Hindustan Times: New Delhi: Wednesday, 09 July 2014.
The NDA
government’s position on the controversial Henderson-Brooks committee report on
the reasons behind India’s humiliating defeat in the 1962 India-China war turns
out to be the same as the previous UPA’s.
In a written
reply in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, defence minister Arun Jaitley said the release
of the “top secret document” would not be in national interest. The government
ruled out the possibility of any information related to the report being
released fully or partially.
Australian
journalist Neville Maxwell had made portions of the report public in March, triggering
a fresh round of debate on India’s worst military defeat and the events that
led to it. The BJP had then demanded that the report, authored by Lieutenant
General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier PS Bhagat be declassified immediately.
Maxwell had
written on his website that he was making the report public as he wanted to end
his complicity in keeping it a secret. The report was leaked 13 years after the
government had appointed a committee under former defence secretary NN Vohra to
look into publication of war histories.
The only war
record to have been declassified so far relates to the 1947-48 Kashmir
operations. It was published four decades later in 1987.
Hearing an
RTI plea on the sinking of INS Khukri during the 1971 India-Pakistan war, the
Central Information Commission (CIC) had whacked the government in January 2008
for being obsessed with confidentiality. The defence ministry was asked to
outline its declassification policy for releasing information to the public.
The Khukri saga
was immortalised after its commanding officer, Capt Mahender Mulla, refused to
abandon the ship and remained seated in the captain’s chair till she sank with
18 officers and 178 sailors. Mulla was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra.
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