Uncovering the war

The story of a bloody period in Sri Lanka.

India’s unexpected war in Sri Lanka caught me on the wrong foot by 12,000 km. I was still finishing the last month of my sabbatical year in Washington DC when the fighting broke out. And as I returned home, the media was full of coverage, often loaded, of the IPKF disaster in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna peninsula. Loaded because the Bofors scandal, and many other missteps, already had Rajiv Gandhi under widespread attack. Sri Lanka was therefore seen as ‘babalog‘ political stupidity, rather than military incompetence. In the process, we were guilty of both insensitivity to Indian soldiers, their courage and sacrifice, and conveniently overlooking the complacence of our higher commanders. Now, this was obviously not a war we were going to ever lose though my friend Hardeep Puri, who was by then our first secretary in Colombo under J.N. Mani Dixit, tells you, sort of semi-lightheartedly, that there was one evening so tense that it sounded as if Palaly (Jaffna airbase and the IPKF’s 54 Infantry Division HQ) was going to fall. Hardeep had just seen the truce agreement he had so painstakingly drafted and signed with Mahattaya (Madras Cafe‘s Mallaya) fall apart.

It is creditable how much of that initial messiness Shoojit Sircar has got accurately. The fact that early IPKF patrols were routinely ambushed, pinned down and annihilated. How its officers were picked out by snipers. How the LTTE seemed to have inside information on all IPKF moves (more about this a little later). The most creditable footage, however fleeting and sensitively handled, is of the Tigers ransacking Indian soldiers’ bodies and picking weapons, souvenirs and trophies from them. Note, particularly, a boyish Sikh soldier sitting, frozen in rigor mortis. That quality of research you didn’t expect from a mainstream Indian filmmaker, and we will shortly explain why.

On my return to India, I was deeply saddened even offended by the celebratory coverage of the war. Cover pictures of Indian soldiers’ bodies, close-ups of Tigers displaying caps, identity cards, boots of dead Indian soldiers. You had never seen an Indian war covered like that, and you haven’t since. Of course, I also felt rotten having missed out on the big story which, for the magazine, was covered by my friend and colleague Anita Pratap, who later worked for Time and CNN. She believes that Nargis Fakhri’s Jaya was styled after her, and has sent emails to her old friends saying so. The photographer accompanying her, Shyam Tekwani, was my frequent travelling partner in Sri Lanka subsequently, and now teaches at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies, Hawaii. I did get into many arguments in our newsroom on how we had covered the story and why it was necessary to now reconstruct what exactly had gone wrong, and the lessons learnt, etc. My reward was being assigned that story now. And in the third week of December 1987, I landed in Colombo, having been briefed by Gen. Sundarji, his DGMO Lt Gen. (later army chief) Bipin Chandra Joshi, and his staff.

Since association by events is sometimes the safest way to remember dates, particularly if you do not maintain elaborate notebooks in my case, in fact, hardly, and notoriously the sketchiest ones, if at all I can tell you I was on way to Jaffna from Colombo in a rented Mitsubishi Lancer on December 24 and had just crossed Vavuniya when everything came to a standstill. Angry, grieving mobs blocked the streets. MGR had just died – that’s how I know the precise date – and a bandh had been declared by Tamils. I couldn’t go forward or back, knew no Tamil, had no food or shelter, and you know how early the winter sun sets that far in the east. But I was lucky again, as an IPKF patrol of Maratha Light Infantry Regiment passed by and its leader, then a very young Captain C.K. Menon, offered me shelter in his camp. We connected decades later at the ITC Grand Central Hotel in Mumbai, where he was serving in a senior capacity, having left the army as a colonel (he has moved up the ladder in ITC hotels now). From him and his colleagues that night, in that small camp in the danger zone, I heard my first stories of the ordeal Indian soldiers had just been through. True enough, after absorbing the initial setbacks, they had taken and secured the entire Jaffna peninsula. But the price had been a shocker: 350 killed and 1,100 wounded in this month-long charge. The casualty rate, at 7 per cent of all troops involved, was twice as high as in our wars against Pakistan. One of the five brigades that assaulted Jaffna, the 41st, which was airlifted on October 17 and launched straight on the coastal road axis leading to Jaffna Fort (see sketch), had 272 casualties, or 17 per cent of its strength. The 72nd also suffered heavy casualties, including its deputy brigade commander, Col D.S. Saraon. The heavily armoured BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was riding was blown up by a 200-kg mine. The 13.2-tonne vehicle was tossed more than 30 feet and its doors, each weighing more than 250 kg, were found more than a hundred yards away. Another illustrious battalion, 4/5 Gurkhas, had its commandant and all but one of its majors killed one afternoon. This is not a war anybody had expected and, regrettably, prepared to fight. I wrote a five-page reconstruction and analysis headlined ‘In a rush to vanquish’ (India Today, January 31, 1988).

T-72 tanks, Mi-25 helicopter gunships had come without ammunition, infantry had been airlifted from places as far as Gwalior and thrown into battle without even three hours of familiarisation. There is no excuse for this kind of complacence. The IPKF’s first casualties were five soldiers from its finest unit, the paracommandos. Waylaid by the LTTE while casually going to collect provisions on October 8, they were burnt in public with tyres thrown around their necks. That disastrous beginning spilled over into the most talked about setback then: the combined, heli-dropped paracommando and infantry raid (October 11) on the Jaffna University campus where Prabhakaran and his top aides were living. It went wrong from the word go. Only two-thirds of the commandos (10 Paracommando) could be landed and the infantry company (13 Sikh Light Infantry), which was to secure the landing ground, the football field from where IPKF helicopters used to routinely pick up LTTE commanders for talks, failed to fetch up, and the special assault forces contingent was reduced to fighting a battle for survival instead. As for Sikh LI, only a platoon could be landed, and in the wrong playground, several lanes of buildings away. The rest of the company could not land as helicopters came under medium machine gun fire. The platoon, led by Major Birendra Singh, a close relation of diplomat-politician K. Natwar Singh, was encircled and wiped out after a valiant fight. Only one of the 30, Sepoy Gora Singh, survived, and was taken prisoner by the LTTE. It is believed Prabhakaran displayed him to his fighters, kicked him in public and said, let him go, so he will tell them not to fight us again. Gora Singh, however, brought back the story of one of the Indian army’s most poignant battles ever, where, out of ammunition, the last three survivors even carried out a final, suicidal bayonet charge. The LTTE looted and stripped all the bodies, piled them in the nearby Nagaraja Vihar Temple on public display, and then cremated them by simply throwing a barrel of oil over them. That’s why it is so revolting now to see Tamil Nadu politicians feeling so sorry for the Tigers.

And this is why we had said earlier that Madras Cafe‘s footage of the first battles, along with the young Sikh soldier (remember the Sikh LI platoon) in rigor mortis and the LTTE boys plundering the bodies, was so remarkable. It was the first instance of Indian filmmakers challenging the old Haqeeqat-Hindustan ki Kasam-Border notion of Indian war cinema. I walked around that ground weeks later and still found shreds of the Sikhs’ uniforms. In the nearby building, there was more evidence of the sickening plunder of those bodies: pieces of Sikh LI battle fatigues, cross-belts, boots, water bottles, epaulettes, all mixed with .50 mg MMG shells, sometimes ankle-deep. That tells you how much fire that one lost platoon withstood in the course of those valiant 12 hours.

The commandos, separated in the football ground, had done a little better, with six killed and nine wounded. They were finally rescued in an audacious and brilliantly innovative operation by their commanding officer, Lt Col Dalbir Singh, covered by three T-72 tanks of 65 Armoured Regiment. Since by now it was known that the Tigers had mined all approaches, Major Anil Kaul, the tank commander (his father had first raised this regiment), remembered a railway line skirting the campus and decided to drive the tanks on the rail tracks instead, for once surprising the LTTE. But his own tank was hit on the turret by an RPG shell (or an MMG burst) and he lost his eye and hand as he bravely peeped out to navigate. His inspired troops put him on morphine, bashed on, and ensured that heroic rescue of the commandos. The Col Kaul with an eye-patch that you see on your TV channels, usually furious over some military issue or the other, and who once famously demanded that I be hanged upside down from a tree and flogged (after our story on the army movements on the night of January 16, 2012, that spooked Raisina Hill), is the same valiant cavalry man.

Pardon me for leap-frogging the calendar, but Col Kaul’s latter day anger apart, in Sri Lanka I got nothing but large-hearted access, affection and hospitality from the Indian army. I did have only one tough scrap, though well meaning. This was at Batticaloa in September 1989, where, after a briefing and lunch with the GOC of 57 Mountain Division there, I was stepping out to go to the city. As Tekwani and I came out of the general’s ops room, we found three army trucks and a Jeep, machine guns mounted, tarpaulins ripped and battle-ready Sikh soldiers spilling over from each one. “This is your escort,” said the general. We protested that we were safest as journalists, and going out with such a convoy would endanger our lives and the soldiers’, as the LTTE may just presume we were some Indian VIPs. The argument became heated. And the irritated general gave up on us, saying, “Alright, then you are on your own, and I am taking the chopper to an outpost. Then, if something happens to you in this area, at least I will not be responsible.” But that “you are being stupid anyway”. He was, of course, speaking from sincere concern. He was a wonderful soldier and his name is Maj. Gen. Ashok Mehta, who is now one of your more sensible and articulate TV generals. Yet another aside: he subsequently married prominent political journalist Aditi Phadnis. I can make a disclosure now – the original tip-off on Tamil rebel training camps in India, that led to the first story of March 1984, had come from Aditi’s mother, Urmila, a highly respected international affairs professor at JNU. Now don’t say that reporters’ stories are filled with digressions.

Shoojit’s film suggests that the LTTE knew all about IPKF moves because some traitor was leaking to them. He is only halfway right. There were no traitors, but the LTTE knew for sure. As the IPKF later discovered, the LTTE’s communications, electronics and eavesdropping ability was on par with modern armies. An army College of Combat team later researched the disasters, particularly at Jaffna University, and concluded that the Tigers had intercepted the IPKF wireless on that assault night. Even the range and height settings of their machine guns were perfect when the helicopters arrived.

The five brigades that converged on Jaffna moved at different speeds and suffered a varying, but high, number of casualties. But the brigade that suffered the least, the 18th, also reached Jaffna the fastest. Why, I learnt during those many conversations over long nights spent at the regrouping and recuperating units’ field headquarters. Its commander, Brigadier J.S. Jogi Dhillon, spoke at length about jiujitsu, of how to turn your enemy’s strengths against him. So his troops moved only at night and only through the fields and lagoons, avoiding all roads, thereby skirting minefields and snipers. But most importantly, he showed the courage and military dash to use the most potent weapon in the IPKF’s armoury: the deadly Mi-25 helicopter gunships, the only time that weapon has been used in our history. His brigade had to take the Tiger stronghold of Chavakachcheri (where Prabhakaran executed Mahattaya and his 257 soldiers later in December 1994), and heavy casualties were anticipated. He prevailed on the high command to let him use Mi-25s. All they did was fire just 32 rockets at the Chavakachcheri bus station, supposed to be the LTTE nerve centre. He took the town with just three casualties. There was the predictable outcry that many of the 28 Tamils killed by Mi-25 rockets were innocent civilians. But Jogi’s point was, so what were they doing there? He quoted the Chetwode Oath to me, which made the safety and well-being of his troops next only to his nation’s security for an Indian army officer. As the Americans used to sometimes call Vietnam, “Shekhar, this is a dirty little war and people will die”, he said, “and because many will die, they better be yours rather than mine.” Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket had probably not been released in India by then, so I am not sure he borrowed that line from the young marine there, though spoken in a different context.

Dhillon, Brigadiers Manjit Singh (the battered 41st) and B.D. Mishra (72nd) spoke of other experiences and lessons. How the Tigers had rigged Chinese-made sniper chairs on the top of palm trees where sharpshooters waited entire days with rifles equipped with telescopic sights, how they expertly picked out officers from Indian columns: a skill taught to them, sadly, by our own army instructors when we were hand-in-glove with them. Also, their expertise with electronics and explosives and their ability to marry both. At one point, the IPKF was so harassed by IEDs electronically detonated from afar that it cut off power to Jaffna for several days.

On the way back from Jaffna and on subsequent visits to Sri Lanka as well, I was given generous audiences in the newly built chancery, a monument to disastrous CPWD architecture and L-1 construction at such a premium ocean-front spot, by High Commissioner Mani Dixit who once had chided me for that 1984 training camps story but was now so genuinely affectionate. The Sri Lankan media mocked him as ‘viceroy’, and Mani smirked as only he could as he cleaned and dusted his pipe and looked out of his window at the two Indian navy frigates routinely anchored close enough for you to see the markings and ensigns. “Sadly, Shekhar, you’ve proven to be right and we so wrong with the Tigers,” he said. “These thugs were never to be trusted and I am sure nobody ever would.” Not much later, Premadasa did, and paid with his life. But Mani also said another important thing. He said the IPKF experience had told him India was still not ready to be a big power. “The first evening of fighting, and I knew we were not yet ready for force projection overseas, and willing to pay the price, politically and militarily, for it. We are a long way from being a big power,” he said.

Of course, over two decades, we became close friends as our paths crossed in Pakistan (when he was high commissioner there) and later, when he served as foreign secretary, he wrote a regular column for this paper and then returned to South Block as the UPA’s first national security advisor. But you could see that he was somehow stressed in that job. The Mani Dixit smirk and twinkle were now missing. At a dinner at my home for Fareed Zakaria on January 2, 2005, I asked Mani why he looked so stressed. Then he spoke that other line which I have borrowed often, in many contexts as a political journalist. “It takes you a lifetime learning the ways of this benighted city,” he said, “and by the time you learn them, it is too late in life to be of much use to you.” As more guests came in, he said we should meet again at leisure and he would explain.

That was not to be. Dixit had a heart attack later that night and the next morning so many of us, friends, fans, admirers and sometimes sparring partners, were at his funeral. Frankly, he would have been a much, much better man to tell you the story of that bloody period in Sri Lanka than any journalist watching from the sidelines, or filmmaker skirting political minefields.

 

Epilogue: I got some lashing in the Colombo press last week for saying at the India-Sri Lanka Society banquet that the country seemed to be missing the real peace dividend that should have followed the successful completion of a long war. Where is the creative, liberal, civil society renaissance that usually follows such wars? I said the army was still too big and, with 4 per cent of the able-bodied Sinhala male population still in uniform (India has around 0.2 per cent), the political and institutional balance was skewed unhealthily. I also spoke of the need to celebrate diversity and to build stronger institutions as, in a democracy, that was the natural protection against majoritarian excess.

I got calls from Colombo journalists saying I had challenged Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and attacked its judiciary, etc. This is utterly fallacious. I believe, on the contrary, that Mahinda Rajapaksa has made a historic contribution to his nation and done a great favour to India and Tamil Nadu by ridding us all of the cruellest, most deceitful, fascist force in our history. He deserves India’s gratitude. And the LTTE deserves nobody’s sympathy. But Sri Lanka’s peace dividend should not be confined to a construction boom.