M A I N   N E W S

Cong, BJP spar over war report
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 18
The Congress and the BJP today sparred over the classified report on the 1962 Sino-Indian war with the former accusing the BJP of politicising the issue on the eve of the elections reminding that the Congress never questioned the government on the 1999 Kargil conflict during the General Election then.

While the Ministry of Defence refused to accord any legitimacy to the report marked “top secret”, in an official release said it came across news reports which state that “an Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has put out sections allegedly from the Henderson Brooks report on the India - China conflict of 1962. Given the extreme sensitive nature of the contents of the report, which are of current operational value, it is reiterated that the Government of India has classified this report as a top secret document and, as such, it would not be appropriate to comment on the contents uploaded by Neville Maxwell on the Web.”

BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said the humiliation was the direct outcome of the way the then Prime Minister, under pressure from his Defence Minister VK Krishna Menon, “ignored the concerns of the Indian armed forces and they were left to fend for themselves in a state of complete unpreparedness. The nation still feels the pain of that humiliation”.

While advocating that the report be made public, Prasad said the country’s future generations must also know who “secured the nation more” Jawaharlal Nehru or Sardar Vallabhai Patel.

Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi accused the BJP of playing “cheap politics …everybody knows that what happened in 1962 was a product of a complex multitude of diverse factors”, and to suggest to make it “a unilateral factor” was to try to “miniaturise” things which were complex. Meanwhile, two veteran journalists Kuldip Nayar and Inder Malhotra raised questions on the timing of the report being made public. “The timing is intriguing,” Nayar, who otherwise has been advocating that the report be brought into public domain, said.