Derring-do in the line of duty

In <i>Mission Overseas</i>, Sushant Singh describes three foreign military operations

MISSION OVERSEAS: Daring Operations by the Indian Military

Sushant Singh

Juggernaut Books, 2017

191 pages; Rs 299

Astonishingly for a country that has witnessed numerous military conflicts since its independence in 1947, India has no official histories of any of these crucial events. In the early 1990s, a government-appointed team of historians painstakingly compiled histories of India’s four major wars (1947-48, 1962, 1965 and 1971), but the planned release in 1993 was blocked at the last moment by an overly sensitive government that worried it did not emerge from those accounts smelling of roses. Nor are there official versions of the Hyderabad and Goa operations, the Siachen conflict that began in 1984 and continues to this day, the Kargil conflict in 1999, or any of India’s “out of area” interventions — as United Nations (UN) peacekeepers, or in bilateral interventions in Sri Lanka (1987-1990) and in the Maldives in 1988.

The resulting gap has been only partly filled by historians like Srinath Raghavan (the 1947-48 war), Amarinder Singh (the 1965 war), Lieutenant General V R Raghavan (the Siachen operation), General V P Malik (the Kargil conflict) and many self-exculpatory accounts of the 1962 China debacle. Now, Juggernaut Books has commissioned soldier-turned-journalist Sushant Singh to launch a new genre -— call it the “quickie historical tale” — which recounts wartime tales based on interviews with protagonists and eyewitnesses, alongside a brief recounting of the run-up to that incident.

In Mission Overseas, Mr Singh describes three foreign military operations. These include the Maldives intervention in 1988, when Indian paratroopers landed in the Indian Ocean archipelago to foil a coup by Tamil mercenaries from Sri Lanka. The second story describes the helicopter assault on the Jaffna University campus with the (eventually unsuccessful) aim of capturing Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the chief of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam (LTTE). Last comes the story of Operation Khukri, in which Indian peacekeepers in Sierra Leone freed an Indian Gurkha battalion that had been surrounded and held captive by rebels in a jungle outpost.

There are both merits and demerits to the quickie format. On the plus side, it brings in a large body of readers who are interested in military stories, especially tales of Indian derring-do, but who are disinclined to delve deep into history, tactics, operations and strategy. In a country where the military commands much respect, such stories create awareness of the difficulties of planning and executing an actual military operation; and of the manifold ways things can, and often do, go horribly wrong. On the downside, these shortened accounts run the risk of oversimplifying the historical and military backdrop, and relying less on documented history rather than on the accounts of a few protagonists who embellish their own roles.

Even so the author, strongly grounded in military matters as well as the journalist’s art of conveying the essentials succinctly, has created pacy tales that grab attention, while also providing just enough historical, strategic and military context. Without question, this slim volume — garishly packaged for airport-type bookstore displays — will be devoured by different readers from those who read General V P Malik’s weightier 2013 book, India’s Military Conflicts and Diplomacy, which provided a decision-maker’s perspective on several military operations, including all three covered in this volume. Yet, readers who enjoy Mr Singh’s book could well graduate to General Malik’s, and then to deeper military reading, thus creating a larger number of consumers of military history. 

The volume begins with the story of Operation Cactus, in which Indian paratroopers flew 2,700 kilometres to land in the Maldives within 14 hours of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s dramatic, early-morning SOS in 1988 when he found himself besieged in his own capital, Male. This is a truncated account of an earlier book, Operation Cactus: Mission Impossible in the Maldives, that the author had done for Juggernaut last year. Mr Singh spoke to a large number of individuals who participated in that operation to reconstruct what is eventually an inspirational tale, but not before the customary hiccups that characterise Indian government responses.

More grim is the bloody story of one of the early debacles of the Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka — the heli-borne assault on the Jaffna University campus. Described largely through the eyes of a Special Forces officer, Major Sheonan Singh, who turns out to be Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s nephew, the story unfolds like a slow-motion train wreck — an IPKF commander who was mentally unprepared for combat and regarded the jungles of northern Sri Lanka as little more than an extension of his headquarters in Hyderabad; Indian combat commanders who lampooned the LTTE’s fiercely committed fighters as “those lungi-walas”; units that had arrived in Jaffna not only without maps but even essential combat stores and equipment. With the author sparing nobody in apportioning blame, it is easy to understand why the casualty count of 70 dead in this brief operation swelled to 1,155 by the time the IPKF came back home in 1990.

The third tale describes the snake pit of a United Nations mission in Sierra Leone, where an Indian general had to virtually put his job on the line to rescue Indian peacekeepers held hostage hundreds of kilometres inside rebel territory. Mr Singh rightly points out that Indian policymakers, who have traditionally demanded UN cover as a precondition for committing troops overseas, would do well to study how India was left to resolve its own problems in Sierra Leone by the UN hierarchy.