Remember the idea is to be confident and not subservient or complacent towards our northern neighbour. But this can only happen if Indian strategists overcome the scars of 1962. This is illustrated by a meeting of the hush-hush China Study Group in 2004, when the Indian army opposed the plan of constructing 12 strategic roads in Arunchal Pradesh, saying that these would be used by Chinese Peoples Liberation Army to come into India. At this point, the then home secretary testily told the then director-general, Military Operations, that if the army was so afraid of meeting the PLA on the foothills, it should prepare to meet it in Delhi.

It is this need for clarity that demands the Brookes-Bhagat Report to be made public. It could ensure that the 1962 failure gets translated into some positive action. In the late eighties, then minister of state for defence, Arun Singh, tried unsuccessfully to ask the defence secretary, S.K. Bhatnagar, to lend the Report to the army chief, General K. Sundarji, so that he could read it, but to no avail. In 1997, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, N.N. Vohra, was successful in accessing the Report, with a deputy secretary of the defence ministry waiting inside his office to ensure that there was no attempt made at photocopying it!

The consequences of this policy of denial is clear: the true history of 1962 war will remain buried. It will be the Chetan Anand film or some coloured war accounts of then serving generals which will serve as the public record of that war, unless the ‘Haqeeqat’ of the Brookes-Bhagat Report emerges.