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Journalism of Courage
MOST ACCOUNTS OF INDIA’S wars with Pakistan have come from outsiders, rather than insiders. Ever since the Subcontinent edged towards nu-clearisation in the 1980s and a whole series of military crises confronted the region, Ameri-can academics and think tanks have produced more analyses than the Indians.
In giving us the first hand account of the Kargil war, General V.P. Malik, the army chief who conducted the war in 1999, might hope-fully have launched a new and welcome tradi-tion of soldiers writing professional accounts of the major events they participated in. Malik gives us a fine and easily accessible narrative on the surprise that confronted India when it discovered that territory had been seized by Pakistan in May 1999, and on the vic-torious response to it.
The Kargil confrontation, despite its limited scale and scope, will go down as a denouement in the military history of India. It demonstrated the extraordinary bravery of the Indian soldiers and young officers in retaking impossible heights from the Pakistani aggressors.
While the nation rallied behind the army, it was also shocked by the sweeping failures of the security establishment — intelligence, army command structures, the political lead-ership’s eager embrace of Pakistan even as covert aggression in Kargil was under way, and unwill-ingness to come to terms with what nuclear weapons meant for Indo-Pak military stability.
The K. Subrahmanyam Committee’s report — from “surprise to the reckoning” — has al-ready given us a macro-picture of the Kargil failures and paved the way for sweeping reforms in the security sector. What Malik gives usis the perspective of the army as it coped with the surprise and conducted its operations. All the phases of the conflict from the initial “fog of war” to the nature of the military operations and the eventual war termination on largely In-dian terms, are covered in impressive detail.
In doing so, he wades into the many politi-cal controversies that dogged the origin and conduct of the war. The intelligence commu-nity has already reacted to some of Malik’s as-sertions on the “strategic and tactical intelli-gence failure in assessing the real intentions of the Pakistanis”. To be sure, there will be others joining issue with the general. By their very na-ture these controversies, such as “who was re-sponsible for intelligence failure in Kargil”, will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Malik’s side of the Kargil story would for long be the benchmark in evaluating the war. It also sets new standards for military openness in the nation. At the same time, Malik only whets our appetite on a number of policy is-sues that emerged out of that confrontation. For example, on the role of nuclear weapons in the Kargil war. While he devotes a full chap-ter to the nuclear factor, and recognises the role of the “nuclear shield” that allowed Pakistan to conduct the jehadi war against India, he steps back from speculating whether the nuclear shield in itself emboldened Islamabad to em-bark upon the Kargil mis-adventure.
More needs to be written on the intersec-tion between high-profile US and Western in-tervention in bringing the war to early termina-tion. Although the world always interjected itself into Indo-Pak wars, Kargil raised the stakes and lowered the bar for such interven-tions given the potential for nuclear escalation. We also await from Malik to get a more de-tailed assessment of the potential doctrinal shift in India’s military thinking towards fight-ing limited wars in the now irreversible nuclear environment in the Subcontinent.
