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"YOU have achieved a miracle," Chief of the Army Staff General V.P. Malik told the troops of the 70 Infantry Brigade on the first anniversary of the Kargil War - the men who had fought perhaps the most difficult and protracted battle that the 1999 conflict witnessed.
"Operations in the Batalik sector," the Army journal Sainik Samachar recorded in its account of Malik's speech, "are classic examples of unconventional warfare in high-altitude areas, the likes of which have never been conducted earlier in the annals of Indian military history. It was here that the maximum quantity of arms and ammunition was recovered and over 300 enemy personnel killed. Six prisoners of war were captured alive, providing the much-needed proof of Pakistani involvement. Demoralised and defeated, the enemy hastily accepted India's supremacy and withdrew from other sectors also."
Six years on, another military miracle has occurred, this time behind the closed doors of the Army headquarters. Brigadier Devinder Singh, the officer over whom General Malik and Sainik Samachar lavished praise, has been passed over for promotion on the grounds that his conduct of operations was poor. Indeed, a Frontline investigation has found, the career profiles of the brigade commanders who led the field formations that fought the war of 1999 have been inversely proportional to their combat success. Coming in the wake of a string of other serious allegations of command failures, the new Frontline findings constitute one more reason for a dispassionate official investigation of the 1999 war.
Last year, after a protracted process of in-house evaluation, the President of India formally approved battle and theatre honours for military units that had performed exceptionally well in the Kargil War. Three battalions of the Engineers Regiment received acknowledgment for their specialised services, without which the war could not have been fought, let alone won. So, too, did several artillery units deployed across the front - the 2122 Forward Battery, the 1889 Light Regiment, three from the Medium Regiment, and four from the Field Regiment. One Army aviation unit, the 666 Reconnaissance and Observation Squadron, received its honour title for helping direct artillery fire with precision, despite the demonstrated threat from shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
Most of the battle honours went to infantry battalions - a fact that is not surprising, given that they did the bulk of the actual fighting. Some awards were predictable. The 18 Grenadiers, the 8 Sikh Regiment, and the 2 Rajputana Rifles picked up honours for performance in the battles of Tiger Hill and Tololing, which saw some of the most savage combat of the Kargil War. Within telephoto-lens range of the national highway, the fighting there had received a great deal of media attention, and the reoccupation of Tiger Hill was represented as the single greatest triumph of the war. The 17 Jat Regiment, the 13 Jammu and Kashmir Rifles, the 18 Garhwal Rifles and the 2 Naga Regiment, in turn, received honours for battles in Dras and the Mashkoh Valley.
One single battle, however, stood out: the battle of Batalik. Seven infantry battalions - the 17 Garhwal Rifles, the 1 Bihar Regiment, the Ladakh Scouts, the 12 Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry, the 1st battalion of the 11 Gurkha Rifles, the 5 Para Regiment and the 10 Para Regiment - picked up battle honours for their exceptional performance in this sector. Batalik, despite its enormous size and the depth of the Pakistani intrusion there, had received little attention from anyone other than military historians. Television coverage was negligible, and military spokespersons rarely provided detailed briefings on the combat in this battle until the closing stages of the Kargil War.
While battle and theatre honours are intended to honour valour and performance, they also enable an assessment of just which brigades of the Indian Army registered the highest levels of combat success: where the cutting-edge of the higher command succeeded or failed. Of the seven brigades committed to the Kargil War, the 70 Brigade of course did by far the best. The 56 Brigade also performed exceptionally well, picking up five battle honours, while the 192 Brigade won two, the 79 Brigade another two, and the 50 Brigade one. The 102 Brigade, which operated out of the Siachen area, and the 121 Brigade, based out of Kargil, did not receive a single battle or theatre honour - a fact which reflects their failure to regain captured ground on any significant scale.
Incredibly, though, the commanders who led these two brigades have had exceptional careers since the war. P.C. Katoch, who is alleged to have abetted the suppression reports of a pre-war intrusion in the 102 Brigade area, was recently approved for promotion as Lieutenant-General. O.P. Nandrajog, who took charge of the 121 Brigade after the sacking of its commander, failed, If the battle honours list is a guide, to reverse its fortunes. Nonetheless, he was promoted and will soon become an Army Commander. 79 Brigade commander R.N. Kakkar and 192 Brigade commander M.P.S. Bajwa, despite their performance, retired in that rank, while 70 Brigade commander Devinder Singh has been passed over for promotion. Only Amar Aul, who led the 56 Brigade, received promotions in line with his war-time performance, and is now a Lieutenant-General.
One explanation for this curious pattern is, of course, that troops might have secured their honours despite the incompetence of their commanders. However, the available literature suggests this was not in fact the case. For example, the Indian Army's own official history of the war, Heroes of Kargil, which bears the imprimatur of both former Union Defence Minister George Fernandes and former Chief of the Army Staff General S. Padmanabhan, went out of its way to praise Brigadier Devinder Singh. It records that "the tactical HQ of 70 Infantry Brigade was deployed well forward throughout Operation Vijay" and that the officer "himself operated ahead to keep abreast of the developments during each battle and to inspire his battalions to give in their best."
IN the absence of a coherent official explanation, it is hard not to believe that the sordid politics of the Army's higher command was behind the treatment meted out to battle valour. In essence, the official version of the Kargil War consisted of twin fictions: an excuse for how it came about, and the fabrication of a winning strategy. In this telling of events, the intrusions were represented as the consequence of the failures of middle-level officers in the Leh-based 3 Infantry Division. Brigadier Surinder Singh, the commander of the 121 Brigade, was one key villain in this official version of history; Colonel Pushpinder Oberoi, the officer directly responsible for the vacation of Bajrang Post, was another. The second element of the fiction was that newly inducted formations hand-picked by higher command had helped transform certain humiliation into victory.
Over the years, both media investigation and independent scholarly assessments have made clear that the first part of this fiction is unsustainable. While significant local-level errors did facilitate the intrusions, these were merely symptoms of a command-level malaise. In essence, neither Army Headquarters nor Northern Command nor the Srinagar-based 15 Corps was willing even to consider the possibility that a war could break out. This, in turn, derived from their uncritical acceptance of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's ill-founded belief that the Pokhran II nuclear tests had made an India-Pakistan war impossible. With the assent of his superiors, 15 Corps Commander Lieutenant-General Kishan Pal therefore focussed his energies and troops on fighting terrorism.
As a consequence, successive warnings were simply ignored. As late as January 30, 1999, for example, even as the intrusions had begun, Colonel Oberoi wrote to the 3 Infantry Division Commander, Major-General V.S. Budhwar, recording his concern about significant weaknesses in the Indian defences. Brigadier Surinder Singh, for his part, even notified General Malik of his concerns about an enhanced threat in the sector. His warnings were dismissed out of hand, as was the finding in a 1999 war game that a Pakistani strike aimed at cutting off the Srinagar-Leh highway was feasible. Even a limited Pakistani incursion at Point 5770, on the southern sector of the Siachen Glacier, failed to arouse India's top military commanders from their Pokhran-induced slumber.
To sustain the second part of the cover-up fiction, Army headquarters relentlessly focussed media attention on the battles waged by newly inducted formations. By contrast, little attention was paid to fighting in the Batalik area. As in Kaksar, where Indian troops registered no great gains, it was assumed that fighting around the mountain complexes of Jubbar, Kukarthang and Batalik would continue until the weather forced Pakistan to withdraw from the positions it had occupied. As the battle honours make clear, of course, that was a spectacular error of judgment. Facts, however, could not be allowed to stand in the way of the cover-up. Officers who needed to be rewarded to sustain the fiction that their superiors had not erred prospered irrespective of their wartime performance.
In March, General Malik's own account of decision-making processes during the Kargil War is scheduled to be released in bookstores across India. Many hope that it will give at least some insight into one of the most troubling chapters in the history of the Indian Army. It will take more than truth-telling, though, to undo the wrongs inflicted on so many men of honour. As the first Chief of the Army Staff in years not directly involved in the Kargil chain of command, General J.J. Singh, who assumed charge of the Indian Army on January 31, has a real chance to set the wrongs right: but whether he has the will to demonstrate the required integrity remains to be seen.
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