Kargil War will always be remembered for the soldiers' gallantry and Vajpayee government's strategic prudence

The Kargil war and its handling burnished India’s profile as a responsible nation.

The 25^th anniversary of the Kargil war (July 26) being celebrated nationally as “Vijay Diwas” (Victory Day) is an important punctuation to reflect on many diverse strands that are still relevant to the management of India’s composite national security.

The most defining feature of that war remains the valour and gallantry of the soldiers and young officers who defied all odds and enabled India to retrieve an extraordinarily adverse tactical situation (Pakistani army regulars had stealthily occupied Indian territory in the Himalayan peaks) with grave strategic implications. The supreme sacrifice of the 527 military personnel who laid down their lives must be reverentially acknowledged, as also the hundreds more who were grievously injured in the craggy Kargil mountain heights.

The nuclear overhang is another significant feature of the war, wherein, for the first time in post Hiroshima-Nagasaki history, two proximate neighbours with nuclear weapon capacity were engaged in a territorial dispute at the conventional military level. The global concern about rapid escalation to a nuclear war was palpable. Yet India prevailed by limiting the objective of the war to a defensive mode to evict the intruders – but at heavy cost, by way of lives lost.

One of the anomalous characteristics of the Kargil war (KW) was the fact that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who led the nation at the time was in reality a caretaker PM – having lost a vote of confidence on the floor of the house in April 1999. In hindsight, it may be opined that Team Vajpayee dealt with a complex, kinetic, sui-generis national security challenge posed by the KW with restraint, resolve – and above all – a degree of transparency that remains unparalleled in Indian history.

The KW ended on July 26, 1999 with valuable US intervention and the perfidy of the General Musharraf plan was exposed. Post war, then PM Vajpayee set up a three-member committee (KRC) headed by the doyen of Indian security studies – K Subrahmanyam – to review the short war and make policy recommendations. To their credit, the committee completed its job within six months and submitted the report to the government which was tabled in Parliament. Then NSA Brajesh Mishra enabled what can only be described as unprecedented and very unbureaucratic – a major part of the KRC report was placed in the public domain in the form of a book.

Titled ‘From Surprise to Reckoning’ – this book is, to my mind, the most important takeaway from the KW and the bleak sub-text is that it also points to the many lessons not learnt by the Indian higher defence management lattice. One of the more critical areas reviewed is the intelligence lapse that led to the Kargil war and valuable recommendations were made. Again, due credit to the Vajpayee government and Defence Minister George Fernandes who created four task forces to take the recommendations forward – but this remains an incomplete endeavor for a variety of political and institutional ‘turf protection’ reasons.

Did the intelligence agencies (R&AW) falter, or was it a lapse on the part of the army intel grid in that sector? These are questions that need to be objectively reviewed but this, alas, has not happened in the last 25 years.

On the military front, while applauding the gallantry of the young soldier and officer – the level of generalship at the highest levels merits objective scrutiny. However, this has not been enabled and the recent government decision to withhold permission for the release of General Nirmal Vij’s book (a former army chief, he was the DGMO during Kargil) does not augur well. Various aspersions have been cast on the army’s top leadership in recent months – and this is both unhappy and undesirable.

Nurturing academically rigorous, objective, non-partisan military history is not an Indian trait and this is unfortunate. To date – 25 years later – there is no official history of the KW in the public domain. This must be redressed.

Read : ‘Huge privilege’: 35 years later, Kargil war veteran General VP Malik’s son commands same division as father

The Kargil war and its handling burnished India’s profile as a responsible nation that acted with restraint and one could add that it laid the foundation for ending the estrangement in the bilateral relationship with the USA.

In its epilogue, the KRC cautioned that procrastination in matters related to security has cost “nations dear.” The sage counsel it adds is: The Committee “has after very wide interaction sign-posted directions along the path to peace, ensuring the progress, development and stability of the nation. How exactly the country should proceed to refashion its Security-Intelligence-Development shield to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century is for the Government, parliament and public opinion to determine. There is no turning away from that responsibility.”

Will this gauntlet be picked up before Kargil@50 in 2049?