This absorbing and closely documented book challenges the conventional wisdom about the Sino/Indian conflict which reached its climax in the border war of 1962. Reasonable, peaceable India, victim of unprovoked Chinese aggression --- such is the general view. But Neville Maxwell's dispassionate account of the policies and actions which led to the border war shows that the truth was very different.

First recounting the history of the disputed boundaries, the author shows that a diplomatic settlement need not have been difficult to achieve --- then traces the policy decisions taken in India early in the 1950s which blocked the way. The failed Nehru/Chou Enlai summit meeting in New Dehli in 1960 marked the effective end to any hopes of a negotiated settlement. After that another story begins; the attempt of the Indian government to use military force to push the Chinese out of territory India claimed and the resistance of the Army to a policy which the soldiers knew was wholly beyond their power to implement.

That resistance was eroded by politics and favouritism and late in 1961 India launched the "Forward policy", a direct military challenge to China. The point of unavoidable collision approached through the following summer and was reached in the climax of the border war, which saw India's army in the north-east shatter under the Chinese assault.

Neville Maxwell is uniquely qualified to write this book. He reported these events for The Times as their South Asia correspondent, augmenting and reappraising his understanding of the dispute as a senior fellow at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. In his research, he was given access to unpublished Indian government papers and reports.

Born in London in 1926, Neville Maxwell went to school in Australia, served in the AIF in 1945, and continued his education at McGill University and Cambridge. Working first as a reporter in Australia, he joined The Times in 1955 and spent three years in the Washington bureau before coming to New Delhi in August 1959 as South Asia correspondent. He held this assignment for eight years, travelling widely through India and the sub-continent; and left in July 1967 to make a study of the Sino-Indian dispute as a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University. He is now joining the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford.