Tag: Kargil Conflict

Kargil – The Conflict Conundrum

Revisting Kargil – The Conflict Conundrum

By Mahendra Ved

In India-Pakistan relations, the past becomes the present and leaves unpleasant lessons for the future that remain largely unlearnt. Their disputes, no matter from whose side you look at them, remain unresolved, and the chasm has grown deeper.

May 3 will mark 25 years since the Kargil conflict began in 1999. Pakistan’s bid for scoring territorial gains failed, again. But not without turmoil and bloodshed on both sides, allowing those outside to influence and intervene.

Significantly, Kargil happened even as the two were engaged in peace moves, being nudged to talk by a world alarmed at their emergence as the two new nuclear powers. Not enough has been asked why the Good Samaritans also failed to anticipate the incoming events. For, Kargil happened within less than three months of the Lahore Declaration that the Prime Ministers, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, signed on February 21, 1999.

Going by the adage that history repeats itself, it did in Kargil on two counts. As it had done in 1947 and 1965, Pakistan’s civil-military establishment first sent intruders. Two: it also caught India napping, yet again.

India discovered the intruders accidentally. Like a Muslim shepherd in the Kashmir Valley noticed Pakistanis in 1965, in 1999 Buddhist shepherd Tashi Namgyal looking for missing animals, saw Pakistani regulars in Pathan outfits, digging bunkers atop the Batalik mountain range. Both led to major conflicts.

The Indian Army took a while to discover that the militants were a façade for the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light Infantry (NLI), well-entrenched on the upper ridges, holding all the tactical aces. It was an uphill task, literally, for India. Facing stiff resistance, it deployed the Air Force and the Bofors gun. A victim of political controversy, it redeemed itself.

Young officers and men climbed 90-degree steep rock faces braving bullets and turning the story around. Mostly young soldiers in the 22-35 age group died on both sides. The official death toll on the Indian side was 527, while that on the Pakistani side was between 357 and 453. Pakistan dishonoured another 600 of its militant youths whose bodies it did not claim and collect. The Indian side had to perform the last rites.

BACKGROUND: In the Kargil region, the past practice on both sides was to leave high-altitude posts in the winter because of the extreme weather and reoccupy them with the advent of spring. In the winter of 1999, Pakistan reoccupied the forward positions and strategic heights of Kargil Drass and Batalik before the Indian forces could.

With the-then army chief, General Pervez Musharraf in the lead, the masterminds of Pakistan’s plan were Chief of General Staff, Lt Gen Aziz Khan, Commander 10 Corps Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmed and Force Commander Northern Areas Maj Gen Javed Hassan.

“Operation Koh Paima” was launched in mid-October 1998 when Musharraf had not informed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Even the air and naval chiefs were not taken into confidence. The timing and the extent of Musharraf’s briefing to Nawaz and the operation’s failure triggered a civil-military power struggle which led to Musharraf ousting Nawaz.

As per Pakistani writer Tariq Aqil, Nawaz, with limited knowledge of military affairs, could not fathom the Indian Army’s capacity to respond. “He was under the delusion that the intruders would be successful and capture Kargil, forcing India to accept the final settlement of Kashmir and he would go down in history as the conqueror of Kashmir.” However, Nasim Zehra, in her book From Kargil to the Coup, writes that the army gave Sharif the first detailed briefing on the operation only on May 17. By this time, soldiers had already occupied positions across the LoC.

ALSO READ: Pakistan Army Can’t Be Confined To Barracks

The Pakistani planners had assumed that 1) Pakistan’s nuclear capability would forestall any major Indian move across the international border; 2) The International community will intervene at an early stage, leaving Pakistan in possession of gains across the LOC; 3.) China would adopt a favourable position on its side and the Indian Army would not muster adequate forces with high-altitude training and acclimatization.

All these proved wrong. Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz got the cold shoulder in Beijing. Nobody accepted Pakistan’s version that the Kashmiri freedom fighters were fighting the Indian forces and that the Pakistani army was not involved. US President Bill Clinton virtually ordered Nawaz to ensure the withdrawal of all Pakistani soldiers from the Indian positions they had occupied.

Pakistan launched Kargil to seize a tactical advantage over India. Its success was supposed to cut off links between Kashmir Valley and Ladakh by blocking National Highway no 1 (NH1). The Pakistani planners wanted to force India to withdraw from the Siachen glacier and come to the negotiating table to resolve the Kashmir dispute.

As things stand today, India continues to occupy an advantageous position in Siachen that it captured in 1984. After the Kargil experience, as things stand today, neither side wants to withdraw from this world’s highest battlefield.

The year 1999 ended with an Indian passenger aircraft hijacked, to Lahore and later to Kandahar. India had to release four Kashmiri militants to secure the release of the aircraft, the crew and the passengers. Yet, India launched the peace summit in Agra without adequate preparations, initiating it and then reneging from it.

Twenty-five years on, there is little discussion on these failed moves by India at the turn of the century. In Pakistan, veteran journalist-analyst Najam Sethi has said that Pakistan has lost all its wars with India since it planned and initiated them, but could not achieve any of its objectives.

Although limited in scale and geographical spread, the Kargil War prompted a deep strategic analysis in both countries. India debated its national security gaps. The Vajpayee government constituted the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) under K. Subrahmanyam to review the events leading to the Pakistani aggression and recommend measures to safeguard national security against armed intrusions. The committee noted that the political, bureaucratic, military and intelligence establishments had developed a vested interest in the status quo. It emphasised the need for a comprehensive review of the national security system, considering the Kargil experience, the ongoing proxy war and the ‘nuclearised’ security environment.

Retired Lt. Gen. B S Hooda says the Group of Ministers (GoM) report, which followed the KRC, “was arguably the most comprehensive examination of national security issues undertaken in independent India.” Four task forces were established to evaluate the intelligence apparatus, internal security, border management and defence management, underscoring the seriousness of the post-war assessment.

The two reports led to many changes in the management of national security. The National Technical Research Organisation was formed in 2004 to handle centralised communication and electronic intelligence. The Defence Intelligence Agency was formed to cater to the military’s specific intelligence needs. A multi-agency centre was set up to foster better inter-agency information-sharing and coordination.

The defence establishment underwent some restructuring. This included the creation of an Integrated Defence Staff, the founding of the Strategic Forces and Andaman and Nicobar Commands, and the devolution of financial and administrative powers to the three services. The appointment of the Chief of Defence Staff, as recommended by the GoM, was made in 2020.

Today, India is economically and militarily strong but needs constant vigilance, internally and externally. In Pakistan’s case, the core issues that drove it into an unwinnable conflict remain largely unaddressed. The military still controls the reins in the country, the rhetoric over Kashmir continues, the economy is in dire straits and state support to terrorist organisations persists.

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Indo-Pak Skirmish And Its Inevitable Political Fallout

By Sanjoy Narayan

In the early 2000s, not long after the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan, which took hundreds, if not thousands of lives, but in which India claimed a decisive victory, we invited a hawkish Indian defence analyst and expert over to the magazine that I was then editing. The idea was to get his opinion on India’s preparedness for armed conflict in the region, particularly with the prevailing hostile relations with Pakistan and a potentially hostile and powerful neighbour like China. The expert (who will have to remain unnamed for now) was good. His knowledge was vast and insightful but being a hawk, his lecture and the subsequent discussions were burnished with aggressive posturing with the key point being that India was certainly in a stronger position vis-à-vis Pakistan and with greater political will it could teach an errant neighbour some hard home truths.

It was an invigorating discussion that opened up our fairly young editorial team’s minds to issues of strategy, defence, and armed conflict. But, following the talk, it was the afterglow that seemed take hold of many of my colleagues I remember vividly. Otherwise rational and perfectly reasonable young men and women strutted about the newsroom with aggressive posturing, some loudly lamenting that the Indian government was shying away from confronting Pakistan and that our armed forces should initiate military action against that nation and teach it a sound lesson.

That sort of sentiment seems to be swirling around in India now in the aftermath of the recent skirmish with Pakistan. Last month terrorists believed to be based in Pakistan suicide-bombed an Indian convoy in Kashmir and killed at least 40 security personnel. India retaliated by sending in warplanes to bomb what it claims to be a large terrorist training centre and camp in Pakistan. This was followed by an airstrike by Pakistan and dogfights in which one Indian plane was downed and a pilot captured. The pilot was released by Pakistan, which refuted India’s claims of decimating the terrorist hideout and took the high moral ground by offering peace dialogues with India over the disputed region of Kashmir.

But the main fallout of last month’s conflict was the chest-beating brand of patriotism that it spawned and the political capital that the current regime led by Mr Narendra Modi is drawing out of it. Mr Modi, his colleagues, and supporters have been proudly proclaiming the decisiveness of the Indian attack (never mind that the actual damage may have been much less than the claims that hundreds of terrorists had perished during the attack). Otherwise reasonable people in civil society as well as India’s noisy and colourful media have earned a sort of bragging rights over the skirmish, and some of them have even been baying for Pakistan’s blood. With less than a month left before millions of Indians head towards polling booths to cast their votes in the national elections, this mood is significant.

It is significant because Mr Modi, his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its allies are quite resolved to making the newest incidence of tension between India and Pakistan into an election issue. Dipstick surveys will likely show that the electorate’s faith in Mr Modi has strengthened as a consequence of the conflict. But what may be more important is the impact (or rather the lack of it) on those who politically oppose Mr Modi. In the past few months opposition leaders, including those of the Congress party and a host of other regional groupings, have been trying to forge an alliance aimed at ousting Mr Modi and his party during the coming elections. Several fault-lines, however, have emerged in that endeavour: there is no clear leader of the opposition alliance that can command support of the motley assemblage of parties; the political ambitions of several regional leaders are seen to be colliding against each other; and there is no clear-cut common electoral strategy that seems to have emerged.

More seriously, the opposition appears to be more than just a bit stumped by the wave of nationalistic fervour that Mr Modi and his alliance have drummed up. In the prevailing environment of patriotic pride and hawkishness towards Pakistan expressing any criticism (or even mild differences of opinion) is fraught with the risks of being labelled “anti-national”, which, with elections around the corner, can prove to be disastrous for anyone with political ambitions. Even mild questioning by some Congress leaders of BJP president Amit Shah’s claim that more than 250 terrorists had died in India’s bombing of a site in Pakistan led to counter-attacks by the BJP that labelled the Congress as being anti-India.

The problem for the opposition parties is compounded by the fact that little has emerged from their side in the form of a cogent, coherent strategy that can be part of their electoral campaign. In spite of a plethora of issues that have plagued the Modi regime—lack of jobs; distress in the farm sector; irregularities in a major arms deal such as the one for acquiring Rafale fighter jets from France; and growing insecurity among India’s minorities—besides criticism, the opposition parties haven’t been seen proffering their solutions for such problems. The Congress’ president, Mr Rahul Gandhi, is visibly more active politically than he has ever been. In Uttar Pradesh, a state which accounts for the largest number of seats in India’s Parliament and which will play a crucial role in deciding the outcome of the elections, the Congress has a new team—Mr Gandhi’s sister, Priyanka, and a relatively young leader, Mr Jyotiraditya Scindia—to spearhead its campaign but thus far their impact has been limited.

Part of the problem for leaders in the opposition, specifically in the Congress, is that when Mr Modi changed the rules of contesting elections, they were taken a bit by surprise. Mr Modi fought and won the 2014 elections by aggressive promotion of himself as the prime ministerial candidate; and by making specific promises about progress, development and improvement in the lives of Indians. It was like a presidential election where candidates project their personalities and their individual strengths to garner votes. In contrast, the Congress fought (and lost badly) the 2014 elections without even a declared candidate for the prime ministerial post. Mr Gandhi’s rallies were pale compared to Mr Modi’s thunderous ones. The leaders of the Congress, which is the only other national party of consequence other than the BJP, appear to contest elections the way the party did in the 1980s when it, for the large part, had no real challengers. That strategy is unlikely to work for it any longer.

The audience (read electorate) has changed. Exposure to digital and social media (which the BJP and its supporters deploy much more efficiently than other parties) have made India’s electorate a lot more aware and demanding. In such a context, the Congress’ style of using emotional appeal and the (fast fading) charisma of the Gandhi family can seem anachronistic. Many supporters of Congress point to the elevation and induction of Mr Gandhi’s sister, Priyanka, as a sort of trump card that the party could use in the coming elections but the fact is that she is quite untested in active politics—a newbie really if you discount her past activities, which have basically centred around nurturing and visiting the pocket boroughs of her family—her brother’s and her mother’s constituencies in UP.

As for the mainly regional parties that make up the so-called grand alliance of the opposition, none of their leaders enjoys a national stature that can be built or leveraged to position against Mr Modi. In such circumstances, and particularly in the aftermath of India’s skirmish with Pakistan, the advantage as Indians get ready to vote could seem to lie with Mr Modi and his allies.