's Academy of Military Sciences, the South Asian scholar, Wang Hongwei, Xu Yan of the Chinese National Defense University that do not figure in Lintner's account. Indeed, for a specialist view of the subject, you can fruitfully look at the scholarship of John W Garver, Steven A Hoffman, or Indian scholar Bali Deepak and diplomat Ranjit Kalha. But Linter's aim seems to be to set right the perception that India was responsible for 1962. Usefully, he links the political events that led to the war and its aftermath with information we have today about the role of the murky inter-party dissensions in China that may have triggered the war.

As such, he does not dwell too much on the past, but shifts the focus to the more contemporary period to a region, east of Uttarakhand, which includes Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the Northeastern region extending to Myanmar.

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The chapter in Bhutan is useful, considering how little the outside world, including us in India, know about its culture and history. But it is important in the Sino-Indian context, as became clear from the Doklam episode last year. Lintner refers to the work of Michael Aris, Karma Phuntso and Lynpo Om Pradhan, as well as provide a balanced picture of Bhutan's complicated internal issues.

Lintner provides a useful precis of the Maoist movement in Nepal, which has waxed, waned and mutated in many ways in the past thirty years or so. He takes us through the bewilderingly complex Nepali Leftist politics which is still unfolding in the alliance between Prachanda and KP Sharma Oli.

The subtext of these pen-sketches of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal history is, of course, China. In Sikkim, India was able to consolidate its position through annexation, but the game is still on in Nepal and Bhutan. Lintner is clear that China did not in any way support the Maoist insurgency, though, eventually they came to terms with the governments that the Maoists Prachanda and Bhattarai formed following the overthrow of the monarchy. But is has not hesitated to use its intelligence services to manipulate Nepali politics. In his assessment, China has now successfully established itself as a rival of India in Nepal.

The last portion of the book takes up issues in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland, Myanmar and beyond, to the Indian Ocean. This is a useful perspective which is often missed out because our focus seems to blur when we reach international boundaries.