Revealing India's failures in 1962 war with China can help clear the air

In India's heated pre-election atmosphere, the leaking online of parts of the Henderson Brooks report - the Indian army's internal operational review of the country's ignominious defeat in the 1962 war against China - has predictably raised the political temperature.

Access to it was blocked for hours after parts were put up online by Neville Maxwell , the retired New Delhi correspondent for . Maxwell is the author of a controversial 1970 book, based on the top-secret report.

Though the Indian government denied having anything to do with the internet block, the crackdown smacked of naivety on the part of the world's largest democracy in an era when sophisticated technology facilitates access to such documents in a trice.

Despite the passage of more than half a century, the full report remains a closely guarded secret by New Delhi. Commissioned in the aftermath of the war by the then army chief, General J.N. Chaudhuri, and submitted by Lieutenant General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier P.S. Bhagat in April 1963, it gives a blow-by-blow account of India's flawed military plans, uninspiring army leadership and the disastrous implementation of the "forward policy" of then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's government that climaxed in the fateful debacle.

The report is particularly scathing of Nehru's policy, which contributed to India's defeat. "We acted," says the report, "on a military unsound basis of not relying on our strength but rather on believed lack of reaction from the Chinese."

Maxwell tells on his website of his frustration at not seeing the report declassified after more than half a century.