Book Review: Che in Paona Bazaar, by Kishalay Bhattacharjee

Senior journalist Kishalay Bhattacharjee is a veteran of the North East. Not only did he grow up in Shillong, he also covered the conflict in the North East for seventeen years, while working for NDTV. Bhattacharjee’s offering Che in Paona Bazaar has a series of snapshots from Manipur, twenty two in total. Each of these vignettes offers a glimpse of life in Manipur and the rest of the North East for the common man. Bhattacharjee uses a fictional character called Eshei to tell his stories. Eshei seems to be the typical Manipuri girl. She can speak the lingo and knows the culture and food, but has spent a substantial part of her life outside the North East, in Eshei’s case, in Delhi.

Bhattacharjee writes well, his touch light and sure. When food is described, the reader gets to taste it. When Manipur’s or the North East’s history is narrated, we get to witness it. When Bhattacharjee tells us that the tribal areas of Manipur and Nagaland have been stripped of all wildlife due to excessive hunting, we feel outraged. The book’s title is derived from Paona Bazaar, Imphal’s most popular street which offers terrific bargains for those interested in buying Chinese goods. Umbrellas can be had for Rs. 50, mosquito-repellent tennis racquets for Rs. 90, fake Levi’s canvass shoes for Rs. 100 and pirated DVDs for Rs. 35 each. A majority of the items sold in Paona sport Che’s image.

However, the most important takeaway from Che in Paona Bazaar is that the people of Manipur are tired of the insurgency. Militants enforce their diktat through coercion. Bhattacharjee tells us that the man on the street wants ‘good roads, a salary without percentage cuts, drinkable tap water, electricity, good schools and security’. The average militant is a goon, out to extort money and doesn’t have much ideology. We are told that ‘six months after two dozen ageing women stripped publicly in protest against the Assam Rifles, a Meitei girl walked into a room to make love to a young army officer. There was nothing political about it. He had come from thousands of kilometres away and had connected with someone. Sex had nothing to do with borders and roots. It was merely an impulse to feel alive and desired.’ Bhattacharjee tells us that every Manipuri supports Irom Sharmila. ‘Not supporting Sharmila would be tantamount to treason in Manipur, but the support is only a posture. Her struggle has been painfully lonely.’ To be honest, I was not fully convinced that these anti-militancy feelings are Eshei’s and not Bhattacharjee’s.

Towards the end of the book, Bhattacharjee tells us that though he went to school in Shillong, he did not learn any Khasi. Shillong has the air of an educational town, like many hill stations developed by the British, but the locals are not educated in those institutions. Bhattacharjee wonders what is at fault – ‘the inability of the locals to assimilate the outsiders into the system or the haughty stubbornness of the plainsmen to adopt any of the local attributes into their own lifestyles?’ The key to resolving the militancy in Manipur and the rest of the North East could lie in the answer to this question.

Book Review: The Kaoboys of R&AW – Down Memory Lane, by B. Raman

When B. Raman, an IPS officer belonging to the Madhya Pradesh cadre applied to join R&AW, he had to overcome a number of difficult tests, some of them calling for physical strength and agility, some requiring excellent mental dexterity. The final test took place in Calcutta (as it was called then). B. Raman’s examiner took him to a dusty by-lane, pointed to a house and said, ‘in that house you’ll find a couple in their late fifties and their three children – an unmarried daughter in her late twenties and her younger twin brothers. I want you to enter the house, befriend them, find out the full names of all three children and a get me a copy of the father’s LIC policy. You have an hour to do all that and your time starts…….NOW.’ B. Raman thought for a few minutes and then went forward to ring the bell. The woman who opened the door found an earnest looking young man, muttering in embarrassment, asking for directions to an address she had never heard of. ‘I’m already so late’, B. Raman muttered, cursing the broker who sent him out to find a stranger’s house. ‘Usually he comes along, but today, he’s fallen ill. I’m so sorry.’ Soon B. Raman was drinking a cup of coffee, nibbling on some namkeen and chatting with the parents. When the all-knowing God sent them an unmarried MBBS doctor, not inviting him in for a cuppa would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Forty five minutes later, B. Raman emerged from the house with the required details and a Xerox copy of the father’s LIC policy, for which he had promised to obtain better terms, claiming that his father was a senior LIC officer.

Okay, I made that one up. B. Raman’s path-breaking book on R&AW doesn’t disclose how B. Raman was selected to join the Intelligence Bureau (R&AW was formed a year after B. Raman joined the IB). Did B. Raman merely fill up a few forms and get transferred from the IPS to the IB? Did he have to undergo an aptitude test? We are not told. The Kaoboys of R&AW is so very different from a book like, say, Rorke Denver’s Damn Few which has a lot of information about how the US Navy screens and selects applicants for its SEAL programme. The Kaoboys of R&AW also has no information whatsoever about B. Raman the individual. What the hell, B. Raman does not even once mention what his initial ‘B’ stands for, though this information (Bahukutumbi) is freely available on the internet. We are told that B. Raman’s hometown is Chennai, that he did a course in journalism at the University of Madras, worked for Indian Express for 4 years, joined the IPS in 1961 and the Intelligence Bureau in 1967. On completion of his training, he was tasked with heading the Burma branch of the external intelligence division. On retirement he settled down in Chennai. Oh! And B. Raman speaks French. That’s all we ever get to know about B. Raman from The Kaoboys of R&AW!

So what’s The Kaoboys of R&AW all about? It is definitely not an action thriller. It is also not a chronicle of every operation which B. Raman was involved in while serving with R&AW. Rather, it is a high-level examination of various important incidents that took place during B. Raman’s tenure as well as an analysis of the various policy issues which confront R&AW at present. The Kaoboys of R&AW is written by a man who is proud to have served R&AW and still cares about it and for this reason, it is very different from India’s External Intelligence – Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing by Maj. Gen V.K. Singh, which is a disgruntled nitpicker’s narrative of what’s wrong at R&AW.


On Bangladesh: The 1971 War was R&AW’s finest hour, B. Raman tells us. R&AW was formed only in 19688, but when in 1971 Indira Gandhi decided to help the people of East Pakistan, R&AW was ready. It not only collected intelligence, but also had clandestine divisions which raided the Chittagong Hill Tracts to attack Naga and Mizo hostiles. R&AW’s performance vis-à-vis West Pakistan was not as satisfactory, but the 1971 war was a success story altogether.


Emergency: R&AW’s Head Rameshwar Nath Kao was in Paris with B. Raman when Kao received a message from a Congress leader informing him that Indira Gandhi was considering the imposition of Emergency and requesting Kao to advise her that it was a good idea. B. Raman tells us that Kao disagreed and counselled otherwise. Did Kao later change his mind or did Indira Gandhi go against Kao’s advice? B. Raman doesn’t know, he tells us.

Relations with other agencies: The CIA was always willing to help India in its dealings with China. At the same time, the Americans would never help India fight Pakistan sponsored terrorism. India had good relations with SDECE, the French intelligence agency. At one point, prior to the 1979 revolution in Iran, there was proposal for France, India and Iran to set up a mechanism to jointly collect maritime intelligence in the Indian Ocean. The proposal fell through and was not implemented.

Witch-hunts: Every change of regime was usually followed by a witch-hunt against those perceived to have been close to the previous regime. We are told that ‘Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Vajpayee came to office with the impression that Kao played an important role in the proclamation of the Emergency and that he let Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi misuse the R&AW for partisan political purposes. Morarji Desai was so distrustful of Kao that he sent the Cabinet Secretary to Kao’s office to make sure that he did not destroy any papers before handing over to Nair.’

Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi: B. Raman has a soft corner for Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi though he does not hesitate to point out their faults. Declaration of the Emergency was a mistake, as was Operation Blue Star, B. Raman tells us, adding that Indira Gandhi had frantically tried to find a political solution and avoid sending the army inside the Golden Temple. Similarly, B. Raman says that Rajiv Gandhi’s Sri Lankan policy was characterised by bewildering confusion. At the end of it all, B. Raman laments that these two Prime Ministers did more for R&AW than anyone else and the intelligence agencies had totally failed to protect them. It is a genuine cry of despair and anguish. B. Raman believes that corruption claims made against Indira Gandhi with respect to her actions during the emergency did not have any substance. Even in the case of the Bofors scandal, B. Raman tells us that in his view, Rajiv Gandhi was a man with austere tastes who was not corrupt. The mistake Rajiv Gandhi made was to get personally involved in refuting the charges against him and in the process, muddied himself.

B. Raman claims that the CIA ran a disinformation campaign against Indira Gandhi. Allegations to the effect that the Congress Party accepted bribes from a French oil company during the Emergency were planted on the Morarji Desai Government through a retired Indian military officer living in Europe. The Bangladesh War, the nuclear tests at Pokhran and India’s perceived support for the Soviet Union, all of this motivated the disinformation campaign, B. Raman tells us.

In the aftermath of Operation Blue Star, it was decided that Sikh officers should not be in close proximity to Indira Gandhi. When Indira Gandhi heard of such a decision, she had it reversed…. and paid for it with her life. B. Raman makes it clear that he believes keeping Sikh officers away from Indira Gandhi was the right thing to do, in those circumstances, citing examples from the UK and USA where officers from Northern Ireland and those with an African heritage respectively were never deployed as bodyguards to the British Prime Minister or the US President. B. Raman’s anguish is just as pronounced in the case of Rajiv Gandhi’s murder. Since he was in the opposition, Rajiv Gandhi was denied SPG cover. The protection offered by state police forces was sloppy and unprofessional and ultimately, Rajiv paid for it with his life.

VP Singh, Chandra Shekhar, Narasimha Rao, Sharad Pawar: B. Raman doesn’t seem to have much respect for VP Singh. He says that ‘VP Singh curried cheap publicity with the extremists and terrorists not only in J&K, but also in Punjab. He was soft to people like Simranjit Singh Mann, who were suspected to be sympathetic to the Khalistani terrorists…………..V.P. Singh came to office with a single-point agenda – to exploit the Bofors issue to discredit Rajiv Gandhi and end his political career once and for all.’ Using the services of a private detective in Europe (paid for by the government) and many journalists like the famous Chithra Subramanium, he pursued the Bofors case at the cost of fighting the insurgency in Punjab and J&K.

B. Raman has a much better opinion of Chandra Shekhar than VP Singh. Sharad Pawar too impressed B. Raman by the way he handled the situation in Mumbai after the 1993 bomb blasts.

As for Narasimha Rao, B. Raman tells us that after the Babri Masjid demolition, Rao invited to his house all officers of the rank of Addditional Secretary and above and addressed them in a rambling manner. B. Raman was left with the feeling that Rao thought the demolition was the nation’s karma and that the government’s inaction was the right thing in the given circumstances.


Getting it wrong: B. Raman freely talks of a number of instances, some major, some minor, where R&AW got it wrong.

R&AW failed to anticipate the 1975 Bangladesh coup which resulted in the murder of its founding father Mujibur Rahman. Ever since then, India’s influence in Bangladesh has declined and Bangladesh has once again become a hub for anti-India activities in the region. Another instance was when the IB and R&AW jointly took the stand that around 2,100 Naga militants had gone to Yunnan for training. Sam Manekshaw called the intelligence agencies’ bluff and came up with a much lower number, on the basis that, if such a large number of young men had departed for training, the local villagers and administration would have known. Sam Manekshaw turned out to be right.

B. Raman doesn’t specially say that Sri Lanka and the IPKF fiasco was an intelligence failure. Rather he says that when the IPKF was sent to Sri Lanka, General Sunderji, the Chief of Army Staff, told Rajiv Gandhi that the IPKF would be able to accomplish its mission within a month. As we know, things went wrong. Was it entirely General Sunderji’s fault? How much of a role did the intelligence agencies have to play? Wasn’t there an intelligence failure as well? B. Raman doesn’t say much about this in his book. According to B. Raman, General Sunderji, who was earlier responsible for Operation Blue Star, at that time a Lt. General, had committed a similar blunder in his assessment of the terrorists occupying the Golden Temple. In both cases General Sunderji blamed the intelligence agencies for the wrong assessments. According to B. Raman, there were too many agencies involved in Sri Lanka and only the CIA had the complete picture of what was going on, thanks to the various moles within Indian intelligence outfits.

Balanced writing: B. Raman’s narrative is mostly very balanced. While his polite bureaucratic air never deserts him, B. Raman also doesn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade. B. Raman has a lot of praise for Kao and his successors, Sankaran Nair, Suntook and Girish Chandra Saxena. He says, ‘they were not only brilliant professionals, but also lovable individuals with endearing personal qualities. There was nothing small or mean about them. They did wonders and were very close to the Prime Minister of the day. Their role in influencing government policy on national security matters was phenomenal. They had a wide network on contacts in the international intelligence community at the highest levels. They imparted a sense of pride to R&AW officers. They never bragged about themselves and their role and contacts.’ However, such effusive praise does not prevent B. Raman from saying that Kao’s 3-year post-retirement tenure as a Senior Adviser to Indira Gandhi did not have the brilliance of his tenure as head of R&AW. We are told that post-1971, a permissive atmosphere crept into R&AW. Corruption and misdemeanours by officers were tolerated by Kao and other senior officers who did not act decisively and put an end to it.

India’s nuclear tests: B. Raman is totally silent on India’s policy on nuclear weapons. India first conducted a nuclear test in 1974. This test was also an intelligence success, since India managed to prevent the CIA and other intelligence agencies from finding out about the test in advance. Pokhran II was in 1998 and B. Raman had retired by then. I had expected B. Raman to have something to say regarding the first nuclear test and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by India, but was disappointed.

Trivia:

The Kaoboys of R&AW is peppered with minor incidents and anecdotes, some of which are funny. When Naga militant gangs started going to Yunnan for training, some Naga pastors went with them. The godless Chinese were not too keen on the God men and wanted to send them back. For good measure, they wanted the Naga hostiles to attend classes on Marxism. There was an impasse and after negotiations in Beijing, the Chinese gave in. The pastors stayed and Marx was kept out!

Then there was case of an IB surveillance team which full-time trailed a Pakistani ISI officer/diplomat posted in Delhi. Once on a winter’s night in dense fog, the ISI officer who was being followed stopped his car and invited the IB team in for tea. It was then the IB surveillance team realised that while following the ISI officer’s car bumper to bumper, they had actually entered his house! Mind you, humorous incidents like this are few and far in between. The Kaoboys of R&AW is mostly serious stuff.

Policy conundrums: The best part of The Kaoboys of R&AW is the discussion around pertinent questions such as whether there should be Parliamentary oversight over intelligence agencies. B. Raman is in no doubt that intelligence agencies require supervision, citing various cases of corruption, nepotism and inefficiency involving R&AW to buttress his arguments.

However, there were a couple of other policy decisions taken in the past which B. Raman accepts unquestioningly, which in my opinion, need to be re-examined. The first is the formation of R&AW itself, through a bifurcation of the Intelligence Bureau. Should the organisations responsible for external and internal intelligence be separate? In my opinion, keeping in mind that many of the internal terrorist threats arise from external sources, there is no rationale for bifurcation of the intelligence agencies into IB and R&AW. This division does not automatically lead to greater efficiency or effectiveness. On the other hand, a single agency headed by one individual would solve the problem of IB and R&AW not sharing intelligence effectively. B. Raman himself gives an example. During operations involving Sri Lankan Tamil organisations, various Tamil militant groups took money from R&AW, IB and the Military Intelligence, with each organisation not being aware of money paid out by the other organisations. We are told by B. Raman that China experts of the IB vintage (who moved to R&AW when it was formed) were better than China experts trained by R&AW. If before the bifurcation IB could turn out better China experts than R&AW could later on, what’s the rationale for keeping external intelligence separate?

B. Raman also tells us that at various times the Indian army has sought permission for running clandestine operations from Indian diplomatic missions overseas, a request which has been repeatedly denied. The army is only allowed to collect tactical military intelligence through trans-border sources. B. Raman does not clearly explain why the Army made such a request in the first place. Was it not happy with intelligence collection by R&AW? Or was it because R&AW does not readily share the intelligence it collects with the armed forces? Until Rajiv Gandhi’s time, the army’s proposals for investing in TECHINT capability needed R&AW’s approval. This is no longer the case and these days IB officers have been posted in embassies in neighbouring countries. It is clear that B. Raman doesn’t approve of the loss of R&AW’s monopoly over collection of external intelligence, but he doesn’t say so in as many words.

Is there an argument to be made for having the intelligence agencies and the armed forces under a unified command? I do not claim to understand these issues too well, nor do I have any special insight or access to information that would allow me to form an informed view on this matter. However, I do wish B. Raman had specifically addressed this question. At present, India is a long way away from having a unified command even for various wings of its armed forces and so, it is almost impossible to imagine a situation where Indian intelligence agencies also fall under a unified defence command.

Better late than never: The Kaoboys of R&AW was published in 2007.

Earlier posts on B. Raman: I’ve blogged about B. Raman a few times in the past. You’ll find my previous posts here and here.

Book Review: Our Moon has Blood Clots, by Rahul Pandita

There are many recorded instances of victims of discrimination, violence or even genocide dishing out similar treatment to others. Kurds, long oppressed by the Arabs and later by the Ottoman Turks, were instrumental in the Armenian genocide during the First World War. Jews, who fled the Nazis and settled in Palestine, haven’t been too kind to Palestinians. In Sri Lanka, the LTTE was rather nasty to the Muslim community in areas under its control, at times forcing Muslims to vacate places like Chavakacheri and Jaffna enmasse. Poles, who were at the receiving end of multiple aggressors ranging from Russians and Germans to Tartars, are rather anti-Semitic even now. To a certain extent, the violence unleashed by the Kashmiri Muslim community against Pandits living in the Valley falls in this category. Kashmiri Muslims may claim with some justification that they have received a raw deal from the Indian government and the earlier Dogra rulers. However, their treatment of the Pandits whom they drove away from the valley in increasing numbers since 1990 will always be remembered as yet another instance of a majority community oppressing a defenceless minority community.

Rahul Pandita, currently an Associate editor at the Open Magazine, and author of Hello Bastar, an account of India’s Maoist movement, tells the story of how his family was forced to flee to Jammu from the Kashmir valley when he was fourteen and live in squalid camps where his mother never tired of telling people that their house in the valley had 22 rooms. Pandita’s favourite cousin Ravi stayed on in the valley and was killed along with two others as they travelled by bus. There is no doubt that countless other Pandits have similar stories to tell.

In Our Moon has Blood Clots, Pandita doesn’t offer any answers, despite the innumerable questions that pop up during the discourse. Pandita makes a half-hearted attempt to be neutral and unbiased, there are references to how Dogras rulers were ‘rough’ with the Muslim community and how Hindus in Jammu tried to exploit the refugees from the Valley, but the book is almost entirely the story of the Pandit exodus and Pandita doesn’t even try to present the other side’s point of view. I don’t blame him. Pandita’s pain is still too raw and fresh to even think of making an attempt to provide the other side of the story, though Pandita makes it clear that he has maintained his humanism throughout. Once at a television studio for a debate on human rights, as Pandita argued in support of a zero tolerance approach in respect of human rights violations in Kashmir, he was reprimanded by a drunk army general who reminded him that the militants whose human rights he advocated had forced him out of his home. ‘General, I’ve lost my home, not my humanity,’ Pandita retorted.

Pandita makes it clear that the atrocities (murder and rape) against Pandits were carried out by fellow Kashmiris, with a different religious persuasion, and not just by foreign militants who came from across the LoC. Pandita tells us that divide between the Pandits and Muslims existed much before 1990. Cricket matches between India and Pakistan always brought the differences to the fore. The Muslims in Kashmir supported Pakistan and the Pandits naturally rooted for India. On April 18, 1986, when Javed Miandad hit Chetan Sharma’s last ball for a six in Sharjah, ‘ít was as if it was Diwali in Kashmir. I think every cracker available in Kashmir was burst in the next one hour. People streamed out of their houses and on to the streets chanting Allah ho Akbar. In the nippy April weather of the Valley, people drank gallons of Limca to celebrate, the way they had seen cricket stars celebrate with champagne.' Earlier, on October 13, 1983, when India had played Pakistan in Srinagar, the first ever international cricket match held in Jammu & Kashmir, the stadium had erupted in support for Pakistan. Vengsarkar was hit with a half-eaten apple. Pandita and his cousin Ravi had watched with disbelief. Was it always like that? Did Kashmiri Muslims always support the Pakistani cricket team since the time of the Partition? Pandita doesn’t provide a clear answer.

Pandita uses Ravi’s father as a narrator to describe the lie of the land at the time of the invasion by tribal levies immediately after the Partition. One gets the feeling that at that time the divide between Pandits and Muslims wasn’t so wide, though it did exist. Pandita doesn’t make it very clear when exactly the Hindu-Muslim divide grew to the extreme proportions one sees now.

In 1990, did Governor Jagmohan encourage Pandits to leave the Valley so that he could take stringent measures against the militants? Pandita rubbishes this theory. According to Pandita, Jagmohan was helpless. The administration had collapsed completely and sections of the state police were sympathetic to militants.

Even before I reached the end of the book I started wondering why the Indian government wasn’t taking more steps to make it possible for Pandits to return to the Valley. Create settlements for them, my brain screamed. When I reach the end of Pandita’s memoir, I find out that the Indian government has done just that and it isn’t working very well. A few thousand needy Pandits have moved back to the Valley and live in protected settlements which lack basic facilities. When they venture out in public, they, especially women, are targeted and harassed. The divide between Muslims and Pandits remains as wide as ever.

An honest account and a very good one at that, Our Moon has Blood Clots is a must read for anyone interested in the Kashmir dispute.

Book Review: Himalayan Blunder by Brigadier John Parashram Dalvi

Brigadier John Parashram Dalvi was the senior most Indian army officer to be taken prisoner by the Chinese during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. In his book Himalayan Blunder, Brigadier Dalvi gives his version of the events that led to India’s debacle in the Himalayas. I had picked up Dalvi’s book mainly to seek corroboration of Neville Maxwell’s claims in “India’s China War”, his widely acclaimed account of the 1962 border war between India and China. Maxwell’s main thesis is that India was the belligerent party and the Indian army, though totally unprepared, had been ordered to throw the Chinese out of positions which India claimed was within Indian boundaries. The Chinese (justifiably, according to Maxwell) launched a devastating pre-emptive strike against the Indian army and pushed their way to the plains of Assam. To a large extent, Dalvi’s account is in tune with Maxwell’s. Where these two gentlemen differ is on whether India’s claim to all land south of the McMahon line is justified. Dalvi, as may be expected from an upstanding officer of the Indian army, is firmly of the view that China does not have any right over Tibet and that the McMahon line ought to be India’s north western frontier. Maxwell on the other hand is very sympathetic to China’s claims over Tibet and does not believe the McMahon line, a British invention, ought to be the boundary between India and Tibet.

I will not try and summarise Dalvi’s blow by blow account of how an unprepared Indian army was ordered to march on hard scales, carrying pouch ammunition, thrown into battle with a vastly superior Chinese army and how bravely Indian soldiers fought despite overwhelming odds, in many cases, to the last man. Maxwell claims that in NEFA, the Indian army made useless sacrifices, when a withdrawal to Bomdi La would have made much more sense. On the whole, Dalvi agrees with this assessment. Dalvi also agrees with Maxwell’s opinion that if only the Indian army had followed the plan formulated in 1959 by General Thorat which recommended a triple tiered defence structure in the north-east, it would have fared much better against the Chinese. The McMahon line could not be defended by sitting on it. Instead the Indian army ought to have retreated to Bomdi La, closer to its supply lines and fought the Chinese army when it was fully stretched.

Certain sections of Himalayan Blunder are especially interesting. One is Dalvi’s description of the Battle of Tseng Jong, which took place 10 days before the Chinese assault on Thag La. BM Kaul had ordereded 2 Rajput to move up Tseng-Jong and occupy the Yamatso La peak (which is west of Thag La peak), 16,000 feet above sea level in full Chinese view with no artillery support. Dalvi convinced Kaul to first send a patrol of 9 Punjab to find a suitable crossing place for the Rajputs and cover them from a position at Tseng Jong. A patrol of 50 men led by Major Chaudhry advanced to Tseng Jong. On 10 October 1962, 600 Chinese troops attacked Major Chaudhry’s patrol. The Rajputs repulsed the first wave. It was obvious that they could not hold on for long, though the second Chinese wave was also beaten back, mainly on account of enfilade fire on the assaulting Chinese from the Rajputs hurrying up to Yamatso La. Major Chaudhry asked Dalvi for mortar and machine gun fire as a cover so that they could extricate themselves. Dalvi refused to order the guns and mortars at Bridge IV to open fire. The reasons given by Dalvi for his decision are interesting, but I’ll not detail them here. Please read this historical treatise (which should be mandatory reading for all students of modern Indian history) and find out Dalvi’s reasons. Dalvi says that ‘I and I alone, am responsible for the decision not to allow the mortars and machine guns to open up’. Quite unlike Kaul who, when things turned bad at Tseng Jong told Dalvi, ‘This is your battle. This is a brigade battle,’ and left.

Another equally interesting chapter deals with how Dalvi seriously considered resigning his command just before the outbreak of inevitable hostilities on 20 October 1962. His warnings had been ignored and his men were totally unprepared for the oncoming avalanche. Dalvi finally decided that ‘my place was with the troops who had followed me loyally to the Namka Chu. I could not bring myself to abandon all sense of responsibility to them, desert and leave them to their fate. In all humility, I felt sure that their loyal obedience was largely due to my presence with them throughout the operation. My departure would have meant more than a change in the person of the Commander.’

Who’s to blame for India’s debacle? Dalvi lays a large portion of the blame on the arrogant and high-handed Nehru who firmly believed that the Chinese would not invade, and his favourite courtier, VK Krishna Menon. Another big chunk is laid at the door of Lt. Gen. Brij Mohan Kaul, Nehru’s protégée who, despite not having held a war-time command, was tasked with throwing the Chinese army out of Indian borders. The legendary General Thimayya, one of the ablest Generals India has ever had, had warned the Indian government of the threat from China many times. Dalvi faults General Thimayya for not having immediately resigned a second time, when Nehru criticised him in Parliament. Instead Thimayya stayed on and retired as a broken man in 1961.

The Indian army had a number of soldiers with World War II experience. Thimayya was replaced by General Pran Nath Thapar who had served in Burma during the second World War in 1941 and later in the Middle East and Italy. However, General Thapar was playing second fiddle to Kaul who had zero combat experience. Dalvi himself had seen action during the Second World War. More importantly, he was one of the few Indian officers who served on the staff of General Sir. Montague Stopford during the Burma campaign. However, men like Dalvi had little say in decision making. The Chinese army on the other hand had recently finished fighting the US army in Korea and knew all about large scale operations.

Dalvi makes it clear that the Chinese army had prepared extensively for the war. They had prepared large prisoner of war camps and even padded winter suits for their prisoners. Dalvi tells us that the Chinese army had many ethnic Chinese who had lived in India and could speak Indian languages. Many of the local guides hired by the Indian army were allegedly in the pay of the Chinese.

Dalvi writes elegantly, with quotations from Napoleon, Marshall Berthier, Barbara Tuchman and Corelli Barnett. However, brevity is definitely not his forte and Himalayan Blunder runs to over 500 pages, including annexes etc. At times, Dalvi makes the same point more than once and the same ground is ploughed over yet again. To some extent, the repetition is on account of Dalvi specifically refuting claims made by BM Kaul in his memoirs (The Untold Story), which Dalvi does not mention by name. At the beginning of his tome, Dalvi tells us that the idea behind this book was born while he was held prisoner by the Chinese. Dalvi’s anguish and pain at the betrayal and loss can be felt in practically every page.

Himalayan Blunder might be a lengthy treatise, but Dalvi doesn’t give much away about his personal life. A two-page appendix mentions Dalvi’s career history and we are told Dalvi was born in Basra, where his father was serving the British administration and that many of Dalvi’s relatives had served in the British Indian army. There is no mention of any family member other than his father, that too in the context of the leather gloves gifted by his father which he wore during the fighting. We never get to know if Dalvi was a bachelor or if he was married with a number of children. From his Maharashtrian surname, I assume Dalvi was neither an Anglo-Indian nor had any European ancestry. Yes, I did wish many times that Dalvi would allow his readers to know a bit more about Dalvi the human being. In this YouTube Video which seems to have been posted by the Chinese government or with its approval and which gives the official Chinese view on the border war, one gets a glimpse of Dalvi after he was captured by Chinese troops.

Himalayan Blunder’s war commentary comes to an end shortly after Dalvi’s capture on the 22nd of October at 9:22 a.m., around 53 hours after the Chinese assault at Thag La. The subsequent events leading to the final collapse of the Indian army and China's unilateral declaration of ceasefire, which Dalvi calls an anti-climax, are summarised in a few pages. Further Dalvi doesn’t mention anything about how he was treated while held prisoner by the Chinese. Didn’t he think his readers would be curious to know? Or were those pages censored before publication? I’ll never know.

India did not use its Air Force in an offensive role during the fighting though the IAF was, in atleast a few respects, superior to the Chinese Air Force. Mind you, even China was not a nuclear power in those days. Would the outcome have been any different had India used its air force? The IAF’s current leadership seems to think so, but there are divergent views as well. However, Dalvi does not analyse this issue.

Book Review: India’s China War by Neville Maxwell

Heavy reading: I bought this book over a year ago, read the first three chapters and put the rest on hold. Around 20 October 2012, as the 50th anniversary of the India-China War was commemorated, a flurry of articles in various newspapers and magazines, including an interview of Neville Maxwell, re-kindled my interest and made me finish off the last two chapters. The fourth chapter, a detailed and precise description of the actual war, especially makes for grim reading, if you’re on India’s side, that is. Mind you, this book was first published by Jaico in 1970, eight years after the 1962 war between India and China. The current edition has been brought out by Natraj Publishers and I should add that the quality of printing leaves a lot to be desired.

Neville Maxwell: Neville Maxwell was The Times’ South Asia correspondent for eight years from 1959 and during his tenure in New Delhi, had the opportunity to see the India-China border dispute from the Indian side. Maxwell’s account admittedly suffers from a lack of access to Chinese sources, comparable to the sort of access Maxwell had to India’s dirty linen. Nevertheless, Maxwell’s India’s China War is considered to be one of the most authoritative books on this topic, especially because Maxwell is supposed to have somehow accessed the yet to be declassified Henderson Brooks report.

Entirely India’s fault: Maxwell’s thesis is very simple. India inherited its borders from the British, who by virtue of being the paramount power in the region, arbitrarily drew boundaries as it suited them. After the British left, India clung to those boundaries, though China, which had taken over Tibet by then, disputed them. Maxwell says that after India’s independence, ‘the boundaries of India ceased to be the pawns of the British in their Great Games with imperial rivals, and became cell walls of a national identity. No longer could boundaries be conceived or shifted by men whose concern was no longer territory, but strategic advantage; henceforth they enclosed the sacred soil of the motherland, and politicians could tamper with them only at their peril.’

Nehru refused to negotiate with the Chinese, though he went out of his way to please them in other respects, such as in admission to UN membership. Later, India instituted a forward policy which involved aggressive border patrolling by the Indian army and the setting up of puny, indefensible pickets very close to the McMahon line. According to Maxwell, one of the pickets, the Dhola Post, on the Thag La Ridge, was actually a few miles north of the McMahon line, in other words, outside Indian territory. This happened because the McMahon line did not pass through the highest point in the Khinzemane sector, but the Indian government thought it ought to. Maxwell says that in the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) China was willing to let India occupy territory south of the actual McMahon line and not the McMahon line as arbitrarily redrawn by India. When the PLA aggressively surrounded the Dhola Post, Nehru ordered the Indian army to throw the Chinese out of India’s borders. The Indian army started planning Operation Leghorn, an attack on Chinese pickets surrounding Dhola Post, even though Dhola Post was definitely north of the line drawn by Henry McMahon. Mind you, the order was publicly announced with a lot of fanfare. Talk of overconfidence and the element of surprise!

Faced with the possibility of an attack by India, China launched a pre-emptive strike on 20 October 1962, which coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. The initial Chinese attacks routed the Indian army. After that there was a lull for over 3 weeks. The second phase of attacks from 14 November 1962 onwards, completed the Chinese victory. In the Western sector, China occupied and held Aksai Chin. In NEFA, the Chinese retreated to the McMahon line, after handing back to India a huge quantity of captured stores. Nehru and other Indian leaders had repeated ad nauseum how China would find it difficult to supply its troops on the border. It turned out that China had good supply links through the relatively flat Tibetan plateau, which in winter receives less snowfall than the mountainous NEFA. It was India which struggled to supply its troops and Maxwell claims that many Indian soldiers died of cold and exposure, compounded by inadequate clothing and lack of food, during forced marches.

Empty talk: Maxwell tells us that ‘both sides were sabre rattling, but India’s scabbard was empty.’ India’s army was weak since India had been focussing on growth and development. More importantly, defence minister Krishna Menon liked to cut army chiefs to size. Nehru and Krishna Menon were confident that China would not attack and more importantly, the Chinese army would not resist India’s forward push. Here’s an interesting OutlookIndia article which supports what Maxwell says.

Call for B. M. Kaul: We are told that when Lieutenant General Umrao Singh, General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Siliguri-based XXXIII Corps questioned the practicability of Operation Leghorn, putting his objections in writing, Army Chief General Thapar and Lt. Gen L.P. Sen, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of the Indian Army's Eastern Command, sought his removal from his command of XXXIII Corps. Lt. Gen L.P. Sen suggested that Major General Manekshaw be appointed to replace him. Krishna Menon baulked. Earlier Manekshaw had faced charges of anti-national expressions and disloyalty and had been denied promotion to Lt. General. So, a new corps, the IV Corps, was created and the Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. B.M. Kaul, the very same man who had filed a complaint against Manekshaw, was tasked with heading it. Kaul had never commanded troops in combat, but no one cared, save for the soldiers. Kaul’s performance was so bad that, at the end of the war, President Radhakrishnan responded to the rumour that Kaul had been captured by the Chinese by saying ‘it is unfortunately not true.’

The View From Peking: Though Maxwell doesn’t have access to Chinese sources, he tries to understand the rationale behind China’s actions. China obviously found Indian terms (a total refusal to negotiate) totally unacceptable. There were other reasons which might have persuaded the Chinese leadership to go for the military option. A war could prompt US assistance to India, as it did, and expose to the USSR how close India was to the Americans. Maxwell does not subscribe to the western theory that China wanted to humble India and put a brake on India’s growth and development. Maxwell says that Chinese never considered India to be China’s equal. India had a very good reputation as a peaceful nation while the Chinese communists were considered to be war mongers. The longer the dispute dragged on, the more sympathy India generated. By defeating India decisively and at the same retreating to their original positions in NEFA, China made it clear that it only wanted India to come to the negotiating table and settle its international boundary.

For the official Chinese view on the border war, please watch this YouTube Video which seems to have been posted by the Chinese government or with its approval.

Riveting but sad: Maxwell writes very well. For example, while detailing the launch of the actual assault by the Chinese, he tells us that ‘at 5:00 a.m. on the 20th October 1962, the Chinese fired two Very lights; on the signal, Chinese heavy mortars and artillery, drawn up without cover on the forward slope of the Thag La ridge, opened a heavy barrage on the central Indian positions. .....The weight of the Chinese attack was thrown against the Indian positions in the centre of the river line; the Gorkhas and the Rajputs bore the brunt of the assault. Their positions had been infiltrated. The Indian units fought back fiercely against overwhelming odds, but one after the other, their positions were overrun – the Indians met the final Chinese assaults with the bayonet. By 09:00 the Gorkhas and Rajputs on the river line were finished. The Chinese had by then brought Tsangdhar under attack. By then this vital position was defended only by a weak company of Gorkhas – which had been preparing to march out to Tsangle – and the two paratroop guards. Firing over open sights, these fought on, until the crews were wiped out.’

Not Front Page News: Even as late as October 1962, Indian newspapers did not always carry the border dispute on their front pages. The dispute with China competed for attention with a wide variety of news items such as Nehru having been burned in effigy in Nepal, the fall of government in Kerala and Sikh politics in Punjab.

International opinion: The US, UK and other western governments sided with India. The USSR adopted a surprisingly neutral note and seemed to be more in favour of China than India. This was mainly on account of the Cuban missile crisis - the USSR desperately needed Chinese support. Most non-aligned governments stayed non-aligned and India was disappointed. No Arab country expressed sympathy or support for India. Nkrumah of Ghana actually rebuked the UK for sending aid to India, this despite Nehru having visited Ghana very recently. Ethiopia and Cyprus were the only non-aligned countries to support India.

Formosa was willing to side with India in any hostile action towards China, but on the boundary dispute, its position was the same as that of China’s. Maxwell tells us that ‘one of the last acts of the Chinese Nationalists’ Ambassador in New Delhi was to remind the Indian Government that China did not recognise the McMahon line, and held the (1914) Simla Convention invalid.’

Abandoning a sensible defence plan: In October 1959, the Eastern command under General Thorat had recommended a triple tiered defence structure in the north-east. The first line of defence would consist of posts close to the McMahon line. These would act as a mere trip wire, expected to fall back in case of a Chinese advance. Secondary strong points would be set up behind the first line to fight a delaying action. The third tier was the actual defence line, where the attacker would be halted. Bomdi La was to be one of the anchors of this defence line, which would be easily supplied from the plains. The attacker would struggle with extended lines, whilst Indian troops would fight close to their supply lines. This was a good plan, but was abandoned since the politicians were unwilling to subscribe to a course of action which would result in losing large areas without a fight.

Thus the Indian army was stretched all across the McMahon line, deployed in small groups at places where the civilian Intelligence Bureau expected the Chinese to infiltrate through.

Compounding of mistakes: It was not just the political leadership which made so many errors. The military leadership under B.M. Kaul at first failed to provide a realistic picture to the politicians. Rather, they allowed the politicians to live in a fool’s paradise. Later, after the initial shock and retreat, ‘on 23rd October, orders went out from IV Corps to the force at Tawang that they were to withdraw to Bomdi La, some sixty miles back on the road to the plains; that in the calculations of the IV Corps, was the farthest point to the north where the Indians could build up more quickly than the Chinese. All formations concerned were informed that the build-up was to be at Bomdi La.’ However, Brigadier Palit urged that the stand be made at Se La, a high pass only fifteen miles behind Tawang. From Misamari on the plains to Se La was one hundred and forty miles, a round trip of six days for trucks. The politicians liked the idea though; less the terrain yielded to China, less the defeat for India. Therefore Lt. Gen. Sen countermanded the order to pull back to Bomdi La and ordered that Se La be held. ‘The decision was crucial and disastrous.’

A birthday gift for Nehru: It was meant to be a birthday gift for Nehru. On 14 November 1962, Indian troops from the 6th Kumaon battalion attacked the Chinese at Walong. They got to within fifty yards from the crest and then stopped, spent. The Chinese not only wiped off the Kumaonis, but also followed up and attacked the main Indian defence positions on the 16th at first light. By 10:00 a.m. a general withdrawal ordered. Kaul and the G.O.C M.S. Pathania left Walong in the last Otter. When Kaul got to Teju, he sent out a frantic signal asking that foreign armed forces be invited to fight China.

Finally on the evening of 17th when Pathania wanted to pull troops from Se La, he could not contact Kaul. Army Chief Thapar and Lt. Gen L.P. Sen were available, but they refused to take a decision though they were Kaul’s superiors and had been involved in making war plans till then. Precious time was lost. In any event, withdrawal was no longer a great idea and the Chinese not only killed off many of the retreating soldiers, even the 48th Brigade at Bomdi La, the only organised Indian formation left in NEFA, was finally destroyed. Maxwell says that ‘the subsequent hour or so in quiet corps headquarters at Tezpur, with the Chief of Army Staff and the G.O.C-in-C Eastern Command refusing to take responsibility for an urgent operational decision, when there was no one else to take it, was the real nadir for the Indian army, not the impending debacle among the steep ridges of NEFA.’

The Indian army faced a total rout in NEFA, but not so in the Western sector where Maxwell tells us that General Daulet Singh of the Western Command rapidly built up strength to reinforce the Ladakh front. Also, Western Command, unlike the Eastern Command, showed more concern for the survival of its troops, not ordering isolated units to fight it out in useless sacrificial gestures as was done in NEFA. ‘When there was a tactical reason for ground to be held, the troops did fight it out, to the last round or the last man; but they were not, as so often in the eastern sector, left to hold tactically insignificant and indefensible positions until overrun.’ About 90% of Indian casualties were in NEFA.

Small mercies: According to Maxwell, the Chinese did not attack Chushul or any other position outside their claim areas, though the Chinese had overrun the heights around Rezing La and had started shelling Chushul when the unilateral ceasefire came into effect.

China snatches a PR defeat from the jaws of total victory: After launching its attack on 20 October 19962, China claimed that Indian troops had launched large scale attacks against Chinese posts in Namka Chu in NEFA and Chip Chap and Galwan valleys in Aksai Chin and that Chinese troops had responded in self-defence. This self-obscuration was a mistake. Everyone knew that India did not have the ability to launch such large scale attacks. If China had spoken the truth, that its attack was pre-emptive, that Indian troops were planning an attack in Thag La as part of Operation Leghorn, it may have been believed.

Foreign Aid: Once fighting started, American jet transports were landing in India at the rate of eight flights a day, each carrying about twenty tons of equipment – automatic rifles, heavy mortars and recoiless guns etc. The UK too threw in its support. The French however stayed true to their mercenary colours and wanted payment for any assistance given. Israel too helped, though when India suggested that Israel supply weapons using vessels that did not carry Israeli flags, Ben Gurion is supposed to have said, ‘no flag, no weapons.’ Israel finally sent a shipment of heavy mortars in a ship flying the Israeli flag.

Public reactions in India: India’s political classes and urban masses reacted with fervent patriotism. Several thousand ethnic Chinese were interned in camps in Rajasthan and Maxwell tells us that some of the internees were expelled to China. I don’t know how true the bit about expulsion to China is - I’ve never read that anywhere else.

After China launched its second phase of attacks in the middle of November, there was general panic in India since the press had led the public to believe that the initial drawbacks were the result of Chinese treachery and that Indian troops were poised to reverse their losses. In NEFA, the Indian government expected the Chinese to takeover Tezpur. Nehru made an urgent, open appeal to the United States for assistance with fighters and bombers. Maxwell tells us that Nehru’s request was very specific – for fifteen American airforce squadrons – non-alignment be damned. As the civil administration evacuated Tezpur, the government ordered a scorched earth policy, but luckily, the administration did not have sufficient personnel to blow up everything.

The government put behind bars communists who did not identify with the communist leadership’s support for the government. Nehru took pains to clarify that India was not fighting China and not communism. By mistake, many communists who supported the Soviet Union were also arrested. Rather than admit its mistake and order a large-scale release, the government released the detainees one by one.

Casualties:

Casualty figures released by the Indian defence ministry in 1965 showed that 1,383 Indian soldiers died, 1,696 went missing and 3,968 were taken prisoner. As mentioned above, about 90% of Indian casualties were in NEFA. Maxwell tells us that the Chinese army used three divisions in the NEFA fighting, which gave the Chinese a very narrow numerical superiority in NEFA. However, the Indian forces were so scattered that the Chinese had no difficulty in putting into effect Mao’s teaching: ‘in every battle concentrate an absolutely superior force.’

Maxwell doesn’t talk of Chinese casualties, though he says that the Chinese suffered substantial casualties where Indians stood and fought, such as in Thembang on 17th November. Maxwell does say that not one Chinese soldier was taken prisoner. All Indian prisoners were repatriated by the Chinese within 6 months. Wikipedia says that 722 Chinese soldiers died and 1,697 were wounded.

On India’s claim to the disputed areas: The best bit about this 450 odd page tome is that the initial chapters contain a detailed discussion on the disputed territories and each party’s claim to those territories.

Ladakh and Aksai Chin

Ladakh, we are told, was historically a part of Tibet. After the tenth century, it asserted its independence, but has always been within Lhasa’s cultural pull. The famous Dogra chieftain Gulab Singh, who later acquired Kashmir from the British, invaded Ladakh in 1834 and captured it. Later, the Dogras went further, and captured Lhasa itself. The Dogra general (the legendary Zorawar Singh whom Maxwell doesn’t mention by name) made the tactical mistake of wintering in Lhasa and was marooned and killed, along with his forces. The victorious Tibetans followed up on their victory and advanced to Ladakh, but were beaten back by Gulab Singh’s armies. In 1846, the British made Gulab Singh the ruler of Kashmir and at the same time forbade him from adding to his territory without British consent. This was because the British were worried that the Chinese would assume that Gulab Singh had British approval for his adventures and would react against Britain.

In the mid 18th century, Britain invited China to participate in the demarcation of the boundary between Tibet and Ladakh, but the Chinese never played ball. When the British unilaterally demarcated the boundary, the terrain between the Pangong Lake and the Karakoram Pass, known as Aksai Chin, was left terra incognito. In 1865, an officer of the Survey of India, W. H. Johnson showed Aksai Chin to be a part of Kashmir, but his claim was treated with scepticism even by other Britons. Support for Johnson’s map came from Maj. Gen. Sir. John Ardagh, Director General of Military Intelligence in British India, whose main interest was to counter any Russian advance in India. In the early 1880s, China started to show interest in its southern frontiers and erected a boundary marker in the Karakoram pass and later dispatched an official, Li Yuan-ping to explore the southern stretches. Later Chinese officials specifically made a claim for Aksai Chin. Maxwell feels that the claim was most probably the result of Russian advice. George Macartney, a British representative in Kashgar commented that ‘probably part of Aksai Chin was in Chinese and part in British territory.’

Though a few British officials favoured a forward policy which would make Aksai Chin part of British India, in 1899, Britain proposed the Macartney-McDonald line to China, which gave China almost all of Aksai Chin proper, but left with British India the Lingzi Tang salt plains, the whole of the Changchenmo valley and the Chip Chap River in the north. China did not respond to this proposal.

In the first decade of the 20th Century, Britain insisted that Aksai Chin was a part of Tibet, rather than a part of China since the former position would prevent Russia from encroaching into Aksai Chin. However, after the collapse of (Manchu) Chinese power in the second decade of the 20th century, Viceroy Hardinge recommended that Aksai Chin should be shown as British Indian territory. This recommendation was never acted on. In 1914 when Britain convened the Simla Convention in 1914, with Chinese and Tibetan delegates in attendance, maps presented by Britian showed Aksai Chin to be a part of Tibet. That China pulled out of the 1914 summit where Britain tried to divide Tibet into Outer Tibet and Inner Tibet, on the lines of Mongolia, is a different story all together. In 1940-41, the Government of Sinkiang, under Warlord Sheng Shi-tsai carried out a survey of Aksai Chin with Russian experts. Britain said and did nothing.

Tawang

The Tawang tract, a wedge of territory to the east of Bhutan, connected Tibet to the Indian plains. Maxwell says that the British never considered Tawang to be anything other than Tibetan till the end of the 19th century. In 1907, the UK and Russia signed an agreement which required both to stay out of Tibet.

After the rise of Manchu China in the 19th century, China was in effective power in Tibet and British officials started to propose a forward policy which did not receive official sanction. Later, Britain held negotiations with Tibetans, without Chinese approval, based on which Henry McMahon, the British foreign Secretary for India, produced a boundary line which showed Tawang to be a part of British India. McMahon’s maps were accepted by the Tibetan plenipotentiary in exchange for British assistance in gaining independence from China. McMahon gave the Tibetans the idea that they could continue to collect taxes in Tawang. The McMahon line was not mentioned to the Chinese during the 1914 Simla convention. In 1929, when an authoritative record of the 1914 convention was published as the Aichison’s Treaties, Tawang was not shown to be a part of British India. The McMahon line remained forgotten till 1935 when a Deputy Secretary in New Delhi, Olaf Caroe, urged a forward policy and publication of the Anglo-Tibetan agreements. In 1937, a new edition of the Aichison’s Treaties was published, as if it was original 1929 edition, showing Tawang to be a part of British India. From 1937, the Survey of India also started using the McMahon line, though New Delhi rejected demands from frontier officials to permanently occupy Tawang.

The Tibetans later took the stand that since the British did not secure any degree of autonomy from China, they would not bound to recognise British claims to Tawang. British officials carried out occasional punitive expeditions to Tawang and in 1944, it was offered that the boundary should run through Se La, south of Tawang monastery. Nothing much came of that proposal, but in 1947 when India got independence, the British had set up Assam Rifles posts in various parts of Tawang and also excluded Tibetan administrators. In October 1947, Tibet formally asked India to return to Tibet a wide swathe of territory from Ladakh to Assam, including Sikkim and the Darjeeling district. India replied that Indo-tibetan relations should continue on the same basis as with the British administration.

Until 1949, the situation in NEFA was as the British had left it. India had an outpost at Walong, but other Indian positions were well back from the McMahon line. Tibetan administration in Tawang was unchallenged. However, from 1951 onwards, India started to occupy Tawang, despite Tibetan protests. Local people were not very happy. Maxwell tells us that ‘a strong Assam Rifles patrol, moving up the Subansiri River in the early 1950s, was warmly welcomed by one of the tribes, feasted and given shelter – and then massacred almost to a man. Seventy three riflemen and civilians died.’

Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan

Maxwell also details how India acquired Sikkim and brought Nepal and Bhutan within its sphere of influence and the tussle with China over these territories. Since I’ve already exceeded the acceptable word limit for a book review, I shall desist from delving into those topics. Please do read this extremely interesting book yourself to find out more.

Could India have won the 1962 War?

Let’s for a moment forget who was to blame for the escalation and the war: could India have won the war if it had prepared better? India’s air force played a passive role in the fear that if Chinese targets were bombed, it could lead to a wider conflict. Maxwell does not delve into this issue, though he does point out to a number of strategic mistakes made by India leading one to assume that if such mistakes hadn’t been made, the Indian army would have fared much better, if not actually won the war. Here’s an article which argues that India could have won the border conflict in 1962.

Conclusion:

Maxwell has argued that if India were willing to negotiate its boundary with China, it would have avoided the 1962 war. In all probability he is right. China had offered to give up its claim to NEFA in exchange for India relinquishing rights to Aksai Chin. Should India have accepted China’s offer? In my opinion, India ought to have accepted it. I am not sure if this offer is still on the table. If it is, India ought to grab it with both hands.

Fifty years ago, China’s hold on Tibet was tenuous and China could not have held on to the territories in NEFA it had captured in October and November 1962. These days, Tibet is well integrated with China, especially on account of the influx of Han people and the railway connection between Beijing and Lhasa. If there were to be another war between India and China and China were to repeat its 1962 victory, it might not want to unilaterally retreat to the McMahon line.

Amidst so much introspection into India’s mistakes and predictions about China’s future behaviour, it is easy to forget the Tibetans. As mentioned above, the Tibetans accepted the McMahon line in 1914 because they expected to receive British assistance in gaining independence from China. This promise wasn’t kept by British and its territorial heir, India. Why then should the Tibetan’s compromise on territory that has been a part of Tibet for many centuries? As mentioned above, in October 1947, Tibet had demanded from India the return of territories ranging from Ladakh to Assam to Sikkim and Darjeeling!

Let’s imagine a situation 100 years hence were, as a result of internal turmoil within China, Tibet has become a free country. It is quite possible that independent Tibet will demand Tawang and the rest of Arunachal Pradesh from India on the ground that they have been a part of Tibet historically. It is also possible that a demand may be made for Ladakh.

India has conceded that Tibet is a part of China. If one takes that argument to its logical conclusion, then China’s claim to Tawang and the rest of Arunachal Pradesh begins to carry some weight since Arunachal Pradesh, including Tawang, has historically been a part of Tibet. However, the average Indian Joe has been led to believe that all the territory that falls within the official map of India is sacrosanct. These days, many Indian newspapers have started carrying articles on these topics which show the true picture rather than bleat the official line. Here is an interesting article on Tawang and Tibet carried by the Times of India.

Indian leaders and media need to re-educate the Indian public on these issues before India’s leadership is in a position to enter into meaningful negotiations with the Chinese and Tibetans for resolving the border dispute.

Book Review: “Leadership in the Indian Army - Biographies of Twelve Soldiers” by Major General V. K. Singh

Before I start, let me clarify that Major General V. K. Singh, the author of this wonderful book, is not the recently retired Indian Chief of Army Staff General V. K. Singh. Maj. Gen V. K. Singh has written a few other books about the Indian army and one about India’s intelligence agency, titled - India’s External Intelligence – Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) – which I had reviewed earlier on this blog, with mixed feelings I should add.

Twelve soldiers, each of them a legend in India, are represented in this collection. The author tells us in his preface that these men ‘represent a cross-section of the Indian army. Of the 12, nine are from the Infantry, one each from the Cavalry, Engineers and Signals. There are three Chiefs (Cariappa, Thimayya and Manekshaw); four army Commanders (Nathu Singh, Thorat, Bhagat and Sinha); three Corps Commanders (Sagat, Bakshi and Hanut Singh); one Head of Army (Batra); and one Brigade Commander (Usman). If one were to go by valour, there were seven who were decorated for gallantry. There was one VC (Bhagat); there MVCs (Bakshi, Hanut and Usman); Thimayya and Thorat); one VrC (Bakshi); and one MC (Manekshaw).’ Interesting, all the twelve soldiers were born before India’s independence and all except one of them (Hanut Singh) joined the Indian army before India became independent. I wonder why V. K. Singh didn’t include a few younger soldiers born after the departure of the British, who do not have the colonial shadow hanging over them? Maybe V. K. Singh did not want to talk about serving officers. However, if V. K. Singh could have covered a few not-so-high ranking individuals like Subedar Major Bana Singh who have performed exceptional feats of valour, this book would have been enriched all the more by such an inclusion.


When I started reading this book, I settled in for what I assumed would be a very dry account of the professional lives of twelve soldiers. Instead, I was treated to riveting stories of twelve brave men and their families, the narration full of anecdotes and jokes. More importantly, these biographies serve as markers for India’s military history from the time of the Second World War till the time of Operation Brass Tacks in the mid-80s. Some of the tales that come out of this book are part of India’s military lore and well-known to every aficionado of Indian military history: The first C-in-C of independent India’s army, Cariappa was a pucca sahib who could barely speak Hindi. A strict disciplinarian who always went by the rules, Cariappa retired at the age of 53, like many other senior officers who succeeded him such as Lt. Gen. Nathu Singh who retired at the age of 51 and Gen. Thimayya and Lt. Gen. Thorat who both retired at 55. V. K. Singh asks the very valid question as to why these experienced officers were allowed to retire so early at a time when independent India had requested many British officers to stay on due to a lack of experienced officers in the army. It was Cariappa who supported the proposal that limited the tenure of the Chief of Army Staff and Army Commanders to four years. The author laments time and again that if such a ridiculous rule hadn’t been implemented, India would not have suffered the infamy of its 1962 defeat against China. In a similar vein, the impact of VK Krishna Menon on the Indian defence forces, in particular the army, is mentioned more than once as V. K. Singh sketches the careers of his chosen soldiers. When Thimayya retired in May 1961, Thorat was bypassed though he was the better candidate and the pliable Thapar was made the Army Chief. It was when Thapar was in charge, with Lt. General Brij Mohan Kaul was the Chief of General Staff, that the 1962 debacle took place. An experienced Army Chief (such as Thimayya or Thorat) and his Commanders could have restrained Nehru and Krishna Menon from following their very short-sighted ‘forward policy’ and getting embroiled in a war against China for which they had refused to prepare despite countless warnings.

Practically all the battles in which the Indian army has been involved in since 1947 until Operation Brass Tacks (the IPKF operations in Sri Lanka are not covered) are described in good detail. I particularly liked the description of how Zojila was captured by Thimayya and Kot by Brigadier Mohammad Usman during the 1948 Kashmir War. In addition, we also get to know of many minor military actions and other incidents one normally wouldn’t hear of. We are told that just after partition, 3 Para Baluch, which became part of the Pakistani army, fired 3-inch mortars on a refugee camp of Hindus and Sikhs. On a different note, we learn that Lt. Gen. Nathu Singh put down two army mutinies in Allahabad and Jhansi shortly after India’s independence. Apparently during the 1965 war with Pakistan, the Chinese served India an ultimatum, asking them to vacate their posts at Nathu La and Jalep La. Since Nathu La and Jalep La were only observation posts, the army was ordered to withdraw to its main defences at Lungthu. Lt. Gen Sagat Singh ignored his orders and refused to vacate Nathu La though Jalep La was vacated. India continues to hold Nathu La. Jalep La is held by the Chinese. On yet another note, we read that in May 1972, India launched at attack against Pakistan in an enclave called Thako Chak (in the Chicken’s Neck) which turned out to be disastrous and expensive for India (in terms of casualties). Then there are titbits which aren’t very relevant, but are interesting none the less, such as that Gen. Thimayya’s elder brother was an INA officer taken prisoner by the British at Rangoon.

The most salacious stories in my opinion come courtesy Sam Manekshaw. Apparently Sam used to make disparaging comments about politicians, which landed him in trouble while he was the commandant of the Defence Services Staff College at Wellington. ‘Based on information gathered by informers who were sent by Kaul (Lt. General Brij Mohan Kaul) for this purpose, Army HQ ordered a Court of Inquiry. There were three charges against Sam. The first was that he was disloyal to the country since he displayed pictures of British Viceroys, Governor Generals etc. in his office. The second was that Sam had failed to take action against an instructor who remarked that Indians lacked a sense of perspective and tended to build up personalities out of proportion (the personality here being the Maratha leader Shivaji). The third was that Sam had said he did not want any instructor at the college whose wife looked liked an Ayah!’ I shall not dwell on these charges or their outcome since I am sure you can read this book and find out, but only remind you that these gentlemen belonged to a different era and subscribed to values that were on a much higher plane than those of average men and women.

We know that some Muslim soldiers (such as Mohammad Usman) opted to stay on in India rather than join the Pakistani army. However, I had no idea that any Hindu or Sikh soldier could have opted for Pakistan. Therefore, when I heard that one Teja Singh Aulakh opted for the Pakistani army since his village Narowal went to Pakistan, I was a bit surprised. Later we are told that when Teja Singh Aulakh found that his family members had crossed over to India at Dera Baba Nanak, he opted for the Indian army. V. K. Singh does not tell us if any Hindu or Sikh soldier opted for Pakistan and stuck with such a decision.

Throughout the book, we get to hear how such and such a solider got on or did not get on with politicians. Lt. Gen. Apparently Nathu Singh did not get along with Nehru. Manekshaw got on famously with Indira Gandhi, once even complimenting her on her hairdo. When Indira Gandhi returned from Simla after signing a peace treaty with Bhutto, Sam Manekshaw reportedly told her, ‘Bhutto has made a monkey out of you.’ The Indian army has always stayed out of politics, but politicians have not reciprocated. We are told that Lt. Gen. PS Bhagat was so popular that he could not be superseded and Indira Gandhi had to resort to subterfuge to get him out of the way. She gave Bhagat’s predecessor Bewoor a year’s extension and thereby prevented Bhagat from becoming the Army Chief. Similarly Lt. Gen S.K.Sinha was superseded and Arun Vaidya was made the Army Chief in July 1983.

A majority of the twelve soldiers covered in this book saw action during the Second World War. Some of them like Thimayya served in Korea, Cyprus and Congo as part of UN peacekeeping forces. V. K. Singh does not stop his biographies at retirement. We are given names of children and even grandchildren. Some soldiers took on onerous commitments after leaving the army and performed very well. Many served as ambassadors, such as Lt. Gen. Sinha who served as India’s ambassador to Nepal. After Lt. Gen P. S. Bhagat was made Chairman of the Damodar Valley Corporation in In July 1974, he turned it around. From 45 MW in August 1974, the production rose to 700 MW by October 1974. During the ten months that Bhagat ran the Damodar Valley Corporation, production increased twenty fold. After retirement, Cariappa, Thorat and Sinha stood for Lok-Sabha elections and all of them lost. Cariappa stood as an independent candidate from north-east Bombay, Thorat as a Congress Party candidate from Kolhapur and Sinha as an independent candidate from Patna. V. K. Singh suggests that Sinha would have won, had it not been for vote rigging.

V. K. Singh doesn’t desist from getting really personal. We are told that ‘Sagat was a soldier, but like everybody else, he had his foibles. One of these was his proclivity for affaires de coeur. A burly six-foot-two, he was a handsome man in his prime and women found him irresistible.’

At times I found myself disagreeing with VK Singh’s logic. Just after independence, when tribal raiders from Pakistan were threatening Kahsmir, Nathu Singh proposed to Nehru that India should attack Lahore, which would pressurise Pakistan into vacating Kashmir. Nehru (rightly in my opinion) berated Nathu Singh for such a plan. VK Singh says that in 1965 such a plan was approved by Lal Bahadur Shastri and an attack towards Lahore had saved Kashmir from Pakistani aggression. All well, but then 1948 wasn’t 1965. If just after independence India had attacked Lahore, India would have been pilloried in the court of international opinion, if not elsewhere.

V. K. Singh’s style of description is not only endowed with old world charm, it also comes with the values of those days built in. For example, we are told that ‘Sam is a Parsi and was born on 3 April 1914 in Amritsar. The Parsis are a very small community, found mostly on the western coast of India, especially Bombay and certain areas of Gujarat.’ Good going, I want to say but when V. K. Singh says that ‘Though small in number, the Parsis are a very progressive community, with 100 per cent literacy,’ I do want to ask what correlation could exist between the size of a community and its progressiveness. Similarly when we are told that ‘though a devout Muslim, Usman was a staunch nationalist and apparently had no problem in remaining loyal to his religion as well as his country’, I wanted to ask V. K. Singh if he believed devout Muslims would normally find it difficult to be nationalistic. When I read that during the 1971 war, Sagat tasked the Hunter aircraft, operating from Kumbhigram airfield, to constantly bomb Maulvi Bazar with napalm, I was shocked. A quick bit of fact checking revealed that the use of napalm is not banned per se, but only its use on civilians. More importantly, both India and Pakistan seem to have used it extensively during the 1965 and 1971 wars.

As I have said before, we are talking of a different era with different values.

For the sake of future readers, I am setting out below the names of the twelve soldiers whose biographies find place in this collection:

1. Field Marshall K. M. Cariappa, OBE
2. Lieutenant General Thakur Nathu Singh
3. General K. S. Thimayya, DSO
4. Lieutenant General S. P. P. Thorat, KC, DSO
5. Brigadier Mohammad Usman, MVC
6. Field Marshall S.H. F.J.Manekshaw, MC
7. Lieutenant General R. N. Batra, PVSM, OBE
8. Lieutenant General P. S. Bhagat, PVSM, VC
9. Lieutenant General Sagat Singh, PVSM
10. Lieutenant General Z. C. Bakshi, PVSM, MVC
11. Lieutenant General S.K. Sinha, PVSM
12. Lieutenant General Hanut Singh, PVSM, MVC

This book is a "must read" for every Indian army fan.

Book Review: Eaten By The Japanese - The Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War by John Baptist Crasta

John Baptist Crasta, the author of this amazing book, was British Indian soldier who fought in the Second World War in the Malayan theatre, was taken prisoner by the Japanese, endured horrific atrocities, but survived to tell his fascinating tale. On his return to Bombay, John Crasta continued to serve in the army until his retirement. He married Christine, a Mangalorean girl in 1947 and they had four children, one of whom Richard Crasta went on to join the Indian Administrative Service and later migrated to the United States and became a full-time writer, publishing books such as The Revised Kamasutra, Impressing the Whites; Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex, and What We All Need.

John Crasta’s story-telling (as edited by his son Richard Crasta) is succinct and to the point. Eaten By The Japanese does not go much beyond one hundred pages and that includes essays by the author’s son Richard Crasta on his relationship with his father, the problems he faced in getting this book published and the reception it faced. After being taken prisoner by the Japanese, John Crasta had to make a choice – whether to join the Indian National Army which was being set up by leaders like Captain Mohan Singh and Rash Behari Bose or to stay loyal to his oath. We are told that coercion and even torture were used to force Indian PoWs to join the Indian National Army. Despite that, many like John Crasta refused to join up. Did John Crasta’s religion have anything to do with his decision? I wondered. This question is not specifically addressed in this memoir, but the fact that out of a total of sixty five thousand prisoners, only twenty five thousand volunteered for the INA sort of suggests otherwise. John Crasta says that the average Indian jawan did not wish to be unfaithful to the British after having served them for many years. One gets the impression that those who signed up to the INA did so more to escape the brutal treatment at the hands of the Japanese than anything else.

I found it unbelievable when I read that some of the PoWs who refused to join the INA were tortured. John Crasta says that a camp called Separation Camp was created where non-volunteers, especially officers who didn’t volunteer, were put to extreme hardship. Many died. Subedars Sher Singh and Fateh Khan were in charge of Separation Camp. ‘High ranking officers who refused to have anything to do with the INA were thrown into it without clothing or food, made to carry heavy loads on their heads, and to double up on the slightest sign of slackness. They would be beaten by sweepers, the infamous Nimboo having been put in charge of them. They would be caned, beaten and kicked. Various other devices of torture, perhaps copied from the Germans, were introduced. Many people died in that camp. Others were removed to a hospital, only to die a slow death. Some others, not being able to ber the hardships, agreed to “sign” and were released.’

The Japanese tortured the prisoners – beat them for no reason, overworked them, gave them little food and drink, provided little or no medical care even for those seriously ill. I found John Crasta’s descriptions of being transported by a cargo steamer from Singapore to Sourabaya in Java and from Sourabaya to Rabaru in New Britain via Palau to be the most horrendous of the various horrible things described in this book – the extremely cramped conditions, the lack of food, the pitiful amount of water, the disease outbreaks, the beatings and the inevitable deaths – except for the cannibalism of course.

The Japanese practised cannibalism. John Crasta tells us of a specific instance when two men of the 13th Pioneer Company, Budhu Mistry and Giana Mistry, who had complained of illness, were given injections by the Japanese which killed them both within a couple of hours. They were buried immediately but the same evening the Japanese ordered the bodies to be dug out, had the arms, thigh muscles and livers cut out from the corpses, cooked and ate it. Well, those men who were eaten were atleast dead. There were many instances of live men having flesh gouged out of their bodies and thrown away to die in agony, even as their flesh was cooked and consumed.

Reading a kindle edition of the book, I was forced many times to switch off the kindle and put it away, only to come back to it almost immediately afterwards. I finished the entire book in one sitting. How does one reconcile Japanese treatment of PoWs during the Second World War with modern day Japan, which though it is yet to apologise for its behaviour in as comprehensive a manner as the Germans, is a very peaceful nation which is at the forefront of technological innovation and is in many respects a model nation? In his essays on Rediscovering his Father and the Political Incorrectness of Truth which follows the main novel, Richard Crasta quotes Pico Iyer who is married to a Japanese woman and lives in Japan. Iyer says that ‘in Japan today, Indians are the lowest of the low.’ Why should it be so hard for the Japanese to issue an apology to all the Indians who were abused and manipulated, and to their children and descendants? Crasta wonders. I guess the first step would be for the Indian government to seek such an apology. As far as I know, the Indian government hasn’t sought one.

After the war, Indian public sentiment was understandably on the side of those who joined the INA. The British didn’t dare punish the mutineers. After independence, those Indian soldiers who fought on the side of the Japanese were feted and rewarded while those like John Crasta were consigned to the dung heap of anonymity. The sympathy and support for INA soldiers is so prevalent even now that John Crasta’s son Richard Crasta found it very difficult to find takers for his father’s story. Crasta tells us (quite rightly in my opinion) that if for any reason the Japanese had conquered India, they would most likely have treated Indians as slaves – such was their contempt for Indians. It is interesting to note that when after independence Nehru asked General Cariappa to get the Indian army to absorb the former INA men, he refused saying it would be the end of the army in India since the soldiers who refused to fight on the Japanese side considered the INA soldiers to be turncoats.

Richard Crasta’s essays on Rediscovering his Father and the Political Incorrectness of Truth beautifully captures his relationship with his father. As a young man, Richard Crasta had little respect for the humble soldier John Crasta who insisted on cycling everywhere, wearing clothes which were not exactly haute couture. This attitude changed as he grew older and started to appreciate the extent of pain experienced by his father as a Japanese PoW. When Richard Crasta took a lot of trouble to have his father’s manuscript printed as a book, it was as much a form of atonement for his previous indifference and disrespect as it was to help his father tell his extra-ordinary story.

An excellent read, especially for those interested in the Indian National Army and the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war.

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed – A Book Review

'Captain Kadian takes a large swig from his glass tumbler, closes his eyes for a moment, smacks his lips and says, "the job is not that hard you see, you just .....................'

The opening sentence of Mirza Waheed’s novel gave me the feeling that I was reading one of those Soviet era books set in the years following the October revolution and that ‘Kadian’ was possibly the abbreviation of an Armenian name. But no, Captain Kadian is employed by the Indian army, has been deployed in Kashmir for a three-year tour of duty and is responsible for most of the unnamed Protagonist’s nightmares. Though ‘Kadian’ is not a common Indian name, Wikipedia informs me that there exists a Jat clan called Kadian and we are told by the author that Captain Kadian is ‘young, handsome, north Indian. A Punjabi perhaps, a Jat probably.’ A humble Gujjar lad, the Protagonist is a collaborator who runs dirty errands for the cruel Captain Kadian, who the Protagonist hates and fears in equal measure.

I began to hate The Collaborator even before I crossed the first twenty pages. Set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, The Collaborator depicts the Indian army as extremely ruthless and cruel. There are mentions of large scale massacres and mass-rapes where all women in a village are raped. I do know that truth is the first casualty in any war and that there have been human rights abuses by Indian security forces, but I felt that the ‘allegations’ in The Collaborator are over the top. More importantly, it shows the Indian army as overwhelmingly strong, powerful and successful in fighting the insurgency, practically killing insurgents at will. No sooner do a number of Kashmiri boys trained in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir cross over into India than the Indian army crunches into action and kills off most of those crossing over at a time of the army’s choosing. In fact the author goes to the extent of telling us, through Captain Kadian, that the Border Security force (BSF) is even tougher and nastier than the Indian army. There is one instance where the BSF’s intelligence unit, the G-Branch, is shown as giving the army a lesson in mountain warfare when some militants were holed out in a few caves and the army didn’t know how to clear them out!

However, as I progressed, I got to know the Protagonist better, and even his fears and dreams, I started appreciating The Collaborator better. The Protagonist, who remains unnamed till the end, does not appear to support Azadi in any serious manner. True, he is petrified of the Indian army and the black cat commandoes who carry out the occasional cordon and search operation and dawn raids. He admires the Kashmiri insurgents who are always shown as inferior in strength to the Indian army, whose soldiers are very shown to be very fit and strong. He is fearful of the ruthless and cruel Pathans, Afghans, Arabs and Chechens who have contempt for Kashmiris’ fighting abilities. He gets bugged when a militant group broke up video rental shops, torched cinemas, dragged frightened little girls out of school, checked their hands for nail polish and sent them home in knee-length burqas. We hear that Gujjars are not trusted by other Kashmiris, though some of them do become insurgents. Slowly we get to know that the Protagonist’s father, the village sarpanch, had fought the tribal raiders from Pakistan just after independence. The sarpanch is liked by the villagers who saved him from the insurgents’ wrath.

After all his friends cross the Loc and go to Pakistan and he is the only teenager left behind in the village, the Protagonist too tries to follow then over the LoC. As he proceeds towards his rendezvous with the guide who is to take him across, he thinks thus of Pakistan: ‘A place of which I had an obscure vision, an image, as being the country where we boys went to become militants and which supported us and welcomed us with open arms, and where they were all Muslims and were in fact sending their own sons to fight alongside us, but a place I did not really know. It was, now I understand, and still is, a khayal, just an idea.’ The Protagonist does not make it across since he is turned away by the guide, with a gentle reminder of his father’s past fighting tribal raiders and accepting government grants.

Captain Kadian uses the Protagonist for a dirty chore. The chore itself is unrealistic (I would rather not reveal what it is and play spoil sport) and descriptions of Captain Kadian’s operations are equally unrealistic, as explained earlier. The soldiers are there in strength in the Protagonist’s village since it is very close to the LoC. Around there, ‘the Indians kill just about everyone. Who will know and object, leave along protest, in this remote, cut-off wilderness? You know, sometimes I wonder – because for Kashmir, there is always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything – what if they have their own pasture of dead boys on the other side of the border? Their own stash of the infiltration residue? Young men who lost their lives while learning to walk the perilous path to freedom. Treachery is a word everyone should learn.’ One hears an old man tell the Protagonist of elite Makara soldiers who even eat people, old people mostly. The Protagonist seems to believe every word he hears. Later when the Protagonist’s friends leave him behind and cross the LoC, the village is at the receiving end of the army’s raids. Curfew is imposed for days at a stretch.

Kashmir has a new governor, a man very stern and ruthless, who is described as ‘the former leader of the demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of forced, compulsory vasectomies.....’ Though not mentioned by name, it is very obvious that the reference is to Jagmohan Malhotra who was the governor of Jammu & Kashmir from 1984 to 1989 and then for a few months in 1990. I found this implicit reference to Jagmohan a bit confusing since in the beginning of the novel, there is a reference to a dead militant’s watch which keeps ticking and shows the date as ‘16 April 1993’. The blurb on one of the side flaps of this book says ‘It is Kashmir in the early 1990s......’ From May 1990 to March 1993, Girish Chandra Saxena was the Governor of Jammu & Kashmir and not Jagmohan, but hey, this is fiction and one shouldn’t nitpick, right?

Towards the end of the novel, one hears of the insurgents torturing the guide and his family who they (wrongly) suspect of having helped the Indian army. By that time, the villagers have had enough of searches and curfews. They all pack up and leave, all except the Protagonist and his parents. Where do the villagers escape to, with all their cattle and other belongings? Do they cross the LoC in the middle of the winter? I was half-expecting them to, since they had nowhere else to go. But no, to escape from the Indian army, they flee to ‘India’! By this stage, I had started liking the Collaborator.

A lot of the information that is conveyed to the reader by the Protagonist is hearsay. A man is snatched from the Protagonist’s village by black-cat commandoes who turn up in LMG-mounted gypsies. The Protagonist tells us that from a distance, the commandoes looked like a ‘pack of animals’. After the snatched man is returned to the village, theories abound. One theory is that he was not harmed at all since he readily divulged all that he knew. Another theory is that ‘he was tortured day and night by Kashmiri Pandit police officers, bent on revenge after their tragic exodus from the valley...... Another theory was that ‘he was made to pee on an electric heater while they threw ice-cold water over him; they pierced a red-hot knitting needle through his...... Finally the Protagonist goes to visit the victim one afternoon and without being asked, the victim lifts up his kurta and shows the area above his groin which has small, etched black pits all over the pubic area.

Captain Kadian trusts the Protagonist sufficiently enough to give him a pistol. The Protagonist hates Captain Kadian enough to want to use it on Captain Kadian. Does the Protagonist summon enough courage to do so? Do please read this extremely interesting book, written in exquisite prose, to find out. Exaggerations notwithstanding, it is a very good read.

The Author of The Collaborator Mirza Waheed spent his childhood in Srinagar, read English Literature at the University of Delhi and later worked as a journalist in Delhi for four years. Since 2001, he has been living in London where he works for the BBC's Urdu Service as an editor.