It’s a force multiplier

Worse, the noise, the dust and the din of a mob at the other end. The spears glistened in the setting sun. The bows and arrows, presumably with poisoned tips, and some primitive firearms and shotguns were very much in evidence. Gill, looking quite concerned for a change, was sitting amidst his CRPF LMGs and I walked up to him.

"What is the problem, Gill saab?" I asked.

"None,really," he said impassively, "except that you are around."

That evening, we were particularly fortunate. We decided to take our chances with the smouldering bridge which somehow held firm as all the vehicles crawled past to the other end, and safety.

Years later, one high-spirited evening as we sat in the fortress that passed for his home in Chandigarh and Gill basked in the glory of his Punjab success, I asked if he remembered the bridge in Mangaldai and how his reply then had still confused me.

He hadn’t forgotten at all. He smiled, in mischief and delight, and said: "The problem was simple. That mob meant business. I had some firepower too. So if it came to a real firefight, did I really want to have the media witnessing the mess?

The media witnessing the mess, an interesting metaphor that and one that is rather relevant now that, in the aftermath of Kargil, there is much excitement over the way the media has covered the crisis. Gen. V.P. Malik, Chief of the Army Staff, in an interview with melast week signalling the beginning of the endgame in Kargil had richly complimented the media for contributing not only to the war effort but also for generating national resurgence.

But there are also others who demanded, right through this crisis, that the media be put under censorship, that it was raising too many questions immaturely and prematurely, that it was giving too much information to the enemy. Now there is the preposterous insinuation that some mediapersons actually helped the Pakistani artillery target Indian soldiers by their indiscriminate use of satellite phones. The whisper campaign goes on and nobody pauses to ask how come, if the Pakistani gunners were so good at homing in on satellite beams, the suicidally-inclined correspondent and her crew survived?

There are perfectly good technological reasons why these insinuations are so ludicrously absurd but this is not the place to list them, nor do I have the credentials to explain the mechanics of satellite telephony. What is more relevanthere is that such nonsense, whisper campaigns and innuendo are only to be expected when somebody in the establishment confuses good media relations with psychological warfare. This is why there is deep suspicion of mediamen witnessing the mess of war, when ulterior motives are imputed to anybody who raises a difficult question or steps out of line.

Just as Kargil was the media’s first experience of a real war, though along a limited front, it was also our military’s first real experience of dealing with an intrepid corps of young, mobile war correspondents, armed with satellite phones and television cameras, filing from the spot, in real time. And, mercifully, no censorship.

There were some mistakes made. But when you look at the larger picture, the media on the spot, and much more than us the thoughters and the pundits smug in the comfort and safety of Delhi, made a big difference to this war. It was actually a force multiplier, a fact acknowledged by the Pakistani brass to their Indian counterpartsduring the de-escalation talks. "Your media," they said repeatedly, "is far too aggressive." Of course the delighted Indian generals were quite pleased to remind them that they could do nothing about it as they had no real control over the press in India.

What is it that the Pakistanis are complaining about? The Indian satellite channels are watched widely in their country, particularly Zee which is popular among the ordinary, non-English-speaking population. The upper crust often surfs the net for the Indian press.

With Indian television cameras bringing live footage of the fall of Tiger Hill and my own newspaper’s Gaurav Sawant, Vikramjit Singh and Muzammil Jaleel bringing eyewitness accounts of the victories as well as the mass burials of the fallen Pakistani soldiers by Indian Muslim troops, it was impossible for the Pakistani army or the so-called mujahideen to peddle the fiction that their foothold was actually expanding. With the return of almost every Indian coffin covered in such detail ontelevision screens, it was also that much more difficult for the Pakistanis to sustain their claims that the Indians were hiding a bulk of their casualties.

Surely, information is a weapon in modern warfare and the media can be the force multiplier it was proved to be in Kargil. But for that it has to have two other attributes besides enterprise, the dash and daring of its frontline reporters. These are credibility and transparency. Kanwar Sandhu, my colleague and an acknowledged writer on military affairs, wrote a spectacular, if sad, series on what went wrong initially at Kargil. It did not diminish India’s war effort in any way. It only gave our subsequent coverage from the spot, as the tide turned, that extra edge of credibility.

No surprise then that it was so often suggested to us by responsible people conducting the war that we please underline certain aspects as "even the Pakistanis take your paper so seriously". Our strength therefore was that even the Pakistanis thought we spoke the truth. Ihave to acknowledge that the Army was smart enough to appreciate this extra edge of credibility.

Never were we pressured to suppress something, or take a plant. If the Army did one thing right this time, it was not to try and rob the media of these qualities despite strong pressures from the odd information warrior from within, or pundits, including some retired generals, who wrote bylined articles demanding censorship. Of course, we exercised a great deal of self-restraint, sometimes infuriating our reporters in the field and under fire as they sent in despatches, in the early days, reflecting the confusion and frustration of the foot soldiers as well as the field commanders.

There were mistakes made. Look at the clips from the first few days of war and you will find some of the reporters describing with horrifying precision how far the Pakistani shells were landing from a brigade headquarters or a bridge. But we cleaned up our act very quickly. This is where good communication from the army, ratherthan whining and whisper campaigns, helped. We reporters are genetically designed to be excitable and sometimes silly but are not so foolhardy as to help the enemy land a 155 mm high explosive, 40 kg sonofabitch on our own heads.

The armies around the democratic world have figured this and have made this an essential part of their communication with war-time media. On the night the first Scuds hit a Tel Aviv suburb during the Gulf War, I was among a thousand-strong mob of scared, ashenfaced hacks clutching at their gas masks and being briefed by an Israeli general. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "never reveal the exact location of where the Scuds have fallen."

Then, waiting for us to absorb the message, he explained, "The Iraqis may be stupid. But presumably they have street-maps of Tel Aviv. The defence forces headquarters is rather close to your hotel. Wouldn’t you rather write the headlines than be mentioned in them? One thousand foreign correspondents killed in Iraqi scud attack?" Needless to add,nobody crossed that line. Some communication of that sort, of the tactical dos and don’ts from the Army to the media early on in this conflict would have helped. Hopefully somebody has kept the notes for the future.

The other persistent complaint of the sour-grapes brigade in Delhi has been that far too many reporters on the frontline were much too young, and inexperienced. So couldn’t we have sent slightly more seasoned (read older) people instead? Now, why does the Army send lieutenants and captains in their early twenties to assault these peaks? Why can’t it send slightly more experienced people, colonels and brigadiers instead? Just as hand-to-hand combat is best left to young men, covering it is best left to young reporters. You need that combination of dash, recklessness and hormones called youth for people to brave incessant shelling, cold, fear, hunger, lousy communication and carping editors with a smile. We surely grow wiser with age, but perhaps too wise to risk our backsides all the time likethis.

In my reporting days I wouldn’t think twice about walking the minefields in Jaffna, crossfire in Nagaland, the bloodied boulevards of Tianenmen or flying the overloaded, flare-spewing AN-26s in Afghanistan. Today I won’t step out without my crate of Bisleri. This was a serious war for the scribes, and we have, as evidence, two — rather young — reporters of The Hindustan Times recovering from shelling injuries. One will have to live with a centimetre square shrapnel lodged in his spleen.

There was a reason why I began this defence of my fellow hacks with that media-witnessing-the-mess story. A year after the Assam massacres, Mrs Gandhi’s government ordered Operation Bluestar. It began with the flushing out of the media from Amritsar. As one of the three reporters who managed to hide in Amritsar, I experienced the horrors of covering so important an event under a total information blackout. All kinds of rumours spread — and in the absence of credible media coverage, the worst ones wereseen to be the truest.

This was the primary reason why many Sikh units of the Army mutinied as utterly fantastic stories of rape, pillage and destruction in the Punjab countryside were immediately believed. Four years later, as the commandoes laid siege around the Golden Temple again, K.P.S. Gill, now in charge of Operation Black Thunder, remembered that lesson. So he invited the media, hundreds of us, to watch the action, every minute of it, from the box seat, the terrace of Guru Nanak Niwas. The media witnessing the mess had now become a force multiplier. Kargil was no different.