Soldier of the mind

General Krishnaswamy Sundarji, India’s most talked-about soldier since Manekshaw, tried his best not to fade away. He launched his column, 'Brasstracks,' and went on to become the most articulate military spokesman

Not long after retiring as India’s most talked about soldier since Manekshaw, General Krishnaswamy Sundarji had decided to become a columnist. His first few attempts were quite disastrous and we, then at India Today, had a problem. How do you tell the great general, with an ego larger than an armoured division, that he probably could not write to save his life? I was assigned to carry the bad news to him.

He was then recuperating from open heart surgery at Delhi’s military hospital. “So, doc,” he asked, “is there still some hope, or is the patient a write-off?” Before I could figure out a diplomatic answer he asked more directly, “I believe you think my writing is all bulls..t. So where does that leave us?”

“I think, General,” I said, “you need to be a bit more direct in your writing — just as you are when you speak.” I then added as a smug afterthought, “Just come to the brasstacks quickly.”

His eyes lit up. “That’s it, my friend, that is the name for my column.” His next piece was a great improvement. The column ran for a long time under the title ‘Brasstacks’.

Retiring in the controversial aftermath of Bluestar, Brasstacks, IPKF and Bofors, this general tried his best not to just fade away like some others. He wrote columns, straddled the security seminar circuit, was painted larger than life on the chatterati radar screen and generally emerged as the most articulate military spokesman for India’s nuclear programme.

We sparred a great deal on the circuit. He never could resist the temptation of pulling my leg over some military detail I got so horribly wrong in my coverage of Operation Bluestar even though another scribe on the beat, who happens to be a friend, had got it just right. In my book, confusing line-of-sight 25-pounders with larger artillery was not such a big deal. For Sundar, it was an outrage, “that’s why you hacks are such big bores with low calibre”, he would say to rub it in. But he himself had plenty to be defensive about. Both Bluestar and Operation Pawan (Sri Lanka) were tactical disasters. It may be unfair to suggest that you could spin a sequel to Norman Dixon’s Psychology of Military Incompetence around these two operations, but you could possibly pen a Psychology of Military Arrogance. Sundar was a grand strategist, a visionary, who was better off moving mechanised divisions and field armies in wide open deserts, or, better still, on Ops room maps and sand models. He did himself injustice by getting directly involved in these operations. That is why it is so tragic that the legacy of India’s most brilliant military commander will forever be marred by his record in what were at best battalion-sized operations.

Students of Indian military history will quibble endlessly over whether Sundar was ahead of his times, or behind them. The truth, perhaps, is both. In terms of his approach to technology, mechanisation, and mobile warfare, he was way ahead of his time. He did sometimes admit he had over-reached himself with Brasstacks. But, he argued, that was the only way he could get his field commanders to think big. Most of them had no experience of seeing a formation larger than a division move. Brasstacks had an entire field in manoeuvre — with live ammunition to boot, and so what if it brought India to the brink of an unwanted, unplanned war with Pakistan?

“You have this typical @*X@* cowardly Indian thinking,” he would say. But was he so impatient because politically he was a couple of decades behind times. This was the post-conventional warfare world where nations preserved or enhanced their national interest by waging or resisting low-intensity conflict rather than Pattonesque set pieces. Where diplomacy, politics and then, increasingly, economics became the crucial prongs of strategic thinking. For Sundar, low-intensity conflict was such a bore — he dreamed of a heliborne assault division and even designated one to be trained for the role. Almost immediately he had to endure the embarrassment of seeing its crack fighting units come unstuck under the LTTE’s deadly sniper fire and improvised explosive devices in the jungles of Jaffna.

He had his critics within and outside the army. The friendlier ones dismissed him as a well-meaning romantic with little relevance to his time. For them, Brasstacks was his nostalgia for the great old days of set-piece battles, probably even an effort to create one to test his pet theories on the battlefield, in the Clausewitzian fog of war. For the more vicious, he nurtured a grand-political-ambition and Brasstacks, with a resultant war and victory against Pakistan, was his shortcut to political power. They do the general great disservice. One with such dispositions and careerist outlook does not question the prime minister of the day on the acquisition of his favourite toys — Bofors in this case — nor does he follow it up with a kiss ‘n’ tell not long after.

Sundar hated the “dirty little wars”, the Golden Temple, Jaffna, Brahmaputra Valley and so on. But that is all he was fated to fight and not very successfully. It was probably a combination of this bitter failure and the belated realisation that the days of conventional warfare were over that brought him in close touch with the nuclear lobby. Soon enough he had become its leading light.

We spent a week together at Salzburg, the usual suspects from India and Pakistan, on the conflict resolution circuit and in the summer of 1994, I got a chance to get back at Sundar. Why, I asked, was it so that the most prominent nuclear hawks in India were from the South? Didn’t it sound uncannily like a diabolical Tam Brahm conspiracy to get Punjabis on both sides of the border to incinerate each other so the kings of Kumbakonam could rule the subcontinent forever? But to be fair to him, even on the nuclear issue, Sundar was by now evolving a doctrine of his own —”more is not needed when less is enough”. He wanted India to develop a limited nuclear deterrent, without entering into any nuclear race. It does not matter if the Pakistanis have a hundred weapons and we have ten. This is more than enough to finish Pakistan or deter China, so why waste money on building a Stalinist arsenal was his argument. Today, he would have been happy to sign the CTBT and engage in FMCT and a regime of confidence-building measures and mutual restraint with Pakistan. He would have also wanted a nuclear India to cut force levels, lower defence spending, mechanise, computerise more and plunge headlong into the Revolution in Military Affairs. Who knows he may have been writing the obituary of the tank, or the mechanised division, his most visible contribution to his army.

Sundar had a cutting tongue and very little discretion when provoked. At another India-Pakistan seminar he fidgeted uneasily, visibly irritated as Pakistani participants took turns at giving vastly exaggerated numbers for Indian troops in Kashmir. Then a former Pakistani army chief put the number at seven lakhs and Sunder intervened. “The only way you get to that number, general, is if you count the limbs, multiply by four and divide by two,” he said,deadpan. We took some time decoding this, but his Pakistani counterpart looked a bit sheepish through the rest of the session.

Much has been said of his peculiar equation with Rajiv Gandhi and Arun Singh, his de facto defence minister. It is possible that one day Arun Singh would throw more light on this, give it a perspective that he owes to the memory and legacy of his favourite general. In one way, however, the general had his timing right. He took over the reins of the army under the political leadership of two, young, techno-savvy political leaders. He did the rest — his domineering personality kept the babus at bay. He certainly would not have survived a Mulayam Singh Yadav, a George Fernandes or Ajit Kumar. Or vice versa.

Sundar died at just 69, at an age when great marshals were leading great armies into battle in the Great Wars. His death did not merit more than a single column mention —  below the fold on many front pages — yesterday. But, surely, there will be many obituaries written. One question all these facile military analysts and historians will ask—or answer –is, what do we remember General Krishnaswamy Sundarji for? Hopefully, the answer would be Brasstacks rather than Blue Star or Jaffna.

This takes me to August 14, 1990, Pakistan’s Independence Day in Islamabad and just a week after the encounter with Sundar at Delhi’s military hospital. At the official reception, I buttonholed General Mirza Aslam Beg, the controversial Pakistan army chief who had just held Exercise Zarb-e-Momin (the strike of the faithful). Or, more accurately, his counterstrike. The basic premise of the exercise was, that in the next war Foxland (as India is referred to in Pakistani wargames) breaks through in the initial phase and the Pakistanis then counterattack and envelope the invader. It was the first major Pakistani exercise that was so defensive in nature, where survival, rather than an all-out victory, or the ”liberation” of Kashmir, was the main objective. Surely, Brasstacks and the scary vision of 3,000 Indian tanks rolling down the desert, threatening to bisect Pakistan had changed a military mindset rooted in medieval history and the thrust-and-parry purposelessness of India’s armoured strike forces in 1965 and 1971.

”So does your publication write a lot about defence and security?” Beg asked, making polite conversation.

”Yes,” I said, ”and soon we will begin to run Sundarji’s column.”

”What is it called?” Beg asked.

”Brasstacks,” I said.

The temperature dropped a few notches. This general’s eyes did not exactly light up in delight.

Would you still have any doubt as to Sundarji’s real legacy?

This article was first published on February 10, 1999