Defreezing Siachen — Defeatism of the victor

In these times of political correctness it is easier to argue the cause of sable and mink than military warfare. All wars are cruel, wasteful, unfair, irrational and represent the failure of diplomacy, but some actually serve a purpose far beyond territorial gains on which we Indians seem so fixated since the Mahabharat. China, in 1962, acquired no new territory but conclusively made the point of who the big brother in Asia was. They returned us the heights of Se La, Bomdi La and Tawang but neither India nor Nehru ever regained the old, moral high ground. India’s military posture vis-a-vis China has since then been defensive and non-threatening. So a short, sharp and successful war that brought no new territory which then had to be guarded by soldiers supplied across the Himalayan watershed actually secured China’s most vulnerable Tibetan flank for decades.

Similarly, consider this preposterous argument that the so-called IPKF misadventure in Sri Lanka was not entirely futile. Given Indira Gandhi’s interventionist legacy in Sri Lanka there was an inevitability to the Indian Army having to dismantle the Frankenstein she had created there. The creation of Eelam would only have whetted Pirabhakaran’s appetite while affirming his status as a great, all-conquering Tamil hero and rekindling the separatist fire of the Sixties in Tamil Nadu. A dirty little offshore war, though it cost nearly 2,000 lives, was ultimately a reasonable price for avoiding a protracted, fratricidal insurgency on Indian soil.

The cowboys in Rajiv Gandhi’s foreign policy establishment probably never thought along these lines. One of these key players, who had begun to harbour notions that India was finally rising to its deserved stature in the region now recalls how, within 48 hours after fighting began he realised that India simply did not have the temperament of a big power; ruthless hunger for victory, a fond longing for the afterglow. Apply the same test to Siachen.

Some of the generals who masterminded Operation Meghdoot in Siachen have now become hopeless pacifists, haunted by the nightmare of not only the 517 dead officers and jawans (mainly through weather and terrain conditions than hostile fire) but also thousands others crippled in the bodies and minds, by the loneliness and the cold. That the situation on the Pakistani side is a mirror image of this, that the battlefield casualties there are much higher, is no consolation to them.

They had reacted in 1984-85 to obvious Pakistani mischief in sponsoring a series of international climbing expeditions into Siachen where the line of control was unmarked, resulting in some international mountaineering journals publishing maps showing Siachen on the Pakistani side. There were also intelligence reports — subsequently proven correct — that the Pakistanis were planning a military incursion using their Special Services Group (SSG) to back these cartographic gains with some sort of a physical presence. The Indian response was uncharacteristically pro-active, and successful as a company of the hardy Kumaonis defied a catastrophic avalanche to beat the Pakistani commandos in the race across the mountains.

If these Johnnies-come-lately in the post-retirement dove brigade fail to see the gains from their Siachen venture it is because of the classical Indian inability to accept, or understand victory. Nearly two decades after 1971, Siachen gave Indian army the opportunity to prove that despite the fatigue and confusion of so many internal crises it was still in pretty good shape. Siachen was a man-versus-man battle under the most hostile conditions with both sides fighting with similar weapons, clothing, igloos manufactured by the same European companies for shelter, and consuming the same inedible sodium-soaked food. Logistics were much easier for the Pakistanis and yet not only did India grab the high ground, it expanded the foothold despite bitter counter-attacks.

For the Pakistani GHQ, Siachen has posed a cruel problem. In a clean, one-on-one, guts-and-glory battlefield situation old excuses of being outnumbered, outgunned, or having to deal with a hostile population (as in 1971) do not work. That is why the Pakistanis have shied from the question of defining the actual ground position. Anything that demonstrates that India holds much of the high ground knocks the very foundations of the image that gives the army its exalted position in Pakistan’s power establishment.

Until 1992 the Pakistanis had lived on the propaganda that India was desperate to get away from Siachen since it was costing them much more. But several subsequent firefights made it obvious to them that India had the will to hang on to the glacier. J.N. Dixit, then Foreign Secretary, understood this and came up with a stroke of genius in his pre-retirement on-paper to his Pakistani counterpart.

It side-stepped the question of the actual ground position and merely delineated the two new lines to which each side will withdraw, leaving behind them a wide Zone of Disengagement and buried somewhere there the question that so embarrassed the Pakistani GHQ. In 1993, still harbouring the fantasy of Kashmir falling into their lap, the Pakistanis contemptuously dismissed it. The realism of 1997 may bring a different response.

An agreement along these lines will fulfill every Indian objective besides freeing up the troops, logistics, saving enormous expense and sparing the glaciers the worst kind of pollution. There will be no fear now of the Pakistani incursions, a military point would have been tellingly made much in the manner of the Chinese strolling back past the watershed in 1962, and India will look good, as a bigger power should in a moment of victory. But do we have the temperament to cope with victory?