The books provide a comprehensive narrative of wars and major military engagements that the Indian armed forces have faced in the first 24 years of India’s independence
Dinesh KumarIn recent weeks, two books pertaining to wars fought by Independent India has added to the existing literature on India’s military history. While 1962 — The War That Wasn’t delves exclusively into the Sino-Indian War, the more recent India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 is a narrative of wars and major military engagements that the Indian armed forces have engaged in the first 24 years of India’s independence. The more recent of the two books, India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971 is authored by Arjun Subramaniam, a serving Air Vice Marshal. What is unique about this book is that it presents a tri-service narrative of all the wars that occurred in this period starting with the 1947-48 India-Pakistan War over Kashmir. It is the first-ever book to take a joint approach, which is in contrast to other books on India’s wars that are usually centered on an individual service. The 72 pages of endnotes bear testimony to the extensive sourcing of secondary sources while compiling accounts of the various military engagements which include the two prominent nation consolidation operations — Hyderabad (1948) and Goa (1961) — apart from the wars with Pakistan (1947-48, 1965 and 1971) and China (1962). But the book is more than a mere compilation as it is supplemented by primary sources such as interviews with about 30 defence officers, reports prepared by the Ministry of Defence, documents examined in libraries and the historical and pictorial archives of various regiments. It has thus ended up being a hybrid narrative that seeks to interpret and analyse the existing secondary sources to come up with a fresh synthesis of this intense and difficult phase of India’s military history. All this has combined to provide the reader with newer and fresh perspectives to the various battles and operations in the book which examines the entire spectrum of the wars — from the policy and strategic to the tactical and human. On the whole, the book communicates well as it is written in a style that makes the complex subject of India’s wars easy to read and understand and hence accessible to the common man even as it draws a delicate line between the popular narrative and academic research. The book, 1962: The War That Wasn’t, is authored by Shiv Kunal Verma, son of a retired Major General whose battalion, the 2 Rajput, was decimated during India’s humiliating defeat by China. The book provides an interesting insight into the key battles fought in what was then known as NEFA (North East Frontier Agency) and Ladakh. Whether it was Nam Ka Chu, Bum-La, Tawang, Se-La, Thembang or Bomdi La, the book brings out how terribly mismanaged, misdirected, ill-prepared and under-equipped the Indian Army was and yet how soldiers and junior officers fought valiantly and in vain against all odds. Verma joins issue with the Australian-British journalist Neville Maxwell. His book India’s China War was based on the still-classified Henderson-Brookes Bhagat Report, a large section of which he posted on the internet in 2014. However, Verma questions Maxwell’s assertion that India was the aggressor and that Beijing only defended its claims by bringing out that Mao’s army had been planning their offensive for months and that essentially India fell into a Chinese trap. Although the theme is the same, what is unique about Verma’s book on the 1962 War is the descriptive account of the several landmark battles fought by the Indian Army and how China’s well-prepared Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) had prior intelligence on the Indian Army before they launched their massive two-pronged attack in Ladakh and NEFA (Arunachal Pradesh) during which over 2000 soldiers were killed, over 4,000 taken prisoner and an entire Division of over 15,000 soldiers routed. Unlike other books, many of these accounts are those of soldiers, and not just officers, who fought the war. The book is holistic considering that it begins by describing the historical and political events dating back to over a century prior to the conflict, the policy-level political and military blunders committed before the start of the war, thanks to Nehru’s ill-advised and incompetent coterie and also Nehru’s politicisation of the military followed by a descriptive account of the battles including a particularly interesting chapter on ‘When Generals Fail’. To a first-time reader, the book provides a fairly comprehensive account of the war and is easy to read. For a young officer, the book provides a refreshing account of the battles that is likely to contain lessons of tactical value. Considering that the defence community in India is more receptive to revelations about a war in which India fared dismally at every level, the book is full of lessons for policymakers and military leaders alike. Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/
