Military Digest | General Krishnaswami Sundarji, a 21st-century general with a 20th-century army

“He had the flamboyance and showmanship of a Patton, the drive and conceptual vision of a Rommel, the stubbornness and ego of a Churchill, the ambitious hawkishness of a MacArthur and the manipulative skills of a politician,” wrote Inderjit Budhwar, then the editor of India Today, after Gen Sundarji stepped down as the chief of Army staff in May 1988. The piece written by Budhwar still stands out as an outstanding appraisal of a general who instituted fast-moving changes in the Army and one whose tenure saw unprecedented multiple challenges, many of them self-generated.

Behind the rakish cap, the penchant for designing new uniforms, boots, ties or regimental flags lay a serious mind that had been applied to the study of operational art at every stage of his career right up to the senior-most flag ranks. A little over two years’ tenure as the chief was never going to be enough to follow through with the changes he had instituted, even though he had a free hand when he was the vice-chief of Army staff under Gen K V Krishna Rao, a COAS from the same Mahar Regiment as Sundarji. It is a pity that the office of chief of defence staff never came about in those years, and there is scant literature available to suggest if a serious push was made for it by the military brass and politicians in power at the time.

Here, we must refer to the “manipulative skills” that Inderjit Budhwar talks about in Gen Sundarji’s dealings with politicians. There is no doubt that the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, took a shine to him. And it is also a fact that as the COAS, Gen Sundarji used this proximity to his full advantage. Indeed, being on the same page as the prime minister can hardly be counted as a disabling feature of personality for a service chief. And if Sundarji kept Rajiv Gandhi in good humour, including naming the assault to capture Pakistan Army’s Quaid Post (now Bana Post) as Operation Rajiv, among other things, it is certainly par for the course.
Since a column can never be enough to sum up a personality like Gen Sundarji’s, we must briefly touch upon a few key milestones in his career.

Operation Blue Star

Over the years, there has been scathing criticism of Gen Sundarji in the manner in which the Operation to flush out militants in the Golden Temple, Amritsar, was conducted in June 1984, when he was the GOC-in-C Western Command. In the words of Lt Gen SK Sinha (retd), who had resigned as vice-vhief of Army staff after being superseded as COAS by Gen Arun Sridhar Vaidya, “Sundarji was given the order—do this by first light tomorrow morning, and his reaction was ‘I will do it by day before yesterday’. And he went in. When he found the going tough, he asked for permission to use tanks and the sanction was given”.

In his book, Probal Dasgupta also alludes to the fact that while planning the operation, Sundarji was in direct touch with the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. However, as another former COAS, Gen V N Sharma, who incidentally succeeded Gen Sundarji as the chief, has brought out, General Vaidya was not in favour of Operation Blue Star in its present shape and form, but Sundarji pushed the idea through by bypassing his chief and interacting with the PM directly. As someone who was the director-general of military operations (DGMO) as a major general, Gen V N Sharma had a ringside view of the events as they unfolded and is one of the few senior officers of the time still around to share his views.

As fate would have it, it was Gen Vaidya who paid for Operation Blue Star with his life: he was assassinated in Pune soon after retirement. Surely this must have weighed heavily on Sundarji’s mind.

Exercise Brasstacks

Brasstacks was an exercise divided into four parts, and it was Brasstacks IV with the actual movement of troops on the ground at the end of 1986 that caused alarm bells to start ringing across the western world, not to mention the Pakistan Army, which had been on tenterhooks for quite some time that year.

However, Brasstacks had been preceded by Exercise Digvijay in 1983, when Gen Sundarji was the deputy chief of Army staff, and it was in this exercise that the seeds for the biggest mobilisation of troops in Brasstacks were sown. In Digvijay, as brought out in Probal’s book as well as by Inderjit Budhwar, Sundarji “moved large armoured columns at very high speeds and over distances that no Indian armoured regiment had moved before. Even in the last two wars with Pakistan, the maximum distance of Indian armour had been 15 km a day. During Operation Digvijay, Sundarji pushed that up to 90 km between dusk and dawn”. Critics in the armoured corps—and let’s not forget Sundarji was the first infantry GOC of an armoured division—pooh-poohed the breakdowns that the armoured vehicles suffered due to the punishing pace. Yet, it was a cautious mindset that Sundarji wished to change more than anything else.

The jury is still out today on whether Brasstacks was a ruse to keep the Pakistan Army occupied in Punjab and Sindh while another operation, named Operation Trident, was to be launched in the Northern Command to capture Skardu in the first phase and Gilgit in the subsequent phase. It is also difficult to ascertain if Rajiv Gandhi could have remained ignorant of Sundarji’s moves and was incredulously tipped off by an innocuous remark of the GOC-in-C Western Command, Lt Gen P N Hoon.

Major reforms

Being instrumental in raising the mechanised Infantry Regiment and the Army Aviation Corps ranks high among the far-sighted decisions made by Sundarji. There was considerable heartburn among colonels of regiments in the infantry when some of the senior-most and well-decorated battalions of their regiments were taken away and made part of the new mechanised Infantry Regiment. But none could stop the Sundarji juggernaut.

His introduction of a 15-year perspective plan covering operational contingencies was also far-sighted. He made a significant push towards reworking armoured warfare doctrines and bringing in fresh thinking with regard to mechanised operations, which also led to the raising of a mechanised Infantry Division (now an armoured division).

The Secunderabad-based 54 Infantry Division was given the role of an Air Assault Division. Influenced by the American Reorganisation Objective Army Division (ROAD), he raised the Reorganised Army Plains Infantry Division (RAPID) with new concepts and greater flexibility in manoeuvre and firepower.

The introduction of command and staff streams in the higher echelons of hierarchy starting from major- general continues to be highly debated till this day, as is the decision to change the command of a battalion or a regiment from the rank of lieutenant colonel to colonel.

It is a matter of strength of character that four decades later, Gen Sundarji continues to evoke debate and discussion among the strategic thinkers of this day. And books like General Brasstacks continue to be written about him. However, the last word on him is yet to be put to paper.

We end this column as we began it, with the words of Inderjit Budhwar in May 1988 about Gen Sundarji, which resonate even today:

“…..Sundarji’s legacy can never be fully and realistically analysed. He was, perhaps, a man ahead of his time, a 21st-century general dealing with a 20th-century army.”