Vijay, Vikram, vichar

Kargil Vijay Divas on July 26 every year commemorates the fifth battle of Kargil in 1999 and brings before the country, particularly its military community, an occasion to retrospect on the past, reflect on the present and resolve for the future. Military achievements and failures create glory or tragedy of national dimensions and magnitude, mood swings in the country’s psyche which can drown the entire country in utter desolation, as after the debacle against China in 1962, or exult it to the skies, as after the triumph in Bangladesh in 1971. But more importantly, the true significance of Kargil Vijay Divas lies in its larger context beyond the physical battlefield, as a continuing quest for excellence and moral rejuvenation, touching all aspects of professional and ethical functioning.
Amongst the current priorities should certainly be the overhaul of the ministry of defence and its replacement by a genuinely integrated civil-military establishment as in almost all other leading militaries, a fully empowered and effective joint services headquarters, along with technological upgradation and removal of long outstanding equipment shortages in the armed forces — whether artillery for the Army, submarines for the Navy, or fighter aircraft for the Air Force.
The higher defence mechanism in India is, of course, unique in a way as the military has been totally eliminated from the decision-making process within the national security system. This is an asymmetric perception framed in Nehruvian distrust of the military based on ill-founded apprehension of a coup de etat on the lines of Pakistan. The recommendations of the post-Kargil Subramanyam Committee for an integrated ministry of defence have been circumvented by the cosmetic subterfuge of simply redesignating individual service headquarters as integrated headquarters in the ministry of defence, but without any changes in organisation, procedures or sharing of authority.
Integrated functioning of the three services is not fully effective as yet and remains hostage to attitudinal differences and inter-service rivalries. This too has been addressed by the Subramanyam Committee, whose recommendations have been implemented but only in a fragmented and diminished manner for which both the government as also the services are to blame. Thus while a full-fledged Integrated Defence Staff under a vice-chief of Integrated Defence Staff has been established, its logical capstone of a Chief of Defence Staff has not been implemented, principally due to initial internal opposition from within the services with one particular service influenced by its own insecurities.
But Vijay Divas should, above all, be an institutionalised day of national remembrance of the armed forces and their contribution in shaping the country’s destiny. It is an occasion to retrospect on the historical and political impact of India’s hard-fought wars, police actions, counter-insurgencies and proxy wars against external aggression and internal separatism that has been ongoing almost continuously since Independence. The gallantry of India’s fighting men has remained an inflexibly glorious constant in all these wars, whether it is Major Somnath Sharma at Budgam in Kashmir in 1947, Major R. Parameshwaran in Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka in 1987 or Major Vikram Batra on Point 5,140 at Kargil in 1999.
Kargil 1999 is, of course, India’s best-known war, imprinted on public memory as the country’s first television war. Bravery and fighting spirit being taken as a given, veterans of the country’s “other wars” can be forgiven for sometimes wondering why Kargil 1999 has been bestowed the honorific Vijay Divas to the exclusion of any of the other equally hard-fought battles and conflicts? Was this war more than others a conflict whose outcome would have been critical to India’s survival?
As always, competitive national politics will raise its unlovely head but a purely professional appraisal would indicate that the earliest military actions immediately post-Independence were India’s “wars of necessity” in the truest sense, which consolidated the Republic during the very initial stages of its existence. Foremost amongst these would perhaps be the most unlikely one — the long-forgotten “police action” in the princely state of Nizamshahi Hyderabad. It was a low-key affair in terms of troops involved on both sides, but of utterly existential significance as the first and so far only heartland conflict in the country (unless the current Naxalite movement is considered to be another such).
The potential for national disaster was immense but the resolute Indian military response with whatever forces could be hurriedly scraped together defeated the conspiracy to engineer a second partition of the country and establish Hyderabad as another Pakistan in the Deccan peninsula.
The first Indo-Pakistan war in Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-48 similarly defined the cartography of India’s northern borders and incorporated the Kashmir Valley as well as the vast expanses of Ladakh into the map of India. Indeed, if the Indian Army and the Air Force had at all faltered during the critical battles of those early days, it is unsettling to contemplate an India with a Pakistan in the south of the country and a Jammu and Kashmir minus Ladakh in the north, with a Line of Control aligned roughly along the river Chenab, passing south of the Amarnath caves. The “small wars” of Junagadh in 1947 and Goa in 1961 which incorporated these enclaves into India, also claim recognition in this category.
But more than almost any other event since Independence, it was India’s total and absolute victory in the third Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 which resurrected it from the ignominy of defeat in the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 and earned the country grudging international acknowledgement as a power to be reckoned with in its own right. It was a military classic that created Bangladesh as an independent nation and witnessed the surrender of 93,000 Pakistanis on the Race Course in Dhaka on December 16, 1971. If the wars of 1947-48 were India’s wars of consolidation then the country’s hour of greatest glory would undoubtedly be the victory in Bangladesh in 1971.
Kargil, July 26, 1999, or Bangladesh, December 16, 1971? “Vijay Divas” as a day of national remembrance should reflect the realities of history.

Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a
former Member of Parliament