When there is a political change of guard at the Centre, there is always the temptation on the part of the new incumbents in office to indulge in finger wagging exercises and needless recrimination; a tendency to fault the old order on its handling of vital issues of national interest. It is therefore highly commendable on the part of Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee to quickly nip in the bud an incipient controversy over the NDA government’s early handling of the Kargil war of 1999. The charge — raised in an in-house study conducted by the army — was that the then political leadership unduly delayed the launching of air strikes against Pakistani intruders, which translated into higher casualties of Indian lives on the ground.Mukherjee’s clarification in Parliament on Wednesday, endorsing the NDA government’s handling of that early phase of the Kargil war, has achieved two important purposes. One, it has helped throw more light on the events of that fateful May. His observation that the delay in deploying air power could not be perceived as the reason for higher casualties is borne out by the Express’s own reportage and reconstruction of the events of that period. As this newspaper has underlined, of the 474 casualties of the Kargil war, only 35 had occurred before the air strikes. In any case, there are several calculations involved in assessing the value of air strikes — including factors like their efficacy and complementarity with the forces on the ground. Apart from this, the unwarranted escalation of tension that the uncalibrated use of air power entails would clearly be a very real concern to any political dispensation — all the more so in a nuclearised region like the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, in hindsight, the circumspection that the NDA government exercised in this regard was both apt and necessary, no matter what the military brass may conclude with the wisdom of hindsight.The second valuable fall-out of Mukherjee’s invention is the message it sends out that when it concerns the country’s core interests — which would, of course, include its conduct of war in the defence of its borders — there can be no scope for raucous partisanship or careless politicking. That is what national consensus entails. That is what is meant when the principle of continuity in change is advocated and upheld. Let us, therefore, banish that vexatious genie that escaped from a classified army document and put an end to an unedifying political controversy.
