During the next few years, he reported on the emerging Sino-Indian border conflict, then the end of the Nehru era and the post-Nehru developments in India.
[7] During the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Maxwell wrote for The Times from New Delhi and was the only reporter there who did not uncritically accept the official Indian account of events.
[8] In 1967, Maxwell joined the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, as a senior fellow to write his book India's China War.
[14]: 3 India's China War was widely praised across a diverse range of opinions, including British historian A. J. P. Taylor, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
It has been classified as top secret by the Indian government, but Maxwell acquired a copy and his India's China War contains the gist of the report.
Historian Parshotam Mehra commented that "deeply-rooted prejudice" oozed out of its every sentence, with examples such as:[12] Hostilities were provoked by India’s reactionary ruling clique which, itself successor to a hateful imperialist regime (British Raj), had been guilty of continuing the latter’s unabashed aggression against a peaceful neighbour....worse still at places, Indian troops in the East crossed the McMahon Line into China’s Tibet region.
Provoked beyond patience itself, the Chinese frontier guards fighting in self-defence, wiped out New Delhi’s armed aggression all along the 2,000-mile frontier.To sustain his narrative, Maxwell cited those facts alone that were convenient and omitted the others.
Well-known scholarly analyses such as the Himalayan Battleground[25] or Francis Watson's The Frontiers of China were missing from Maxwell's bibliography, and so too were the writings of men who had first-hand knowledge, such as Sir Olaf Caroe.
[12] Notwithstanding these defects, Mehra believed that the book made a contribution as an "alternative point of view to an understanding of the events" that led to the hostilities.
[12] Historian Sarvepalli Gopal, himself a key player in the Sino-Indian dispute as the Head of Indian MEA's historical division, wrote a lengthy rebuttal in The Round Table.
He pointed out that the Indian case for its border definition was set out in considerable detail in the Report of the Officials, which Maxwell dismisses with a one-liner and no real analysis.
[26] Historian Srinath Raghavan, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, called India's China War a "seminal revisionist account".