Inadvertent revelations on how Kashmir messed up the army
Book Review: KGAKGG
The dust jacket of
Kitne Ghazi Aaye Kitne Ghazi Gaye by
‘god’s favourite child’, ‘The KJS Dhillon’, carries the blurb ‘National Bestseller’.
Presumably, it touched a chord in its intended audience: ‘young boys and girls
aspiring to be part of the Indian Army family…to motivate these young people…to
unleash the warrior within themselves…’.
My interest was in
a passage that caught my eye as I browsed through it at a bookshop. The
anecdote is of my father, then corps commander Chinar Corps - depicted as a
‘strict disciplinarian’ but remaining unnamed in the book - chancing upon a
young second lieutenant on the sidelines of a night operation in the Valley.
Instead of chewing him out for some minor administrative infraction he’d spotted,
father’s motorcade drove off, much to the relief young officer.
That the author
includes the incident in his autobiography, though its neither significant nor
has him as protagonist, caught my eye. I wanted a closer look at what the
author has to say about a strange incident in Kashmir in the period, Kunan
Poshpora. His unit finds mention in narratives critical of the army’s showing
in Kashmir back then. But, curiously, there is nary a reference to the incident
in the book.
Perhaps the book’s
scope as a motivational tract for youngsters lead to its excision, though this
risks observations that the author infantalises the youth of today. This may more
likely owe to the author being posted out by the time of its alleged occurrence.
He didn’t get back to that unit later, since, as with many officers of his
generation, he went on to the Rashtriya Rifles (twice it would seem from the
non-chronological memoir) and command of another regimental unit in Kashmir.
Since the author
prides his six tenures in Kashmir totaling some 12 years of service life, that
is a yardstick to measure the book by. Many officers, particularly of infantry,
have had multiple tenures in Jammu and Kashmir, making them part of the army’s Kashmir
cadre or honorary Kashmiris, as the author jocularly brings out. To the army’s
Kashmir engagement can be attributed some of the anomalies, if not quite
pathologies, that have come to be associated with the service.
If anyone’s
looking for a sophisticated understanding of the Kashmir problem, it would only
be fair to expect to find it within the covers of the book. His claim to fame
dates to his tenure at the helm of Chinar Corps when the Pulwama incident took
place and the clampdown to keep Kashmir from boiling over on the vacation of
content of Article 370. And yet, given his creditable academic record at
National Defence Academy, where he passed out with a 6.8 grade point average,
it is hard to believe that his take on the problem is so limited, unable to
tread beyond the official narrative.
There could be two
complementary explanations.
One is that the
higher military leadership forged in the Kashmir cauldron was of a typical
kind. While not all resorted to ticket punching, the army leadership’s
immersion in counter insurgency was of such an order that not all its members
were able to transit intellectually to the demands at higher operational and
strategic levels. At the higher levels, a capability for critical thinking is a
must.
It’s possible to
infer that the incestuous nature of the army’s Kashmir engagement was
all-consuming, hobbling critical faculties of those on the upward career curve.
Though the Kashmir cauldron has thrown up credible military leaders (Nanavatty,
Panag, Menon, Hooda readily come to mind), there is also a set that has
prospered under right wing regime(s) - remaining unnamed here as their self-confession makes them rather well-known.
The author was
picked as the perspective planning head, when General Rawat - who superseded
two seniors of the mechanized forces on account of his supposed Kashmir expertise
- was Chief. He informs of Rawat asking him at the end of one of their sittings
together if he’d take over Chinar Corps. Clearly, Rawat knew ‘Tiny’ Dhillon’s
6’4” frame fit the bill for a fast-tracked promotion. To say the least, Rawat’s
statements on Kashmir were always shocking. We know a Chief’s speeches are
drafted in Perspective Plans – headed by Dhillon then in his fourth tenure in
that branch.
Rawat wanting someone
to take forward the ‘take no prisoners’ Operation All Out, which since the
Burhan Wani phase, had consumed some 600 Kashmiri youth and foreign terrorists,
appropriately alighted on Dhillon. (One militant, Adil Hussain Dar, whose gun
jammed, was taken alive in the period.) Chuffed up, the author goes on to boast
of a 100 killed in the first five months of 2019, including the Pulwama mastermind
‘Ghazi’ within a 100-hours. His illegitimate and illegal warning was, ‘You pick
up the gun, you are dead.’ Of those killed, 75 per cent were callow Kashmiri
youth. To his credit per his unverifiable claim, he brought over 50 young boys
from the militancy.
Even so, it is
retrospectively clear that the scene was being set for the evacuation of
Article 370 by killing those who might create a ruckus. Quietude in wake of Amit
Shah’s 5 August histrionics in Lok Sabha owes much to such setting of the stage,
not to mention Ajit Doval’s camping over in Kashmir for a fortnight to control
the paramilitary pumped in, lest another Bijbehara occur.
That the general
was party to a hoax on the nation is clear from his bit of perception
management on national television that an improvised explosive device had been
found on the Amarnath Yatra route. That lending of the authority of his uniform
to the excuse for the regime’s year-long crackdown across Kashmir, albeit prolonged
by the Covid outbreak, is the author’s ticket to infamy.
It’s no wonder
then that he, fixated as he was with Kashmir, missed the wood for the trees as
the Chinese marched up to their claim line in Ladakh. As Chief of Defence
Intelligence Agency he ought to have read the tea leaves, since input had been
received of Chinese headed onto Tibet during their winter exercise. This is yet
another elision - proving the baleful effect of the army’s Kashmir obsession that
cost the nation 20 Galwan brave-hearts.
The monotonous
regurgitation of the official narrative in the book, right from the inception
of the problem in Kashmir to how the autonomous state was defenestrated, can
also have an alternative explanation. The second one gains plausibility from the
author in the acknowledgements informing of encouragement to record his memoirs
from a former major and star of the right-wing lapdog media, Gaurav Arya.
This suspicion
is reinforced by the ingratiating account of the author’s meeting with Amit
Shah, the all-powerful home minister, during his visit to Kashmir when Shah was
contemplating voiding Article 370. Dhillon egregiously recalls opining to his
wife on return from a one-on-one working breakfast meet: ‘Bees yuvraj mil kar bhi iss bande ka mukabla nahin kar sakte.’ What
can be more sickeningly cloying than that?
For his pains,
he has so far only been rewarded with the chairmanship of the board of
governors of Mandi Indian Institute of Technology, the director of which - on
Dhillon’s watch - has been the butt of memes. But then, the market is rather
full with generals – and sister service equivalents – falling over each other
to attract the attention of India’s ruling duo – national interest and
institutional integrity be damned. Though subtitled My Life Story, expect a sequel.
