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Ikkis: No age to die

Two very different army officers - a generation apart - performed acts of extreme courage for which each was recognized by a grateful nation with its highest gallantry award, Param Vir Chakra (PVC). A recent movie, Ikkis, recounts the life of one of the two, Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal, PVC (Posthumous). The other is Captain Manoj Kumar Pandey, PVC (Posthumous), with a story awaiting a screenplay. Both came up with the same answer to their respective combat predicaments – the ultimate in leadership.

While Manoj cleared enemy sangars off rocky heights of the Khalubar ridge in the Kargil sector; Arun joining battle in the Basantar bridgehead, knocked off enemy tanks wielding the still-functioning main gun of his tank, itself earlier disabled by a direct hit. The fierceness of the battles raging around them is clear from Kargil throwing up four PVC brave-hearts, including Vikram “Dil Mange More” Batra; and the Basantar sector, two - the other being the doughty grenadier, Hoshiar Singh.

The leadership puzzle

The intriguing part is though the two subalterns were superficially quite unlike each other, their courage suggests that deep down they were kindred souls. The dissimilarities in their background and personalities makes it difficult to catch what is the essence of such endeavour, something if captured could help the military inoculate all its junior leaders with.

Manoj, short and wiry, had his highpoint of his cadet days in striding up as team captain to collect the cross-country trophy – perhaps the most prestigious of academy trophies - at the National Defence Academy’s (NDA) famed glider dome. Not from a well-off family, he was likely irrepressibly unshod as a child. So, when the runners lined up for the start gun to go off, he would have his shoes on; but just after the start, he’d kick them off to run the rest of the rugged route - and win - barefoot.

Ikkis shows Arun similarly engaged in his last term. In the movie, he is depicted sounding a trumpet to gather his course-mates around him. He goes on to inspire them for a like collective effort, in his case, to move the squadron up from its long-held ranking at the bottom of the championship table. Over the term, they uncharacteristically top the table. He played a crucial role in the makeover, netting the drill competition – taken as the second most significant trophy since it has mass participation quite like cross-country - with the squadron marching to his word-of-command as squadron cadet captain (SCC).

Very alike in deed, yet the two were somewhat dissimilar in getup. While Manoj was the son of a small shopkeeper, Arun’s father was an army brigadier from the engineer corps. Manoj went to a sainik school, while Arun attended a public school. Arun was quite a swashbuckler – proficient at the saxophone and having a romantic interest at his elbow to boot. In contrast, Manoj was unassuming and - in a course-mate’s words - ‘happy-go-lucky, never hassled and always smiling.’ They were similar in one aspect: Arun was highly duty conscious and Manoj, focused.

Manoj had the advantage of having spent some time with his troops up at the highest battlefield, Siachen, prior to the outbreak of the Kargil War, allowing both – his Gorkhas and he - to get to understand each other deeply. In contrast, Arun, pitchforked into the 1971 War just six months out of the Indian Military Academy (IMA). He had to win the die-hard respect of his tank buddies doubly-quick.

Arun’s story

Ikkis shows Arun grow up the hard way, without the benefit of the combat-arm basic course. Finding the dates coincided with an upcoming war, tear-eyed Arun asked his reputed commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Hanut Singh to be taken off it. Hanut placed Risaldar Sagat Singh Rathore as his instructor to in-house mould him and another just-commissioned officer. Rathore transformed the two into junior leaders befitting the over two-centuries old, “Fakhr-e-Hind” Poona Horse. Sadly, both fell to enemy action in separate engagements.

Ikkis traces Arun’s leadership journey, much of which amounted to learning after a fall. The most significant episode has Arun at attention in front of his squadron commander (squaddie) at NDA. Taking his duties as SCC rather to heart, he was there to report a course-mate for wrong-doing. He fails to take the squaddie’s offer of an off-ramp, when the major hints that complaining of a course-mate amounts to ratting on a colleague, afoul of the academy culture of course-spirit. Apparently, he had earlier warned the wrongdoer, but recurrence led up to this. Even so, the very act of standing up for the ‘harder right’ – as the NDA prayer goes – shows moral courage. The movie goes on to reveal his girl-friend goading him to do the right thing, pushing him to realise that he’d gone overboard, particularly since his friend ends up losing a term. His apology settling the matter shows Arun taking responsibility for his actions.

That he was inspired by a sense of duty is clear when at the IMA, he distances himself from his sweet-heart, reasoning that his taking french-leave to see her on discovery resulted in his being taken off the Sword of Honour shortlist. He argues that he would not like to be distracted from becoming worthy of his forthcoming pips. Towards the end of the film, when the war is drawing to a close, Arun is seen writing a forces’ letter to patch up with her. In the event, the girl in time became an army doctor, sending a cake to Arun’s parents on his birthday every year.

Ikkis does not romanticize Arun. The movie lightly touches on his distaste for boxing, with Arun reporting sick rather than getting into the ring in his weight category. If it was fright, it only humanizes Arun, reminding the viewer that he as a cadet on a learning curve was but a teenager.

In the regimental mess, Arun vows to bring home to the regiment a second PVC, the first having been notched up by its legendary commanding officer, Ardeshir Tarapore, in the 1965 War. Tarapore, commissioned in the Hyderabad Infantry unit (which incidentally was commanded by this writer’s grandfather) had been granted a transfer from infantry to cavalry after his showing physical bravery. On the firing range, he saved his detail from a grenade accident. His moral courage was evident from his taking on the British commanding officer of his next regiment to task for racist remarks. Such was the quality of officership in Poona Horse, which Arun was raring to measure up to. However, he was denied an opportunity of a skirmish almost right through the war, maturely held in reserve by his CO.

His last moments are epic, and there is no better narration of this than that of the Pakistani tank commander opposing him in battle. Though Pakistan surrendered in East Pakistan, the war went on a day longer on the western front. During those last hours, the regiment had firmed-up the bridgehead across Basantar river, but was being furiously contested in successive counter-attacks by the Pakistanis. A Pakistani regiment, 13 Lancers - ironically the pre-Partition ‘sister’ regiment of the Poona Horse - led the charge. Arun’s troop sprang to the fore as reinforcements. They overran the perimeter of the bridgehead in pursuit of the Pakistanis after one bout. Reforming, the Pakistanis returned for another go, with the squadron commander, Major Nissar, in the lead. The final scene has Arun fending off the Pakistanis in defiance of orders and standard procedures to abandon a burning - and disabled - tank. His last round puts the Pakistani commander’s Patton out of action. With Major Nissar surviving the exchange, history gets a live, unbiased witness.

The other part of Ikkis has interspersed scenes from a later time, when Arun’s father, Brigadier Khetarpal, visits Pakistan in a period of relative bonhomie between the two countries, when Track II dialogues seeking rapprochement were on. The brigadier had migrated from across during Partition and wished to visit his village. Major Nissar - who had since retired as a brigadier himself - volunteered to host the visiting Indian. Coincidentally, Khetarpal’s village was near the scene of Arun’s last battle. In a poignant scene, his host Nissar paints the tactical picture of his son’s first and last battle. Khetarpal absorbs the sad narration with sobriety and not a bit of rancor.

The message

The director does well to fire his anti-war message from the shoulders of one of India’s most senior and respected actors, late Dharmendra, who assayed his final celluloid role as Khetarpal just before his recent demise. The times required the dual message on the futility of war and of war between neighbours - if not brothers. On the face of it, a simply-told tale of valour hardly balances jingoistic films, especially one currently demolishing earlier records of audience attendance. Sensibly, that the movie does not attempt to match such movies in publicity, budgets, technical wizardy and noise is itself a resounding refutation of the narrative of eternal enmity sought by propaganda masquerading as film. Fearing the message will strike a chord, the regime’s minders have forced an insertion at the end, helpfully from its perspective, reminding film goers that the neighbor is not to be trusted.

For the military, the leadership puzzle is set to remain. That such human material obtains in every strata of society is altogether a good thing, and must be tapped. The military has traditional means to shape this putty for its moment. It has Arun and Manoj as models. Arun would have been 75 today, and Manoj 50. Their examples across time caution conservatism, with leadership uninfluenced by the loud-mouthed and rabble-rousing, one that takes enemies as having mascara-filled or ‘small’ eyes, model new India seems to be harking after. Ikkis’s story of a 21 years-old, makes clear that the warrior dharma has no place for hate.

 https://m.thewire.in/article/books/general-anil-chauhan-spills-the-beans-in-his-new-book

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In his new book, General Chauhan spills the beans

Discussing the ‘many lines of action through which one can enhance the capability of a state to defend itself,’ General Chauhan, in the subsection on ‘Civil-Military Fusion’ in his chapter ‘National Security: A Conceptual Framework’ says in his new book:

This (civil-military fusion) ensures the optimal utilization of civil and military resources to achieve national objectives. It fuses military professionalism with political ideologies (emphasis and parenthesis added) (p. 44).”

Given that military professionalism and political ideologies have historically and universally been taken as incompatible, the misbegotten insertion appears to have escaped the eye of avid copy editors.

Even so, since it explains a lot of what’s been going on in the military sphere over the past decade of the Modi regime’s tenure in power, it must be alternatively read. It should not be mistaken as a ‘slip of tongue’.

It is instead a bold assertion, meant to be read, absorbed and normalized; even if alongside it is – as here – scrutinized, critiqued and pilloried.

Since the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) himself puts it so bluntly, it does not require further explication. Even so, since it is so shocking it might require a helpful word or two to digest.

The good General lists civil-military fusion among the intangible factors, which together with military force application, help with ‘Defence of a Nation State.’ ‘National security remit being larger than the application of military force,’ its instruments include ‘civil-military fusion’.

To be fair, he elaborates on the sentence, arguing that the infusion of state-of-the-art technologies across multiple domains and advent of dual-use technologies and infrastructure lend credence to the concept of civil-military fusion for optimizing resources. Fusion is also ‘paramount’ for citizen-centric HADR (humanitarian and disaster management) operations.

The General appears to want to take the sting out of the sentence by sugar-coating it by highlighting the close interconnection between the civil-military spheres. However, it is not self-evident why the military needs to be imbued with ‘political ideologies’ for interconnectedness to be efficient and effective.

Whats clear is that the interconnection cannot be seamless, since the military is an institution of a democratic State that by definition sees alternation in power of political ideologies.

By no means must a military be at odds with the national spirit or the political master, but adoption of ‘political ideologies’ goes beyond the consensus thus far on military subordination of the political.

So, what could Chauhan possibly mean?

His view is perhaps unknowingly informed by a theory in civil-military relations (CMR) termed Concordance theory. The theory is important enough in CMR to have been reprised in the golden jubilee commemorative edition of Armed Forces and Society (AFS), an international inter-disciplinary journal on the subject.

Its academic proponent, Rebecca Schiff, claims that the theory, ‘sees a high level of integration between the military and other parts of society.’ She argues that ‘three partners - the military, the political elites, and the citizenry - should aim for a cooperative relationship that may or may not involve separation but does not require it.’

In her seminal essay in the frontier AFS - later expanded to book length - she had used India as an example of concordance, incidentally, alongside Israel in the other case study. Her book went on to include a case study on Pakistan, of discordance there resulting in military intervention.

Unpersuaded with the understanding on civil-military ‘separation’, attributable to the dominance of the Huntingtonian notion on CMR, she had sought out ‘integration’ as a more descriptive term on CMR in many, particularly, non-Western states, such as India.

The theory has it that concord between the three stakeholders – the political elite, the military and society – brings about domestic non-intervention by the military. This is probable when the three ‘partners’ agree on four factors: ‘the social composition of the officer corps, the political decision-making process, recruitment method, and military style.’

To her, ‘(c)ooperation and agreement on four specific indicators may result in a range or civil-military patterns, including separation, the removal of civil-military boundaries, and other variations.’

Such a consensus existed in India through the Congress raj with civilian preponderance and separation of the military. Schiff approaches her case-study in the tumultuous decade of the Nineties, when political consensus was showing cracks. She concludes that political dominance alone (recall the political disarray of the coalitions back then) cannot explain continuing Indian military reticence on domestic intervention. Institutional (the military’s non-political style) and cultural factors (continuing British legacy) need factoring in. Thus, ‘separation’ served India well.

Today, India faces a new reality: that of an ideological capture of the State. Requiring a quiescent military, an ideological state can have one, but only through cooption. Thus, separation is no longer necessary.

So, is India moving towards ‘removal of civil-military boundaries’ – one of Schiff’s models?

This could explain General Chauhan’s brief, and for now cryptic, advocacy.

With Hindutva now predominant in Indian political culture - opposition parties opting for ‘soft Hindutva’ – it’s the only political ideology in town. Is the CDS advocating the military bandwagon?

Given the change in political culture, a shift in strategic culture is but natural, with the verities of the former informing the latter. A preceding sub-section to the one on fusion discusses ‘Strategic Culture’.

He calls for creation of a strategic culture ‘in the nation to create an awareness among the people on the ‘whole of nation’ approach that is sine qua non with emerging challenges.’ This, to him, requires that ‘citizens and society in a nation must understand the importance of security in all its dimensions, be it external, internal, economic or social.’

In other words, a trickle-down must encompass society, strategic culture defined as a ‘set of beliefs, customs and traditions held by the strategic decision-makers about the political objectives of war and the most effective ways of achieving it.’

With the political elite and the military already politically concordant, the society must be brought in line through strategic cultural manipulation. Efforts as Project Udbhav must been seen in this context.

The author devotes a chapter to ‘Ancient Indian Wisdom and its relevance in modern strategy and statecraft.’ To his credit, he lists Moghuls alongside the Guptas in keeping up the Mauryan consolidation of the idea of India – Bharatvarsh’.

With Moghul history kicked out of pedagogy, strategic culture can only rummage in an ancient history attic. This shows the military has bought into the verities of the Hindutva project.

In short, the civil-military separation that facilitated Indian military professionalism is fast losing its sheen. Is professionalism itself next?

General Chauhan is appreciative of the civil-military integration that has taken place thus far (the creation of his appointment, the CDS), but is silent on the civil-military integration that the yet-pending theaterisation will wreak.

He states theaters will be ‘force employment’ mandated, while Service headquarters headed by the Chiefs will restrict themselves to ‘force generation’, with even the CDS continuing only in an advisory role.

This leaves unsaid where the command-and-control chain of theater commanders’ stops. It cannot be at the desk of a triple-hatted CDS, one hat of which is as a Secretary.

The recommendatory line - ‘the chain of command and the operational decision matrix will also need to be redefined’ - is hardly helpful.

His one-line mention - ‘There should be NO ambiguity in the command-and-control structures for the higher direction of war (emphasis in original, p 168)’ – suggests civil-military ‘integration’, with theater commanders answering to the defence minister, as is in the American system.

No harm in that, but a book from the CDS need not have avoided the subject, particularly if there is dissonance (what else explains the ‘NO’, in caps?).

Another subject missing is nuclear weapons. That these are significant is clear from the manner the regime went about limiting Op Sindoor. Clearly, ‘(A) Blueprint for the transformation of India’s Military’ – the book’s subtitle – cannot have elided this topic.

It is logical to expect the CDS as the military adviser to the Nuclear Command Authority on nuclear matters, to have touched on the matter. Besides, the General’s previous book, authored at a one-star level, was on nuclear war effects; indicating his being attuned to the dangers. Instead, nuclear weapons find a mention at three places only in generic terms.

This keeps this critical matter under wraps, particularly the command-and-control arrangements, given that the CDS does not have command authority over the Strategic Forces Command. This begs the question: Who does? If a civilian (the NSA?), then does it presage theater commanders answering to a civilian?

Finally, and importantly, here’s evidence of the populist dogma in the political sphere finding its way into the military’s innards. General Chauhan writes:

In terrorism, one finds the absence of a political goal. It is not a means to an end but an end in itself. In the Quranic concept of war, terror is not a means to impose a decision but a decision in itself. Such violence without any definite political end state is contributing to the changing nature of war (p. 57).’

This is of a piece with the longstanding misinterpretation of the book by a Pakistani brigadier titled ‘Quranic Concept of War’ written in Zia’s times. Some two decades back I had refuted the notion of a Quranic endorsement of terrorism in the Army War College journal, that had asynchronously carried its review, writing in the following edition,

Terror in the author’s (Brigadier Malik) perspective is taken as akin to ‘Shock and Awe’, rather than ‘Terror’ as is currently, fashionably defined, more for propaganda purposes than accuracy. Terror can be taken as the imposition of a decision paralysis on an enemy commander, a numbing fear in his army and popular disaffection in the cause of the war. To the author (Brig. Malik) it is not the spectacular killing of innocents and non-combatants that is Terror in the post 9/11 Age (p. 198).

Now, with the CDS endorsing nonsense, Islamophobic dogma appears to have gone mainstream.

Lastly, the book’s title is interesting in its inclusion of the term, ‘Resurgent’. Are we to believe that the Indian military was in stupor so far, a Rip Van Winkle (Kumbhkaran in Hindi-speak) to be stirred awake by regime using likeminded acolytes in uniform?

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*General Anil Chauhan, Ready, Relevant and Resurgent: A Blueprint for the transformation of India’s Military, New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2025, pp. 200, Rs. 895.