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| May 22, 2000 | ||
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| Kargil's
Original Sin Why better universities mean better armies. And more victories. By Manvendra
Singh
It is the justification that Pakistan seeks to give its own "land grab" position on Jammu and Kashmir that needs to be demystified. This book does that to a fair degree. Pakistan's inconsistent stand on the question of the merger of the princely states, its duplicity in sending in rapacious frontiersmen in the first Kashmir war of 1948, its stupidity in once again sending soldiers as irregulars in the second Kashmir war in 1965, and its immense confidence in initiating the third, albeit proxy, war in 1989-90 are well covered. Kargil could well be regarded the fourth war for Kashmir, even if the two regions have a scarcely passing association. The war is the book's raison d'etre and, almost by definition, its best part. The really outstanding section is the nuclear dimension to Indo-Pakistani relations, its catalytic role in the proxy war in Kashmir and now in a conventional ultra-high altitude war in Kargil. The really bad part of the book is the bit on defence budgeting and ad nauseam reproduction of data from the Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses on how India's allocation for defence is insufficient. Of course it is, just as it is anywhere else in the world. The real question is how the allocated money is spent. The charter of the committee did not permit it to ask such questions. In the final analysis, the India of May 1999 was not the India of May 1998, and Pakistan was simply the last nation to realise that fact. Eventually it paid the price for its inability to understand India. Which, to return to the first line, is exactly the affliction that has gripped bureaucratic India for the past 52 years. And in that bureaucracy is included the military establishment. Pakistan has provided a perfectly consistent record of what it aims to achieve vis-à-vis India, but it is only the careerists in Delhi who don't seem to read the writing on the wall. All systems failed and thus Kargil had to happen. Which is why, as goes the committee's best recommendation in the book, India must develop a greater infrastructure for research and area specialisation in its universities and colleges. What passes off today as scholarship or a doctoral thesis is barely disguised plagiarism. In fact, a certain rigour would also be of help to the committee that produced this book. The bit on Kashmiri history, for instance, is way off the mark. Even worse is the emphasis on Kashmiriyat as a supposedly prevailing ethos. Anybody who has lived in rural Kashmir would testify to the fact that Kashmiriyat exists only in the imagination of some starry-eyed folk in Delhi. But then isn't that where the problem stems from in any case? NEW RELEASES 100 Best Letters (1847-1947) Law Relating to Human Rights Economic Factors in Finding Jesus In Dharma Aromatherapy |
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All
are to blame, and none is to blame. That just about sums up the findings
of the Kargil Review Committee, constituted by the Government in the
aftermath of the brief sector war last summer. And of whose report this is
the unedited book version, original text and all. The charter of the
committee was to look into the events that led to India being surprised by
the incursions in Kargil. The committee was not meant to look into the
conduct of military operations. For that the best account would no doubt
come from an unedited Pakistani committee report on Kargil and as to why
that country was surprised by India.