Military historians will have a hard time resolving this one. Which date should mark the anniversary of the war in Kargil? May 3, when tribal graziers reported first sightings of strangers in the mountains? May 5, when the first of the three fact-finding patrols, led by Lt. Saurav Kalia, was ambushed? Or May 25, when South Block finally woke up and called in the IAF?
I would choose May 5 simply because this is when the war claimed its first lives, unfortunately Indian. So today, its anniversary is a day of much pride and a little shame for us. It is also time for the `Lessons of the Kargil War’ columns to begin appearing in our newspapers.
But what really were the lessons of Kargil? The bitter truth is, the lessons were the same as those of all our wars — and we have fought more than any nation since 1947. Every time we have found our soldiers poorly equipped, the higher command mentally unprepared and the political leadership unfocussed. In periods of peace, we somehow believe that another war will never come. Or we are so incompetent, so braindead and so insensitive that time and again we commit ourselves under-prepared to wars. Then we pray that our soldiers’ spirits and regimental sense of honour will save the day for us.
The issue here is not cutting-edge technology and nuclear weapons. It is the basic tools of war. Consider this: our soldiers’ first view of automatic weapons was in the hands of Naga guerrillas, trained and equipped with AK-47s by the Chinese. This was in the late fifties. Yet, in 1962, they were sent out, armed with .303s, to fight the Chinese. Even this week, there were reports that the Indian Army is finding it difficult to find enough AK-47s to equip its frontline units. Four decades have passed since the first Naga ambushes and we, a nuclear weapons state, are short of a weapon designed a half century ago and half the price of a Bajaj scooter.
Contrary to our claims of great technological advancement and prowess, it is Pakistan that has led the way in bringing in modern weapons systems into the subcontinent’s battlefield. They brought the first bombers, the first submarines, the first night-capable tanks and fighter jets, the first air-to-air missiles. Pakistan dragged us to war in 1965 confident of its clear technological edge. It was going to launch armoured battle groups against us, NATO-style, at night. We still believed battles, as in the Mahabharat, ended at sunset with the rival generals blowing conch shells.
The Pakistani fighters had Sidewinders while the IAF had to make do with front-mounted guns that sometimes fired, often didn’t. In the desert, the Pakistanis had vehicles fitted with specialised tyres. We had camels.
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In that war, as in Kargil, our skin was saved by some incredibly spirited fighting men on one side and some foolhardy generals on the other. But if, from submarines to Sidewinders, from night-fighting tanks to antitank guided weapons, and from mobile artillery to gun-spotting radars, if Pakistan invariably succeeded in getting the technology edge, there must be something very wrong with our strategic intellect. Or our claims of scientific depth are so much poppycock.
Cut to Kargil, May 1999. How many stories did you hear of Indian soldiers lacking night-vision goggles that the Pakistanis had in plenty? How many Indian jawans complained about the quality of their shoes, the weight of their helmets, the primitiveness and shortage of wireless sets, or the inadequacy of ordinary infantry weapons? The lazy and self-serving explanation for this was that in the preceding years successive governments had starved the defence forces of funds. But in the very same years the Pakistanis had been cutting budgets as well. In no year did the basic 3:5:1 ratio of our respective defence budgets change too much. Yet if they looked so much better equipped at Kargil, questions should be raised in the Ministry of Defence rather than in Finance.
A simple answer is that through these years of shortages and IMF-induced defence budget cuts, the Pakistanis have remained more focussed than us, except in the eight months between the uprising in Dhaka on March 25 and the formal beginning of the war on December 3, 1971. They had a better sense of their military objectives, so they invested the little money they had wisely. We frittered it away on this and that, sometimes on ego-driven prestige hardware, but mostly on our bloated military establishment, spread out among scores of cantonments built by the British to symbolise their hold over the entire country. We zealously maintain these white elephants, while our jawans cadge AK-47s from dead and captured terrorists.
There is no evidence that any of that is going to change soon. Until Kargil, the defence establishment’s complaint was that there was too little money available and that, in any case, the bureaucrats did not allow for much of it to be spent. There is some truth in that. Even in the years of falling budgets, the defence forces were made to park unspent funds as deposits with the favourite PSUs of the government of the day. Today, there is no such excuse. There is plenty of money, the Defence Ministry bureaucracy has been rolled over at least that much Admiral Bhagwat has achieved through his kamikaze act. Today, nobody would dare question a chief; can any government fire two chiefs in its tenure? The babu in the Raksha Mantralaya has never been more inconsequential. The generals haven’t been formally empowered yet, so you really can’t hold them accountable in the long term. The MoD reform has proceeded even slower than PSU divestment. The minister is an absentee landlord. But when another war breaks out, thesame tired excuses of May last year will be trotted out again.
What is your most enduring memory of Kargil? Poorly outfitted Indian soldiers displaying torn boots, short of automatic weapons, helmets, firepower and mobility. Pick up a picture of an Indian jawan, say from a 1965 war album, and if you find that he did not look particularly different from the one in Kargil 1999, we must have been remiss at something in the intervening decades. Then see how different the US GI or Marine looked then in Vietnam. Or the Chinese. Even the Pakistanis.
In our obsession with big-ticket military merchandise and thanks to inter-service rivalries, we have ignored our basic military needs. The bitter truth is, it will take no more than a couple of thousand crores to re-equip the fighting men in our cutting-edge formations so well as to reduce fatalities by 60-70 per cent. Just better personal weapons, lighter kevlar helmets and body armour, more communications equipment and a bit more investment in casualty evacuation resources would have reduced not only the Kargil deaths greatly, they would have more than halved the day-to-day casualties in the Valley. If we have indeed learnt this lesson from Kargil, what are we buying now?
A lot of money will now be spent buying new tanks for the Army for the next “decisive” battle in the desert. The Air Force will get its Advanced Jet Trainer and then there will be very little left for anything else. The Navy, now itching to patrol the South China Sea (some delusions of grandeur!) and fight blue-water piracy to the finish, will add a new carrier besides a whole panoply of expensive aircraft even as it commissions at least nine new ships in the next year. Tens of thousands of crores will be invested in preparing for an all-out, Pattonesque war that may never take place.
What inevitably will happen again is another Kargil. And if you still find your jawans just as poorly equipped and the defence establishment repeating the same excuses as in May 1999, remember whose misfortune it was to predict it first.
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