Tribune News Service

Rohtak, December 8

Former defence officials associated with the Haryana Ex-Services League (HESL), a body of ex-servicemen, have decided to work for the defeat of the BJP nominees in the mayoral and municipal elections across the state.

This was stated by Col RS Malik (retd), a former president of the league, who was accompanied by Col KS Sansanwal (retd), Col RS Budhwar (retd), Col Jai Singh Kadian (retd), Capt Shamsher Singh Malik (retd) and Sub RK Ahlawat (retd), while addressing a news conference here today.

The former defence officers supported the candidature of Dr Jagmati Sangwan, the CPM’s mayoral nominee for Rohtak.

Col Malik alleged that the state government had hijacked the League and some functionaries government were interfering in its affairs.

The former HESL president maintained that the BJP regime at the Centre had made the surgical strikes a political tool, whereas it was a routine military exercise and no government had ever tried to seek credit or political mileage for it.

He alleged multifarious irregularities in the functioning of the League under the government-appointed administrator and an advisory committee constituted by him.

Jat samiti to campaign against BJP in Hisar

The All India Jat Arakshan Sangharsh Samiti will oppose the BJP candidates in the municipal corporation polls in five towns of Haryana. The samiti spokesperson Rambhagat Malik said at a meeting in Hansi town of the district that they would start campaign among electorate to vote against the BJP candidates in the MC polls. He said the state government had backstabbed the Jat community on the issue of reservation.

Time for India to get scholars to write unbiased books on the India-China War as conflicting versions abound

Line of Conflict: Blame game over India’s debacle in the 1962 War continues in the books that chronicle and analyse it

Ajay Banerjee

In the absence of an authentic public account, events leading to the month-long India-China war in 1962 have diametrically opposite and rather ‘conflicting versions’. Some blame India for being the aggressor, others blame China for having prepared for a war since 1959 and for being the aggressor.

Adding to the cauldron of conflicting versions are books written by key players of those times. B.N Mullick, the director Intelligence Bureau, wrote Chinese Betrayal: My Years with Nehru;  Lt Gen B.M Kaul, the then commander of the Tezpur-based IV Corps, wrote The Untold Story;  Brig DK Palit, the then Director Military Operations, penned the War in High Himalaya: The Indian Army in Crisis, 1962;  Brig J.P Dalvi, the then Commander of the Army’s 7th Brigade, has his version of events  Himalayan Blunder: The Curtain-Raiser to the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

All have looked at their own specific roles and are autobiographical accounts. In 2016, Shiv Kunal Verma, son of an Army Captain who fought the Sino-India war, wrote  1962: The War That Wasn’t. He pieced together yet another account that discusses the battle-scape and also the political scene.

Conflicting versions

A 1971 book India’s China War  by Australia-based  author Neville Maxwell kicked off the blame game by maintaining that Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had unleashed a ‘forward policy’ that ‘provoked’ China into a war (Oct 20, 1962 to Nov 23, 1962). Maxwell’s theory propagated in his book reinforces the thought that China was only defending its territory. British author Sir Alistar Lamb, who has authored three books, also presents a case against India.

Two other books have a diametrically opposite view maintaining that it was China, and not India that ‘provoked’ the war. Swedish Journalist Bertil Lintner’s China’s India War-Collision Course on the Roof of the World, and History of the Conflict with China — 1962, released for ‘restricted’ circulation by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in March 1993, puncture the Maxwell-Lamb theory that has cast a shadow on the post-Independence thinking on the Sino-Indian conflict.

At the launch of his book in New Delhi in December last year Lintner had said, “Maxwell may have misjudged and most people do make that mistake”. His book goes on to detail that the decision to go to war with India had been taken in 1959 — the year Dalai Lama had arrived in India.

The MoD book, rebuts the Maxwell claim an a aggressive ‘forward policy’ — a decision taken by India in November 1961 — saying it was to restrict the Chinese to their claim-line of 1956 and stop claims over the new territory in 1960. Beijing had expanded its claim on another 5,100 sq km of territory in eastern Ladakh. It was to “prevent further infiltration into unoccupied areas of Ladakh”, says the book possessed by a miniscule number of Indians, but the same is again not in public domain being classified as ‘restricted’.

India and China have an un-demarcated boundary. Five attempts by the British between 1847 and 1914 did not yield results. At present the India-China special representatives are charged to tackle the boundary question.

Need to correct misperception of disgrace 

The MoD book also debunks the ‘popular belief’ that India was totally ‘disgraced’ in the 1962 India-China War. It accepts the shortcomings, but tells how Indian troops held on in Ladakh, most notably at Rezang La in eastern Ladakh, just 5 km south-east of the hamlet of Chusul. “The Indian soldier was defeated but not disgraced in Ladakh,” it says, dispelling the notion.

Notably, the Chinese officially admit to 2,419 casualties (722 dead and 1,697 wounded). The figure is quite stunning given the situation in which each Indian position was asked to fight.

Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report apportions blames on Generals  

A report on the war by Lt Gen Henderson Brooks and Brig (later Lt Gen) Prem Bhagat is classified even as Neville Maxwell put out portions of it on a website. New Delhi did not rebut him for this nor had it done in 1971 by a scholarly rebuttal of his earlier book hence allowing Maxwell’s one-sided interpretation to flourish.

The portions put out in public reveal that the government wanted a ‘forward policy’, but left the implementation to the generals. Gen B.M Kaul, overruled valid cautions presented by Lt Gen Daulet Singh, the Western Army Commander who had insisted that a forward move must have adequate troop numbers, combat support and logistics.

The belief that pushing forward would not encounter Chinese resistance came from the Intelligence Bureau. The Army’s earlier stated view that “the Chinese would resist by force any attempts to take back territory held by them,” was countered by B.N Mullick thus: “The Chinese would not react to our establishing new posts and that they were not likely to use force against any of our posts even if they were in a position to do so”.

The Army Headquarters had a wrong assessment of troops. It argued that China could not muster more than 5,000 troops facing eastern Ladakh even as Lt Gen Daulat Singh warned (correctly) on August 17, 1962 that Beijing had 15,000 troops.

Hindrance in accessing records

The Public Record Act 1993 does not entail automatic declassification of military records, and exemptions under the Right to Information Act 2005 are a deterrent for researchers. A war history cell at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) produced a paper in 2016 titled A Historiographic Analysis of the Military History of  Post-Independent India. Authored by Jaideep Chanda, it is candid: “An analysis of the military historical literature in India will primarily find personal accounts mostly written by retired Army officers”.

Jammu, December 4

A special programme to mark the Navy Day celebrations was organised at Delhi Public School, Nagbani, on Tuesday.

The day started with a speech by senior students, who also sung patriotic songs to celebrate the greatness, glory and role of the Navy to the country.

Navy Day in India is observed on December 4 every year to celebrate the magnificence, achievements and role of the naval force to the country.

School coordinator Aarti Gupta acknowledged the efforts of the students by saying that the Indian Navy plays a crucial role of exercising joint operations with neighbouring countries, providing support to people living on edges and helping them to set up their lives in such difficult regions. — TNS

The corridor, if not handled properly, can cause friction instead of promoting goodwill. At the same time, does it indicate Pakistan’s fresh thinking towards India, brought forth by its realisation that its economic woes and stability cannot be addressed without normalisation of ties with India?

Vivek Katju
Ex-secretary, Ministry of External Affairs

IF Pakistan’s object was to take the corridor to Kartarpur Sahib to the destination of peace and engage a reluctant India in full dialogue, the comments and actions of Prime Minister Imran Khan and army chief Qamar Bajwa on November 28, the day it organised the ground-breaking ceremony, and later, the injudicious remarks of Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi were counterproductive.

Khan’s initial intention may have been to use the occasion to point to his desire for the normalisation of India-Pakistan relations. But if that was the case, he should have realised that a reference to the Kashmir issue would vitiate the atmosphere. General Bajwa’s presence was useful, for it indicated the army’s support for the corridor. But his exchange of greetings with a known Khalistan supporter raised legitimate questions of that all-powerful institution’s motivations. And, Qureshi’s exultation that Khan had bowled a ‘googly’ which had compelled India to send ministers to the ground-breaking ceremony was plain stupidity, raising doubts about Pakistan’s objectives.

India too travelled away from the Kartarpur Sahib corridor’s possibility of positively impacting the bilateral relationship. On Gurpurab, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking the blessings of Guru Nanak Dev, implicitly held out the vision of a changed India-Pakistan relationship. However, in External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj declining the invitation to attend the ceremony and instead sending two Sikh ministers, India signalled that it was honouring Sikh sentiment more than anything else. That indication was confirmed when, on the ground-breaking day itself and when its ministers were to be in Pakistan, Swaraj reiterated India’s position that full bilateral engagement could only be undertaken once Pakistan had abandoned terror.

Swaraj cannot be faulted for drawing attention to the inappropriateness of Qureshi’s ‘googly’ boast. It is noteworthy that while the Pakistan Foreign Ministry was underlining that the Kartarpur initiative was “solely in deference to the long-standing wishes of our Sikh brethren”, the minister himself was using the cricketing metaphor — and in that context ‘yorker’ would have been better — to show how Khan, the fast bowler, had slipped one past India. In doing so, he only succeeded in eroding the effort of his diplomats. Khan’s endeavour at damage control by asserting that “it was not a googly or a double game but a straightforward decision” will hardly help.

The choice of the word “brethren” in the statement reveals Pakistan’s long-held desire to build enduring bridges with Sikhs all over the world, and especially in India. For decades, Pakistani official propaganda targets India’s minorities, including Sikhs, and seeks to create schisms between the majority community and the minorities. It projects the minorities to be under majority yoke. The fact that it will never succeed in its vain attempt at diluting the patriotism of India’s Sikhs does not and will not deter Pakistan from making attempts to do so.

The role of Navjot Singh Sidhu is merely a distraction to the larger issues surrounding the Kartarpur Sahib corridor. Countries take decisions on issues such as the corridor, which had remained stuck — but not always in focus — for decades, not on the basis of personal friendships but a careful evaluation of their interests. Individuals can become conduits for messages or hasten or retard processes, but by themselves, they can never solely deliver. Mutual praise between Khan and Sidhu may have made for catchy TV shows but is meaningless in achieving results in difficult bilateral ties as between India and Pakistan. Sidhu’s comments and actions added passing grist to the domestic political mill but even here they are hardly of enduring relevance.

Apart from the physical construction of the corridor, which Pakistan wants to complete in time for the 550th Gurpurab, the two countries will have to work out the procedures for its use by the pilgrims. The Pakistan Foreign Ministry’s statement noted, “We also look forward to working out necessary details and modalities with the Indian side concerning passage through the corridor.”

In addition, India will have to seek guarantees that Pakistan does not inflict Khalistani propaganda on the pilgrims. This is especially important as Pakistan routinely does so on Indian Sikh jathas during their visits on important festivals. India may have to insist that its officials are allowed daily access to the Pakistani side of the corridor to look after the welfare of the pilgrims. If the corridor is not handled properly, it may become a source of constant bilateral friction instead of promoting goodwill.

Pakistan plans accommodation and facilities around the Kartarpur gurdwara to fully utilise the potential of religious tourism. These will obviously not be within the corridor but in close vicinity of the gurdwara. It obviously hopes that these will attract Sikh pilgrims from the world over. Some visas to Indian Sikhs may be forthcoming for this purpose too. Does such a project and indeed the corridor itself indicate fresh thinking towards India brought forth by its current economic difficulties as well as a realisation that without the normalisation of ties with India, Pakistan will not be able to become really stable let alone prosperous? Unfortunately, there is no evidence to indicate so, especially in the army.

The fact is that Pakistan will have to radically change course so that a full dialogue with India can take place. For that, Pakistan will have to redefine its approach to the use of terrorist groups against India. Pakistan is hardly going down that path, for it is keeping Khalistani elements within its territory and also supporting them outside. The assessment that Indian security agencies cannot be complacent on the Khalistani front is valid. The Kartarpur Sahib corridor, while a good and welcome development for Sikh pilgrims, may add to the concerns of Indian security managers.

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New Delhi, November 21

With border guarding force BSF facing the maximum brunt, in the last three nearly 400 paramilitary personnel lost their lives in operations in the country, including firing from across the Indo-Pak border and terrorist and insurgency-related incidences.

A senior Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) official said as per the latest data available, of the total nearly 400 casualties in the line of duty, the maximum (167 personnel) from the BSF were killed between 2015 and 2017. A majority of them lost their lives while guarding the highly sensitive borders in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has lost 103 personnel, mostly while fighting Naxals and militancy in J&K, the MHA official said.

While the BSF lost 62 men in action in 2015, 58 in 2016 and 47 in 2017, the CRPF lost nine personnel in action in 2015, 42 in 2016 and 52 in 2017. As many as 48 personnel of the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) were killed in action, the official added.

The SSB guards the Indo-Bhutan and Indo-Nepal border. The troops of the force are also deployed in internal security duties. Sixteen were killed in 2015, 15 in 2016 and 17 in 2017. — TNS

Rafale fighter jet