The Kargil Committee expedition

Published : Mar 18, 2000 00:00 IST

By blaming it on systemic deficiencies, among other factors, but evading the question of specific responsibility, the Kargil Committee's report leaves the government happy but everyone else unamused.

A. G. NOORANI

AS the realities of the Kargil crisis dawned on the people, two sentiments became crystallised in public opinion. Admiration and gratitude to the jawans for their valour and their sacrifices, and resentment at perceived failures in the leadership, politi cal and military, which enabled Pakistan treacherously to exact such a toll of Indian lives. The people demanded a thorough probe. The Government temporised and prevaricated, only to yield gracelessly with these severely restricted Terms of Reference (To R): "To review the events leading up to the Pakistani aggression in the Kargil district... and to recommend such measures as are considered necessary to safeguard national security against such armed intrusions."

The ToR could not have been narrower. They ended abruptly at the intrusion, omitting the Government's and the armed forces' response to it. They did not address the concerns felt by the people. This was no exercise in accountability, in glaring contrast to two noted precedents. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, the Israeli Cabinet set up an inquiry commission headed by Dr. Shimon Agranat. It was asked explicitly not only to ascertain the intelligence before the war and its assessment, b ut also "the decisions of the duly authorised military and civilian bodies" on them. The remit went beyond the outbreak of the war to cover the period "up to the containment of the enemy".

The Report of the Committee of Privy Counsellors, headed by Lord Franks, entitled Falkland Islands Review (Cmmd. 8787, HMSO, 1983) dealt with "the way in which the responsibilities of Government... were discharged in the period leading up to the A rgentine invasion of the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982."

On July 24, 1999, Minister for Information Pramod Mahajan, announcing the Cabinet's decision to set up the Kargil Review Committee, its ToR and composition, said: "When we say events leading to, it may be intelligence, administrative, political fa ilures. We are not binding the Committee with one or two aspects" (emphasis added, throughout). No one was impressed.

Chandan Nandy of The Telegraph reported (August 4) that the Committee "has been instructed by the Centre not to fix responsibility on individual officers. Highly placed sources said that "the... panel has been advised to go about the inquiry in a 'general' manner and not make it 'individual specific'." A source told him: "The focus will be on systemic problems."

The members of the Committee, K. Subrahmanyam, Chairman, B. G. Verghese, Lt. Gen. (retd) K.K. Hazari, and Satish Chandra, Member-Secretary and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, would resent suggestions of instruction. But it is truly remarkab le that their report, signed on December 15, vindicates the news report in the main - it was a systemic failure. Subrahmanyam told The Times of India (January 8): "We believe we have been able to establish what went wrong. We did not undert ake the exercise to find out who went wrong. That would have been a different kind of exercise. Had one started by going into the question of who went wrong rather than what went wrong, it would have been a witch-hunt" (emphasis as in the original ).

This is special pleading. No other inquiry has made such a disingenuous distinction. No one asked the Committee to start with individual culpability. But any probe into what went wrong inescapably exposes who was responsible for that lapse. All inquiries have combined both without feeling the need for such distinctions. It is humans who commit lapses. There is no computer fault here.

Public dissatisfaction, however, was not confined to the ToR. It extended to the composition of the Committee, without the least disrespect to its distinguished members.

They miss the point in labouring on the limited aspect of "conflict of interest with two members of the Committee being Members of the National Security Advisory Board" (Subrahmanyam and Verghese). The wider issue is one of bias. These two accomplished p ublicists are known for their pronounced views on India-Pakistan relations, the Kashmir issue and related matters. This does not disentitle them to our respect. It does debar them from serving on a body which is charged with the duty of conducting an unb iased, impartial probe and of reporting objectively. Even judges have recused themselves in such situations.

It may be recalled that last June a group of former senior officials had issued a joint statement to say "it is essential that political parties, their leaders, and analysts who write and speak on the subject, suspend for the time being any focus on the inadequacies and failures that have led to the crises situation the country faces." Subrahmanyam was privy to this abdication of democratic duty.

"The record needs to be set right, not through strident propaganda, but by a cold marshalling of the facts regarding contemporary events," the report ponderously says (page 223). Large parts of it, however, are couched in fluid, emotive and cultivated pu rple prose. The "history" it dishes out is spotted and of the kind one finds in official propaganda material. Heavily padded, it reeks of tendentiousness and pontification. Let alone the contents, even the style and expression suffer by comparison with t he Franks and Agranat reports; indeed with any such report of note.

We are treated to "military legends... of mountain crossings and mountain warfare" (Hannibal, Topa Inca Yupanqui and Babar) and told: "These expeditions and others like them elsewhere certainly rank as famous exploits. But all pale into insignificance as every one of them peaked or ended at levels where the Kargil war began. This was an incomparably harsher environment, enveloped in cloud, at elevations where men, arms and equipment, supplies logistics, trajectories, ballistics, manoeuvres, flight paths , combat flight plans, surveillance and, indeed, very survival, hinged on acclimatisation of one kind or another in that rarefied, deoxygenated atmosphere. It demanded improvisation and sheer will power." What is all this in aid of?

The ToR accurately dubbed "the Pakistani aggression" as one committed through "armed intrusions". A former Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), Lt. Gen. V.R. Raghavan, wrote: "The assumption that Kargil was a limited war will not stand scrutin y. Kargil was a series of local military actions, albeit fought with great heroism, to clear Indian territory of intruders" (The Hindu, February 2). The report says on page 1: "It was an extraordinary war, this Fourth War of Kashmir" (the first th ree being the ones of 1947, 1965 and 1971). It sobers down later. "The intrusion involved the use of a relatively limited number of men (approximately 1,700 or so) across a restricted front of much less than 100 kilometres to a depth of only five to nine kilometres. In military terms, this was not a very major operation either in terms of size or capability. There was little prospect of the Pakistanis being able to hold out once the Indians had built up forces to react in strength against the intrusions (page 82).

But it soon becomes "the Kargil invasion... the first regular war fought by India since 1971" (page 86); then an "armed intrusion in the Kargil sector" which "came as a complete and total surprise to the Indian Government, Army and Intelligence agencies. .." (page 189). On page 198 we are warned that, though limited, "this was not a minor skirmish but a short, sharp war." As before, sobriety seeps in: "The Kargil intrusion was essentially a limited Pakistani military exercise to internationalise the Kash mir issue" (page 201).

What confidence can one repose in the judgment of men who are simply unable to decide whether it was a "war" or an "intrusion"? It is not that they are unaware of the facts. They laboured hard and in earnest. It is the quality of judgment that is suspect . Their fervour explains stylistic eccentricities and warped conclusions.

Two correspondents reported that. Seema Mustafa of The Asian Age did so in detail with direct quotes from some who "appeared before the Committee" (November 19). Praveen Swami recounted personal experience at their hands (Frontline, Februar y 4). Their accounts tally - argumentative interruptions by Subrahmanyam and Hazari and, even more remarkably, of Hazari charmingly lapsing into reminiscences about his days in Kargil earlier.

Such self-indulgence accounts for the play with the ToR. The Committee members imagined that they were not narrow but "open-ended". It, therefore, "found it necessary to define its scope of work precisely". What actually happened is that, in their ardour , two members - both able and amiable but no prizes for guessing their identity - mounted their respective hobby horses and centred off on a frolic of their own to the applause of their colleagues who merrily approved of the sport.

By what stretch of the ToR ("events leading up to the Pakistani aggression" and measures to avert such intrusion) can you drag in the nuclear policies of India and Pakistan in the last few decades, India's defence expenditure and media policy? The style of the first two is markedly different from that of the third. The former are strident; the latter, pontifical. Both are self-righteous.

Of the 228 pages of the report, the high-pitched prologue takes eight pages, "history" 18, security implications of trends in India's defence expenditure" (Chapter 9) covers 14, "Nuclear backdrop" (Chapter 10) has 29 and "The public dimension" (Chapter 1 1) six. Add to them the rhetoric and repetitiveness in the rest. A good sub-editor could have reduced the report to a half of its bulk without any loss of substance. Evidently the authors of the report were out to produce a "historical document".

Yet, the "open-ended" approach is prudently selective. The tall poppies are spared. Military operations is properly excluded, surely; if "the U.S. sponsored withdrawal of the intruders" is to be recalled repeatedly, why is no mention made of Defen ce Minister George Fernandes' offer of a "safe passage" to them on June 1 and the Prime Minister's renewal of it the next day? The Clinton-Nawaz Sharif joint statement came on July 4.

More to the point, on June 27 Fernandes admitted that "the intelligence establishment had failed to provide any advance warning of the Pakistani infiltration" - a charge the report upholds in respect of the Research and Analysis Wing and the Directorate General of Military Intelligence. On July 14 and since, Fernandes flatly denied that there was any "intelligence failure". On July 23, just a day before the Committee was set up, Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee said "there was no failure" of intelligence. The early utterances of Fernandes bear recalling:

May 14: Pakistan's shelling in Kargil was "sporadic" and our army was "well prepared" to deal with it.

May 15: The intruders would be evicted "in 48 hours".

May 16: The army "had cordoned off the area entirely" and our objectives would be realised "within the next two days".

May 20: "The situation is well under control."

May 29: Indian troops had flushed out the intruders in the Dras sector and "restored the sanctity of the Line of Control". Such ignorant smugness in the Prime Minister and Defence Minister surely called for some comment in the report.

While the chapter on the "Nuclear backdrop" ends predictably with tacit approval of the draft Indian Nuclear Doctrine drawn up by the National Security Advisory Board, the one on the media ignores criticisms by foreign and Indian correspondents of the lack of objectivity and access. Daniel Lak of the British Broadcasting Corporation wrote of television's performance during the Kargil crisis: "Television news was a patchwork of contrived patriotism and unhelpful jingoism. Colleagues have even told me of TV news editorial meetings where senior people ordered the injection of more fervent nationalist points of view into the correspondents' front line reports."

Pamela Constable of The Washington Post found curbs on reporting Kargil worse than those imposed even in Chile and El Salvador. She commented on "the frightening ease with which objective news coverage can lapse into unquestioning jingoism when is sues of patriotism and national security are raised even in a flourishing democracy like India with a huge and freewheeling press corps that routinely hoots down prevaricating politicians and leaps on official scandals with gusto."

The report proudly says: "The media coverage especially over television bound the country as never before." The ban on Pakistan TV and on Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, providing access to the daily Dawn, were unprecedented and an insult to our free society. The ban, in the exquisite words of the author of this Chapter, was "not particularly well considered". Pakistan could "portray these as acts of Indian censorship" which, to him, evidently they were not. The ban on PTV was in braz en violation of Section 19 of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995.

Read this revealing bit: "The two Ministers who spoke for India on Kashmir in the BBC's programme, Hard Talk, were inadequately briefed for their grilling on human rights in and idea of mediation on Kashmir in the midst of the Kargil confrontation when i nternational sympathy was by and large with India and Pakistan stood isolated. Satyameva Jayate is an excellent motto. But the truth must be assisted to prevail." This is reference to Tim Sebastian putting George Fernandes and Jaswant Singh in a tight sp ot. Do they need briefing to face the usual questions? The latter relied, incredibly, on B.G. Verghese's report, an exoneration of India's record on human rights in Kashmir. His report, under the Press Council's auspices, dealt with a few incidents and i s widely discredited (see the writer's "Exceeding the brief: The tragedy of the Verghese Report," Frontline, October 12, 1991).

No comment, however, is made in this chapter on the joint statement by the former officials made in June 1999, pleading for a suspension of criticism of the government during the Kargil crisis. Be it recalled that Winston Churchill faced a censured motio n in the House of Commons even during the War.

Chapter 2 titled "Historical background" traces events since Kashmir's accession to India in 1947. It rightly refers to the fraudulent polls in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) but wrongly omits to mention the elections in the State held since 1951 , bar the ones in 1977 and 1983. If this is addressed to Indians, it is unnecessary. The foreign audience will not be convinced. Sample this in para 2.24 on page 23: "There was nothing like provisional or conditional Accession under the Independence Act. Nor was there any question of taking account of the religious or ethnic composition of individual princely states". Three falsehoods in three lines is a record. The first reflects illiteracy, the rest, ignorance. (1) The Act was not supposed to, and did not, provide for accession of States to either country. That was done under the Government of India Act, 1935, adapted as our interim Constitution. (2) The Government on India's White Paper on Kashmir (1948) said (page 3) that "in accepting the accessio n the Government of India made it clear that they would regard it as purely provisional until such time as the will of the people could be ascertained." (3) In a wire to Liaquat Ali Khan on November 8, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru said "it is essential in order to restore good relations between two Dominions that there should be acceptance of the principle that where the ruler of a State does not belong to the community to which the majority of his subjects belong, and where the State has not ac ceded to that Dominion whose majority community is the same as the State's, the question whether the State should finally accede to one or the other of the two Dominions should be ascertained by reference to the will of the people." Lord Mountbatten had made an identical proposal to Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Lahore on November 1.

This is old history. Even more inexcusable is the distortion of the record on Siachen. India resiled from one accord on the withdrawal of troops in June 1989 and aborted another in November 1992 (vide the writer's "The Siachen affair," Frontlin e, June 3, 1994). On November 16, 1989, Rajiv Gandhi said in Calcutta: "We have recovered about 5,000 square kilometres of area from occupied Kashmir in Siachen. We will not forgo one square kilometre of that." This belies the report's claim that Indian troops were in Siachen even before 1984.

Siachen is of direct relevance to Kargil. In the last round of India-Pakistan talks in November 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government wrote off a decade's record of negotiations based on mutual withdrawal. Its stand was based on Defence Minister George Fernandes' statement on July 18, 1998: "India needs to hold on to Siachen." The five-point proposal made on November 5, 1998 was crafted to ensure its rejection. It sought to freeze the status quo.

The year 1998 was tense, anyway. The report records: "The developments of 1998 as reported in various inputs, notably the increased shelling of Kargil, the reported increased presence of militants in the Force Commander Northern Area (FCNA) region and th eir training were assessed as indicative of a likely high level of militant activity in Kargil in the Summer of 1999 and the consequent possibility of increased infiltration in this area... General Musharraf has disclosed that the operations we re discussed in November 1998, with the political leadership and there are indications of discussions on two subsequent occasions in early 1999."

Nothing can mitigate, let alone justify, what he plotted. Calm appraisal of the adversary's motive is one thing. Throwing up implausible hypotheses is another. He plotted to use Kargil to settle Siachen. The report mentions this as one of the poss ibilities. On this point, it is dead right.

Which brings us to the most deplorable part of the report. It says (page 10) that the Committee "did not consider it appropriate to attempt to fix responsibility on particular individuals. That would have made it necessary to adopt inquisitional procedur es". Rightly so. The rules of natural justice - communication of charges and evidence and hearing to the person accused - brook no evasion. No adverse finding can be made unless these rules are complied with. They were ignored in regard to Brigadi er Surinder Singh who commanded 121 Infantry Brigade. He was accused, in effect, of telling an untruth. The report devotes six long paragraphs spread over four pages to this one case. Why? The Committee, rather unusually, met the press on February 25, th e day after the report was placed before Parliament. John Cherian reported: "On Brigadier Surinder Singh being singled out for criticism, he said that the matter concerning the Brigadier was forwarded to the committee by Army Headquarters, and Sur inder Singh too had made a representation. Further, matters concerning the officer had figured prominently in the media. Subrahmanyam denied that the committee had passed any judgment on the Brigadier" (Frontline, March 17, 2000).

It is amazing that Subrahmanyam should have made a palpably incorrect statement, which is belied by the very text of the report and the utterances at the press conference. What was it, if not a witch-hunt?

The excuse of public interest was trotted out to discuss defence expenditure and nuclear backdrop too. But the revelation he made is shocking. Army Headquarters had no business to refer this case to the Committee. It could not have considered it w ithout undermining its independence and credibility. Its ToR was there. It was not a roving inquiry. The public knew nothing of this addition. Could the Government have likewise remitted it to any other matter, unknown to the public?

Pray, are there any other matters discussed in the report on a reference by the government or the Army?

Para 8.17 (page 134) goes beyond a recital of facts. It contains comments on and censures of Brigadier Surinder Singh: "His statements reflected an attempt at ex-post-facto generalisation." A soldier is accused of making up a story, that is , telling an untruth.

This is outrageous. As it is he has faced an inquiry by Lt. Gen. A.R.K. Reddy, Chief of Staff Northern Command, whose boss is none other than Lt. Gen. H.M. Khanna GOC-in-C, Northern Command. At the press conference Lt. Gen. K.K. Hazari made no secret of his ire at the Brigadier. He went out of his way to allege that he had not done what he should have. In other words he failed to do his duty. Hazari added that not being provided the resources did not dilute the responsibility of a field commander (read Brig. Surinder Singh) for his area of deployment. The army did not function that way. Hazari pompously added: "There can be no compromise or excuses in matters of responsibility." Nor, one might add, with the rules of natural justice, fair play and basic decency. Hazari's remarks were uncalled for and improper.

The Committee goes out of its way in the opposite direction in Lt. Gen. Khanna's case and that of Chief of the Army Staff V. P. Malik. The former was in Pune from May 12 to 19, after the intrusions were known - avowedly for a briefing from his predecesso r. The latter was in Poland "during the early part of May". He returned by May 25. His trip, it was said, "was of some political significance".

Here goes yet another. The Intelligence Bureau "got certain inputs on activities in the FCNA region which were considered important enough by the Director, I.B. to be communicated over his signature on June 2, 1998 to the Prime Minister, Home Minister , Cabinet Secretary, Home Secretary and Director-General Military Operations. This communication was not addressed to the three officials most concerned with this information, namely, Secretary (R&AW), who is responsible for external intelligence and had the resources to follow up the leads in the I.B. report; Chairman, JIC, who would have taken such information into account in JIC assessments; and Director-General Military Intelligence. Director, I.B. stated that he expected the information to filt er down to these officials through the official hierarchy. This did not happen in respect of Secretary (R&AW) who at that time was also holding additional charge as Chairman, JIC. The Committee feels that a communication of this nature should have been d irectly addressed to all the officials concerned."

A good bureaucratic point. But what did Vajpayee, Advani & Co. do with the I.B.'s report of June 2, 1998? They sat on it.

The Army chief, Gen. V. P. Malik, toured the Rajouri-Poonch, Uri-Kupwara and Siachen sectors from April 10 to 14. He did not go to Kargil. Intrusions had begun in small groups in February-March 1999. The main body of troops came in the latter half of April. There is a (page 192) reference to an "influential section of the Indian political class and media" who were outraged, "Some" felt Nawaz was not "duplicitous". Why not mention that Fernandes and Vajpayee exonerated him in May 1999?

There are many policy prescriptions such as "a political initiative, internal and international, ...as there is no military solution to the Kashmir question" (pages 188 and 226) which go beyond the ToR. The report roams over the Lahore process to exonera te Vajpayee. It blames "deficiencies in the system", blames RAW, censures Brigadier Surinder Singh and leaves the Government happy and everyone else unamused. A truly "historic document".

At the press conference, Subrahmanyam claimed that this was the first time a report of this nature had been made public (The Statesman, February 26). It is an achievement only in the Indian clime of secrecy and minimal accountability. Israel was b orn in 1948 and lived in a state of war with neighbours for decades. The Agranat report contains no pejoratives, is matter of fact, spares none and was published soon, a quarter century before this report. It would have been treated with derision in Isra el, had it been produced by any of its inquiry committee.

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