On the death anniversary of Maharaja Ranjit Singh — June 27 — it’s time to look afresh and recall some of the unprecedented achievements of a mighty Indian Maharaja, checkmating the mightier Englishmen, steam-rolling their Indian opponents with ease, one after another.

Abhijit Bhattacharyya
Commentator and Author

When Rabindranath Tagore wrote the immortal stanza on Sikhs: “Pancha nadir tire, beni pakaiya shire; dekhite dekhite gurur mantre jagiya uthichhe Sikh; nirmomo nirbhik” (on the banks of the five rivers, tying their hair and braids, the Sikhs responded to the clarion call of their Gurus to wake up from torpor to transform themselves as valiant fighters for their honour), one is not sure whether the poet had Maharaja Ranjit Singh in mind or not.

Nevertheless, the well-known fact is that Tagore wrote at least six poems on Sikh heroism and martyrdom owing to the indelible impression it left on his psyche. Thus, he wrote two poems in 1888, three in 1898, and one in 1935. Of them, three were on Guru Gobind Singh, one each on Banda Bahadur and Bhai Taru Singh, and one on the boy, Nehal Singh.

Be that as it may, if we re-focus from the spiritual to the statecraft of the Sikhs led by Ranjit Singh, what re-surfaces today is the mind-boggling action and thought process of the first geo-strategic thinker-cum-ruler of modern Indian history who knew how to call a spade a spade with the rapacious and roving British, notwithstanding his multi-front disadvantages. 

On the death anniversary of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who passed away on June 27, 1839, at Lahore, the capital of his empire, it’s time to look afresh and recall some of the unprecedented achievements of a mighty Indian Maharaja, checkmating the mightier Englishmen, steam-rolling their Indian opponents with ease, one after another. In a matter of days. Battle after battle. State after state. The London juggernaut across South Asian terrain appeared endless, and unstoppable.

When Ranjit was born (originally named Buddh Singh) on November 13, 1780, and growing, it was an era of perennial turbulence and anarchy in India. The Marathas (aspiring to be the Mughals’ successor on the Delhi throne) had already been brutally battered by Afghan chief Ahmad Shah Abdali (aka Durrani) in the third battle of Panipat (January 1761). Soon thereafter, the English (under Warren Hastings), too, fought the Marathas and ended with the treaty of Salbai (May 1782), thereby giving another rude jolt to the Indian dream of establishing ‘Hindu Pada Padashahi’ (the Great Hindu Kingdom). 

Thus, when (minor) Ranjit, as the chief of Sukarchakia Sikh Misl, since April 1792, ascended the throne in April 1801 (at 20-plus), who would foresee the man reigning a long 38 years, till 1839? Perhaps, the ruler Ranjit himself also could not have had seen the future valour, achievement and foresight of his own self!

No wonder, Ranjit’s sixth sense-cum-vision told him to contain the British in the south through sweet words of diplomacy and curb the congenitally habitual invaders of India (since time immemorial) with the sword-wielding cavalry combatants to the north and north-west. Thus was concluded one of the rare, landmark treaties: the Treaty of Amritsar on April 25, 1809, between the British Government and the State of Lahore.

As many as 210 years have gone post the Amritsar Treaty, yet every Indian would be proud to peruse its semantics: “Both parties being anxious to maintain the relations of perfect amity and concord” were the opening words. The British want “perfect amity and concord” with an Indian ruler! How often has it happened during 19th-century Indian history? The treaty was concluded “by Rajah Ranjeet Singh on his own part, and by the agency of Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, on the part of the British Government.” Ranjit’s best bet came as a sort of guarantee by the British: “The British Government will have no concern with the territories and subjects of the Rajah” (Ranjeet Singh) “to the northward of the Sutlej”.

The strategic vision of Ranjit assured avoidance of ‘war on two fronts’. The British, too, having thus far arrived from their tiny island, were more than aware of their vulnerability owing to the real possibility of a Maratha revival in the heartland and the prospect of growing resentment in the periphery turning into a multi-front revolt across the Indian terrain. Both the British and the Punjab king secured their respective fronts.

Assured of stability and security, Ranjit had the north, north-west, and west to move his military; which he did. Successfully. With ‘one at a time’ policy. With a professional band of fortune-seeking, able commanders transcending borders and barriers of caste, language and religion, thereby putting Ranjit Singh way ahead of his times, compatriots, foes and friends alike. His sentence ‘Ek din sab lal ho jayega’ (One day everything will turn red) after seeing several red-colour territories on the map of South Asia (red denoting the British-conquered or -occupied Indian kingdoms and principalities) was prophetic. Ranjit Singh certainly was no prophet. He was an able ruler. A king. Far from pretentious. He had his plus points. He also had fault lines and share of failure.

He was a brilliant commander and himself a warrior par excellence without doubt. However, it was the misfortune of Punjab, and hence the history of India, that so great a visionary and geostrategic ruler like him would leave behind an empire destined to be doomed so fast and furious.

It’s of course no fault of Ranjit Singh that his was an essentially land power owing to Punjab (for that matter all territories which he conquered), Kashmir, Afghanistan and the fringe areas of Central Asia being landlocked. Hence, when the ‘great game’ began for the possession of land as buffer by the British and access to the Indian Ocean warm water port by Moscow (through the territories of South Asia) to break out of its land-fixative strategy, the importance of Ranjit Singh as the best buffer emerged for London and Moscow. His stability and ability were undoubtedly far superior, and preferable, to the eternal turbulence of Afghanistan which the British realised soon after his demise.

The British made the fatal mistake to fight the Afghans directly, in March 1839; but came back battered and shattered in 1842. There was no Ranjit Singh to give the British shelter, safety and security from/of/for the north-west frontier, to expand across other zones. The strong man of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Central Asia was gone. And as it so often happens, an ‘over-strong’ predecessor is invariably succeeded by spineless, squabbling successors. Ashoka, Aurangzeb and Hitler: all were strong. Their states just capitulated after them. One is reminded of the old saying about the strong father’s weak son: “His sceptre was the bow of Ulysses which could not be drawn by a weaker hand.”

Vishav Bharti
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, February 10

The 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar was not an isolated incident or the outcome of a brutal mindset, but a “calculated move to strike terror” among the masses, says a new book by a British historian.

To be released on Tuesday, Jallianwala Bagh: An Empire of Fear and The Making of A Massacre by Kim A Wagner argues that demonstrations of violence were intrinsic to the colonial encounter not just in British India, but also Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The book is based on a range of material from diaries and letters to court testimonies. Wagner observes that the story of Jallianwala Bagh is also the story of a particular colonial mindset haunted by the spectre of the ‘Mutiny’ or the First War of Independence.

“After 1857, the British in India did not respond to local unrest as much as to what they imagined that unrest was or could become — hence the consistent disproportionality of violence on the part of the colonial regime. The Amritsar massacre was accordingly both retributive and pre-emptive: Dyer took revenge for the attacks on Europeans, including Miss Sherwood [a missionary teacher attacked in Amritsar], during the riots three days earlier, but he also acted to prevent a much bigger outbreak that he believed to be imminent.”

He writes that at Amritsar, Dyer had simply followed the example of so many colonial officials before him, including Frederick Henry Cooper, Amritsar DC during the 1857 rebellion, or L Cowan, who ordered Kukas to be blown from guns in 1872.

Both had resorted to “exemplary and indiscriminate violence when faced with rebellion and anti-colonial unrest”. Wagner says that rather than an exceptional episode, “in singular and sinister isolation”, the Amritsar massacre revealed the inner workings, and the imagined vulnerability, of the British colonial rule in India.

Colonial punishment, Wagner observes, had little to do with justice, and that the suppression of the unrest in Punjab in 1919 exposes the fundamental lie about the pre-eminence of the rule of law in British India in the most glaring fashion.

“A week after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, on 21 April 1919, Lieutenant Governor Michael O’Dwyer made a remarkable statement when defending Dyer’s actions to Viceroy Chelmsford: ‘The Amritsar business cleared the air, and if there was to be a holocaust anywhere, and one regrets that there should be, it was best at Amritsar. O’Dwyer was here using the word ‘holocaust’ in its literal sense of a ‘burnt offering’ – as a sacrifice. The crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, in other words, had to be sacrificed to produce the necessary effect, ‘clearing the air’, and preventing a second ‘Mutiny’.”

The book finds that Amritsar massacre was just in continuity of what the British were doing to the local populations, variously described as ‘tribal’, ‘savage’ or ‘fanatic’, on the North-West Frontier in Afghanistan, in Sudan or throughout parts of Africa and elsewhere.

They routinely massacred locals with machine guns, drove off cattle and burned villages in demonstrative displays of power. “What became known as ‘savage warfare’ was not simply shaped by the tactical necessities of asymmetric fighting against irregular enemies, but was based on deeply encoded assumptions concerning the inherent difference of local opponents.”

The Indian Air Force is all set to deploy ASRAAM heat seeking close combat air-to-air missile in its Sukhoi Su-30 MKI Fighters, Livefist has reported. The IAF is currently in the final stages of the programme to mate the British missile system with Russian-origin Sukhoi fighter jets.

A pair of HAL-built Su-30 MKI jets have gone through required modifications in software to deploy the MBDA ASRAAM missile, top IAF sources were cited in the report as saying.

The move comes after IAF successfully integrated the missile system with its Jaguar deep penetration strike jets. The ASRAAM integrated Jaguars are part of IAF’s £250 million contract with United Kingdom’s MBDA in July 2014. The modified Jaguars are to be declared operation ready this year.

According to the report, the IAF is intending to fully replace the Su-30 MKI’s current close combat missile, Russian Vympel R-73, with the ASRAAM in a phased manner.

The ASRAAM-armed Su-30 would be reportedly declared ready around the same time as the Jaguars, and will make use of the same test cycle.

National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL) was tasked with the checking the stability of the ASRAAM on the Su-30 airframe at its Bengaluru wind-tunnel.

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 8

Of the 33 cadets from Punjab, who were commissioned as officers at the Indian Military Academy (IMA), Dehradun, today, as many as 15 are alumni of Maharaja Ranjit Singh Armed Forces Preparatory Institute (AFPI), Mohali.

A total of 382 officers of the 144th Course, along with 77 foreign cadets, passed out from the IMA today. Punjab stood at the fourth place in terms of the number of officers in the batch, a marked improvement over previous years.

The highest number of officers are from Uttar Pradesh (72), followed by Bihar (46) and Haryana (40). The passing out parade was reviewed by Lt Gen C Mathson, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, South Western Command.

The cadets from the AFPI are from the institute’s third batch. They had undergone two-year training at the institute along with completing their Class XII from 2013 to 2015, followed by three years at the NDA and a final year at the IMA. The senior most among them was Battalion Under Officer Harshdeep Singh Sohi, who has been commissioned into the Mechanised Infantry.

Amongst the rest, two have joined the Armoured Corps, four each have opted for the Infantry and the Artillery while two each have chosen the Signals and the Army Ordnance Corps.

“With this, the total number of commissioned officers from the first three AFPI batches comes to 50. Another five cadets are under training at the Air Force Academy and are expected to be commissioned into the Indian Air Force on June 15,” said Maj Gen BS Grewal, Director General, AFPI.

In the batch that had passed out in June last year, over half the cadets from Punjab were AFPI alumni. General Grewal said so far, six AFPI courses had contributed 119 cadets to various service academies.

The AFPI was set up by the Punjab Government in 2011 for training boys for joining the armed forces as commissioned officers through the NDA or other service academies. Earlier, the entire state was sending just six to eight boys to the NDA for each course.

NEW DELHI: The defence ministry is set to invite private sector companies to participate in the Rs 21,000 crore deal for new naval utility helicopters, which will be the first project to kick off under the strategic partnership (SP) policy under the ‘Make in India’ initiative.

Sources said that the first ‘expression of interest’ (EoI) to the private sector under the policy will be issued for the helicopter deal in the coming days while others like a mega plan to manufacture submarines,  ..

Itanagar/New Delhi, June 5

A massive day-night search for a transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force, which went missing two days ago, continued on Wednesday in remote mountainous Mechuka in Arunachal Pradesh’s West Siang district.

The Russian-origin AN-32 aircraft with 13 people on board lost contact on Monday afternoon after taking off from Jorhat in Assam for Menchuka advanced landing ground near the border with China.

IAF sources on Wednesday said additional assets, including two Sukhoi-30 aircraft, were deployed on the third day to locate the missing plane apart from the fleet of C-130J and AN-32 planes and two Mi-17 and two ALH helicopters.

The ground forces included troops from the Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and state police.

The two Sukhoi-30 and two C-130J aircraft will carry out night missions, they said.

The IAF has been regularly updating the families of all air-warriors on board the aircraft about the rescue operation.

Military sources said rescuers have not received any signal from the emergency locator beacon in the missing plane, adding there is a possibility that the device may not have been functional.

They said the plane that went missing is yet to be upgraded with latest avionics and radars, though some of the AN-32 were strengthened with advanced systems.

The Indian Navy’s P-8I aircraft was deployed on Tuesday as it has electro-optical and infra-red sensors which could be helpful in the search operation.

IAF officials said ISRO’s Cartosat and RISAT satellites are taking images of the area around Menchuka to help the rescuers find the plane.

They said the area has thick vegetation and difficult terrain which are making the rescue operation challenging.

The IAF on Monday said the aircraft took off from Jorhat at 12.27 pm for the Menchuka advance landing ground, and its last contact with the ground control was at 1 pm.

A total of eight aircrew and five passengers were on board the aircraft.

The AN-32 is a Russian origin aircraft and the IAF currently operates a sizeable number of it. It is a twin-engine turboprop transport aircraft.

An AN-32 aircraft had crashed near a village in West Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh in June 2009 in which 13 defence personnel were killed.

The aircraft had crashed over the Rinchi Hill above Heyo village, about 30 km from Mechuka advance landing ground.

In July 2016, an AN-32 aircraft went missing while taking off from Chennai for Port Blair with 29 people on board.

The aircraft could not be traced following weeks of massive search operations covering 2,17,800 square nautical miles by multiple aircraft.

Months later, an IAF court of inquiry concluded that it was unlikely that the missing personnel on board the aircraft would have survived the accident. — PTI

Tribune News Service

Jammu, December 5

Tributes were paid to the heroes of the Chhamb battle of 1971 at a solemn ceremony at Pannu War Memorial in Akhnoor under the aegis of the Crossed Swords Division on Wednesday.

A contingent of the 5 Sikh Regiment comprising Junior Commissioned Officers and other ranks was also present. It also paid homage to the heroes of their unit.

A defence spokesman said: “During the 1971 Indo-Pak war, a Company of the 5 Sikh Regiment was entrusted with the vital role of defending the important approaches to the Chhamb sector under the leadership of Major DS Pannu.”

“Over a period of four days, the brave soldiers successfully repulsed as many as 14 attacks, thereby foiling the designs of the Pakistan army in the sector. The brave soldiers stood fast till the end despite all odds and inflicted prohibitive losses on the enemy. Many of them, including Major DS Pannu, the Company Commander, sacrificed their lives in the line of duty in the finest traditions of the Indian Army,” he said.

On the solemn occasion, Maj Gen Rajinder Dewan, General Officer Commanding, Crossed Swords Division, Col NJS Pannu (retd), brother of Late Major DS Pannu, who was awarded the Vir Chakra posthumously, and other serving and retired soldiers laid wreaths at Pannu War Memorial.

A kirtan, ardas and langar were also organised at the memorial. A number of ex-servicemen and locals also attended the ceremony and paid respects to the brave sons of the nation.

Col Manmohan SIngh father of Lt Gen Ranbir Singh contradicts surgical strikes due to name changed for Raids conducted earlier .Her himself had conducted Raids in J& K.