Neville Maxwell

Neville Maxwell

Neville Maxwell (born 1926) is a British journalist.

Born in London, Maxwell was educated at McGill University and Cambridge University. He joined The Times as a foreign correspondent in 1955 and spent three years in the Washington bureau. In 1959 he was posted to New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. In the next eight years he traveled from Kabul to East Pakistan and Kathmandu to Ceylon, reporting in detail the end of the Nehru era in India and the post-Nehru developments. In 1967 he went as a senior fellow to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in order to write India's China War.[1] He was with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Oxford University at the time when his work India's China War was published in 1971.[1]

While serving as South Asia correspondent in The Times, Maxwell authored a series of pessimistic reports filed in February 1967. In the atmosphere leading up to the 4th Lok Sabha elections, he wrote that "The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed. [Indians will soon vote] in the fourth—and surely last—general election." An article written in The Guardian in the weeks prior to the election provided a contrary view, noting that "the Delhi correspondent of a British newspaper whose thundering misjudgments in foreign affairs have become a byword has expressed the view that Indian democracy is disintegrating.[2]

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