Kulpreet Yadav's Haji Pir recounts soldiers' bravery in key 1965 war battle

The Battle of Haji Pir: The Indian Army’s Cross-Border Surgical Strike

Author: Kulpreet Yadav

Publisher:  Penguin

Pages: 257 + xx 

Price: Rs 399

Fifty-nine monsoons ago, India fought a bloody war with Pakistan, which had pushed some 30,000 infiltrators through the Ceasefire Line (now called the Line of Control, or LoC) on August 5, 1965. These infiltrators were Pakistani soldiers on a covert military operation called “Gibraltar”. Their mission: To pluck Kashmir from India by precipitating insurgency in the state.

So secretive was Operation Gibraltar that outside of Pakistan’s 12th Infantry Division, even its own army had no idea about it. India, still recovering from the wounds of the 1962 war with China, was caught unawares. Disguised as civilians, the saboteurs mingled with the local population, and started looting, killing and targeting key infrastructure.

The conventional response to the situation would have been to get into defensive mode, and try to capture, liquidate or push the infiltrators out. Instead, an audacious counter-strategy was developed. India would go on the offensive. Its troops would capture the very landmass, a 500 sq km bulge jutting into India, through which the Pakistani soldiers had entered. Called the Haji Pir bulge, this landmass included the 8,652-foot Haji Pir Pass on the Pir Panjal Range, and fell in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The battle of Haji Pir, one of the key battles of the 1965 war, would be a surgical strike. The Indian troops would cross the border from Uri in the north, in a mission codenamed Operation Bakshi after the brigadier (Zorawar Chand Bakshi, later lieutenant general) tasked with carrying it out, and from Poonch in the south (Operation Faulad) to assume control of the Haji Pir bulge.

Kulpreet Yadav’s book, The Battle of Haji Pir, is an account of this unorthodox twin operation — largely of Operation Bakshi. It is not the first. From the Indian armed forces’ journal, Sainik Samachar , to books by military historians and by officers who fought in the 1965 war, numerous accounts are available.

What makes this book unusual, though, is the narrative form the author has adopted — recreating the battle as it unfolded, and presenting it in a manner that makes it accessible to a wider audience rather than just the men and women in uniform.

The author, a former Indian Navy and Coast Guard officer, reconstructs scenes and conversations, as one would in a novel, based on publicly available records and earlier books, besides interviews with veterans of the Haji Pir battle.

The soldiers who fought on those treacherous peaks, in torrential monsoon rain and bitter cold, are now in their 80s and 90s. By recording their war experience and weaving it into the narrative, after corroborating it with other sources, the author has managed to preserve their oral histories. (Disclosure: Among the veterans interviewed for this book is this reviewer’s father.)

Before he gets into the chapters, or even the preface, the author presents an uncomplicated map of the area where the battle played out. Marked with arrows, it helps set the context as he begins to chronologically narrate the events from the war rooms to the battlefields.

The book opens at Murree, the headquarters of 12 Infantry Brigade, where Pakistan President Field Marshal Ayub Khan is taken through the broad contours of Gibraltar, an operation not every top Pakistani general is in agreement with, though Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister, is all for it. The way this scene is described, it could well be out of a contemporary Hindi war movie.

The early chapters offer a glimpse into the minds of military leaderships in India and Pakistan back then. Through a reconstructed conversation between then Indian army chief, General J N Chaudhuri, and Western Command’s general officer commanding-in-chief, Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh, the author gives a quick overview of how India had upped its defence tactics after the 1962 China war. Replacing the police and Home Guard battalions manning the border posts with the J&K militia, a paramilitary force of trained locals raised after the Pakistani invasion of 1947, was one such critical move. This force would conduct itself spectacularly in the 1965 and 1971 wars, and would be turned into a full-fledged army regiment, Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry, in 1976.

During the Haji Pir campaign, the Indian army carried out 15 battalion-level attacks, each of which is vividly described in short, sharp chapters in four sections. Notes from other sources offer context and additional information.

Lesser-known facts emerge, such as the genesis and role of the Meghdoot Force of commandos handpicked by Major Megh Singh. The officer had been under a cloud and passed over for promotion, so he had put in his papers. On his request, he was given a chance to raise a special force, with which he executed a daring mission for which he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and awarded the Vir Chakra.

Names of other decorated soldiers appear in the book, and it is here that an error has crept in: In the chapter on the Gitian feature attack, the author writes about 6 Dogra’s Lance Havildar Naubat Ram, who charged on despite being wounded thrice and was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra for his bravery. The author writes that Naubat Ram was “tragically killed”. He wasn’t. Naubat Ram survived the battle and eventually retired as a subedar. His citation on the defence ministry’s gallantry awards portal has details of his act of valour.

A book on the Haji Pir battle would be incomplete without mentioning the Tashkent agreement. The author refers to it upfront. After the UN-brokered agreement, India handed back control of the Haji Pir bulge to Pakistan on the assurance that it would not be used for infiltration. “Ironically,” he writes, “... it remains a preferred route for terrorists and troublemakers”.