1965: STORIES FROM THE SECOND INDO-PAK WAR
Rachna Bisht Rawat
Penguin Books
190 pages, Rs 299
A grand victory "carnival" is on in Delhi to celebrate the golden jubilee of the 1965 Indo-Pak war. It includes an exhibition at the India Gate lawns that showcases the role of the armed forces in the war. Food courts, souvenir shops and tableaux have sprung up on the greens. Some reports indicate that music, dance and magic shows are also planned. The Delhi traffic police have issued an advisory to residents to steer clear of certain key roads while the festivities are on. The message is loud - louder than ever before - and clear: "Lest we forget…"
But a war is not a carnival. To make a circus out of it is hardly in good taste. So, Rachna Bisht Rawat is spot on when, in the introduction to her well-timed book, 1965: Stories from the Second Indo-Pak War, she writes: "Battle victories are not celebrated, they are commemorated." And this, she says, is what her book aims to do.
1965 is an account of the five battles that define the war. They are the battles of Haji Pir, Asal Uttar, Phillora, Barki and Dograi. Ms Rawat pieces together the war, one battle at the time, largely through first-hand accounts of the veterans who fought those battles and came home to tell the story.
For weeks now, newspapers and television channels have been flooded with stories of the war told by the soldiers who were in the thick of it. What stands out in all of them is the vivid memory of these battle-hardened men of that period even five decades later. For example, as he recounts the battle of Asal Uttar in 1965, Hari Ram Janu, then a 22-year-old lieutenant, remembers every little detail of that warm September afternoon when he, with 600 soldiers of his battalion, waded through chest-deep water, their rifles held above their heads, even as artillery shells and bullets whizzed past them.
There are several accounts, along with maps of the operations and pictures from the battlefields, some of them sourced from soldiers' personal albums. Many of these stories remain in the history of the regiments that fought the war or end up as family lore, narrated by the soldiers to their children and grandchildren. In that sense, this book serves as a memory-keeper of sorts.
The story of Abdul Hamid, who brought down one Patton tank after another before the enemy spotted his jeep and fired at it becomes more real and accessible. The events that transpired in his house the night he was to leave for his regiment and his wife's anxiety as she begs him to stay one more day add another dimension to the personality of this hero whom we read about in our school books.
Interesting anecdotes, some poignant, some humourous and others that reflect struggles of a different kind - like five soldiers sharing a toothbrush or jawans treating their officers with salted semi-cooked goat meat, while going without salt themselves - can be found in several pages of the book.
1965 was a bloody war that no side really won. So, after the Tashkent Agreement, when the troops were asked to pull back from land they had risked their lives to capture, they were dismayed. A colonel from 1 Para remembers his soldiers in tears as they evacuated Haji Pir, which was returned to Pakistan in 1966. They had seen many of their comrades dying in this battle.
There is one problem with this book, though: it is not an independent effort. It is a result of the press information wing of the defence ministry wanting to bring out a well-researched book commemorating the five battles in time for the 50th anniversary of the war. So, even though Ms Rawat says she has tried not to exaggerate and overemphasise, some amount of jingoism has crept into the writing. At least twice in the chapter, "The Battle of Asal Uttar", the author emphasises that "Asal Uttar" means "befitting reply".
Certain accounts reflect a comparison between the way Pakistani and Indian officers treat their soldiers. While a Pakistani captain is "disgruntled and dejected" after being denied permission to go and see his dying father, an Indian major goes to the extent of urging his commanding officer not to cancel the leave of another young officer who has gone home for his wedding. These are word-of-mouth stories that can also be found in magazines like Sainik Samachar, the defence ministry's official publication.
There are a few slips too. In one place, the author writes, "Soon after ceasefire is declared on 21 September…" The ceasefire was declared on 23 September at 3.30 a m - and the author gets the date right in the chapter "The Tashkent Declaration". In the chapter on the Haji Pir hero Lt Gen Ranjit Singh Dyal, she writes that the officer spent his childhood in a tiny village of Himachal Pradesh, near Anantpur Saheb in neighbouring Punjab. The name is Anandpur Sahib, which a simple web search would have revealed.
Ms Rawat had four months to "read, research, travel, interview and write 50,000 words" because the additional director general of public information, whom she met in February, wanted the book out in August. That's the tragedy of our times. We live in a period when timing is everything. And so, authors of even those books that recreate history must work on a war footing.
What we forget is that books such as these later become sources for writing authentic historical accounts, so the responsibility on the author is that much bigger.
