After the Indian Army got its Pakistani counterpart to surrender in the eastern theatre during the 1971 Bangladesh war, the army chief Sam Manekshaw wrote a warm letter to RN Kao, the chief of the Research and Analysis Wing—India’s external intelligence agency. The letter conveyed his appreciation of what he described as the brilliant work done by R&AW before and during the war. The letter had also been marked Indira Gandhi. She returned the letter with the remark: “The General is generous in his praise because he won the war.”
B Raman, a retired officer of R&AW, recounted this episode while talking about VP Malik, who had been the army chief during the 1999 Kargil War. Unstated in Gandhi’s remarks was the argument that the army would have been the first to put the blame on the intelligence agencies had it lost the 1971 war. Even during that conflict, the army had tried to apportion the blame for its less-than-glorious performance in the western sector on the failure of the intelligence agencies. When it comes to the Kargil War, it has become a mantra that has been repeated ad nauseam and established as accepted wisdom by commentators and servicemen alike.
Alone in the Ring, a new book by former general NC Vij, who headed the military operations directorate during the limited war with Pakistan, reiterates the narrative. The book has been stopped from being published after the defence ministry asked for the manuscript for vetting. Based on the extracts and media reports that have appeared so far, it seems that Vij continues with the same old storyline—the intelligence agencies failed, the army won thanks to the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers, and the generals were amazing leaders. The last one has been hard to drill home, for there are many still around who clearly remember the events of 1999—when India’s territorial integrity had been breached in a near unprecedented manner.
The army chief VP Malik was not even present in India when the crisis erupted. He had left on 9 May that year for an official trip to the Czech Republic. He did not cut short his visit even after the government was apprised of the situation, and returned through London. In an interview, he explained, “On the evening of May 17, I decided I had to return to India as quickly as possible. But, when I checked my options, I found I would take the same amount of time if I came through London as I would if I came directly to India.” He chose to return only on 20 May.
Malik’s decision to continue with his trip as per schedule had its consequences. The late diplomat Satinder Lambah, who had been India’s ambassador to Germany shortly before, and then foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, were visiting Berlin. Lambah recounts in his book In Pursuit of Peace, that Singh thought the situation in Kargil could not be as bad as it appeared because Malik was continuing with his European visit. The late Shakti Sinha, a bureaucrat in Prime Ministry AB Vajpayee’s office, wrote in his book about his tenure that the prime minister did not think the situation was very serious particularly because Malik was not cutting short his foreign tour. The situation in Kargil “may not be normal,” Sinha wrote, but it “wasn’t critical either.”
In fact, the situation had been critical much earlier. AY Tipnis, then air chief marshal of the Indian Air Force, recounted to Force Magazine that senior army officers had been approaching their IAF counterparts and seeking help to evict a few intruders from an area on the line of control. By around 10 May, the army’s northern command had requested the Air Officer Command headquarters in Jammu and Kashmir for “fire-support from Mi-25/35 helicopter gunships and armed Mi-17 helicopters to evict a few ‘intruders’ who had stepped across the Line of Control in the Kargil sector.” Tipnis recounts that by the time he met the officiating army chief, the lieutenant general Chandrashekhar, in his office the next day, he was certain that “the situation was desperate.” He was clear that the use of IAF in such a situation needed political clearance but could not persuade the officiating army chief to accept the essentiality of government clearance before the IAF provided fire support.
Four days later, Chandrashekhar asked him for fire support from helicopters, arguing that a “political go-ahead was necessary only in case fire-support was being provided by fighters; use of helicopters, even in a fire-support role, was an in-house services’ headquarters’ decision.” Tipnis refused, and rightly so. On 15 May, Tipnis noted that the ground situation in Kargil was “grave.” The army required the help of the air force to evict the intruders, but the army headquarters was reluctant, possibly because it was “embarrassed to have allowed the present situation to develop,” Tipnis noted, to reveal “the full gravity of the situation” to the government. The next day, a meeting of the three service chiefs under the aegis of the Chiefs of Staff Committee again decided to maintain the status quo. The government was being kept in the dark.
It was only on 17 May when the Vajpayee government first came to know about the situation in Kargil, two weeks after the intrusion of Pakistani troops had been reported by local shepherds. The government did not find out through the normal channels either. Manvendra Singh, a former parliamentarian of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was then a journalist with the Indian Express and living with his father Jaswant Singh, then the foreign minister. He told me in 2018 that in the second week of May, he was invited for dinner by a brigadier serving in the army headquarters. The officer told him that the situation in the Kargil sector was very serious, and the political leadership should be apprised by Singh via his father. Early the next morning, Manvendra asked his father if the latter was aware of any reports of major problems in the Drass-Kargil sector. Jaswant replied in the negative and then called the defence minister, George Fernandes.
Tipnis confirmed that a meeting was attended by the defence minister without any prior intimation on 17 May. Sinha mentions that on that day, National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra informed Vajpayee that there were cross-border developments in Kashmir that might become a cause for concern. Mishra seemed anxious, Sinha noted, and Vij provided the briefing to the prime minister in the operations room in the South Block the next day. Malik returned to India only on 20 May even though the army was asking for attack helicopters from the air force ten days earlier. The army’s failure at informing the political leadership was against democratic norms. While the army was exploring its limited options, the government could have used that valuable time to bring all the instruments of the state into play—military, diplomatic, informational, economic and political. By the end of the month, Pakistani forces had already reached the Kargil-Srinagar highway near Drass while the Indian army was scrambling for a consensus-based strategy.
As far as the briefings go, the Kargil War was the first time senior military officers briefed the leaders of the ruling party at the party headquarters. Vij—who went on to head the right-wing thinktank Vivekananda International Foundation after retirement—and Air Vice Marshal SK Malik drove along with Fernandes to an emergency meeting of BJP’s national executive on 31 May. Vij and Malik then gave the party leaders a detailed briefing on the situation along the LoC. This broke all service rules. The BJP workers were not bound by the oath of secrecy that a minister takes. The same evening, the BJP’s then spokesperson M Venkaiah Naidu said that Fernandes had brought the officers to the meeting. Fernandes himself had been invited by the party president Khushabhau Thakre. Vij went on to become army chief.
While the army’s behaviour was inexplicable and the Vajpayee government clueless, Farooq Abdullah, then chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, was on top of the game. On 19 May, at a closed-door meeting of the unified headquarters in Srinagar, Abdullah observed that the “recent infiltration was not a short-term plan but a sinister design of Pakistan aimed to isolate certain areas and cut off Kargil-Leh from the valley.” The minutes of that meeting record Abdullah as explicitly stating that “these were not mere militants but supported by some Pakistani regulars too.”
This was just the beginning of a truly messy few months, in which the political expediency to demonstrate a blemish-free victory over Pakistan using the post-liberalisation media took primacy over any norm of military accountability. To maximise its political benefits, the Vajpayee government decided to send the remains of every single soldier who had been killed in Kargil to their homes and accord state funerals to them—a first in Indian history. These became sites of anti-Pakistan nationalist propaganda, where the national tricolour merged with the BJP’s flag. Soldiers featured prominently on BJP’s election posters.
A template was set for the future. Full-page advertisements were taken out in the national and international press. India’s wide diaspora was mobilised to put pressure on senators and members of the US Congress. Official inquests such as the Kargil Review Committee set up after the war did not dig deep enough to avoid holding anyone responsible. No heads rolled at the senior level and the courage and sacrifice of the soldiers and young officers was used as a pretext by the military leadership to burnish its credentials.
Continuing in the same vein, the Modi government wants to partake in the glory of the Kargil victory but it has no interest in learning any lessons from that conflict. The official history of the war prepared by historian Srinath Raghavan, despite the army refusing to share most of the documents, has not been released till date. With the propaganda machinery in an overdrive on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kargil, it is easy to forget what really transpired in May 1999. The numerous tactical victories achieved on the slopes at a tremendous sacrifice of young men cannot absolve those who should have been held guilty. A celebration that evades questions of accountability only dishonours the valour of those soldiers.