1965 Indo-Pak war: A Soldier's perspective on lessons for future conflicts

India's next war could be fought on two fronts, with a collusion between Pakistan and China, warns Major General Ian Cardozo, drawing on logic, past experience, and evolving geopolitical reality

1965: Courage Unleashed – Short Stories on the Indo-Pak War

Author:  Ian Cardozo

Publisher:Penguin

Pages: 234 + xLix

Price: Rs 350

It is not commonly known that when the 1965 Indo-Pak war broke out, one particular combat had spectators: The students and professors of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.

It was mid-morning and a class was on when sounds of explosions disrupted an otherwise ordinary day, sending students and their teachers rushing out. What they witnessed that day was one of the greatest air battles in the subcontinent. Indian and Pakistani fighter planes — the Sabres and the Hunters — screamed in the air, criss-crossing, chasing and shooting at each other. On the ground, the students cheered and applauded, with no clue to which aircraft belonged to which side. Later, they would happily collect parts of the fallen Pakistani jet as souvenirs, and the military police would have to raid their hostel rooms to recover the wreckage.

This spectacle played out in West Bengal — far away from the western front where the 1965 war was largely fought to foil Pakistan’s attempts to sever Jammu & Kashmir from India. From Ladakh up in the north to Bikaner in Rajasthan, the war covered the states of J&K, Punjab, Rajasthan and, courtesy this aerial combat, also West Bengal, its scale exceeding the wars of 1947-48, 1962, 1971 and the Kargil conflict of 1999.

It was a war of many battles, each with many stories.

Ian Cardozo’s book, 1965: Courage Unleashed, is a collection of some of these stories, most of which aren’t well known. The aerial combat near the IIT campus is one such account, parts of which read very similar to the manner in which it is narrated in The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965, a book by P V S Jagan Mohan and Samir Chopra on the Indian Air Force’s role in the 1965 war. Messrs Mohan and Chopra’s book, however, does not find a mention in the bibliography of this book. 

A few of the accounts are well known, and were at one point even taught in school, such as that of Havildar Abdul Hamid who destroyed several of Pakistan’s US-supplied Patton tanks during the Battle of Asal Uttar in Khemkaran, Punjab, before he was killed in action.

What Major General Cardozo, a decorated officer, brings to even these better-known accounts are the details only a soldier can offer. Now retired and with the experience of three wars (the Sino–India war of 1962, and the Indo–Pak wars of 1965 and 1971), he offers an insider’s view.

The book, another one written for non-military readers, is more than a series of stories of what the army did, or the role the air force played, or where the navy was in the midst of all of this. It’s a soldier’s voice, welcomingly low on jingoism, that assesses the decisions taken back then, sometimes questioning them, at other times recognising the contexts in which they were taken.

One of the more interesting chapters is of his own experience, where a brigade commander asks him to draw up a plan to capture a Pakistani supply post within a week. This chapter gives a sense of the rare friction that can sometimes exist between a higher-up and soldiers on the ground, of how young officers can sometimes give in to foolhardy machismo out of josh, and how, for a soldier, the battalion is above all else.      

It is nearly 60 years since the war of 1965, but the question is sometimes still raised on whether India won or lost, considering that after the Tashkent Agreement, Indian troops were ordered to pull back and the territory gained was handed back to Pakistan. Major General Cardozo attempts to put this question to rest, like many others have done so before him.

He also explains why it is relevant to revisit a war fought six decades ago. A war is a learning for future wars. It is a lesson to be alert and be prepared for all potential possibilities an adversary may come up with.

As he winds up his book, he offers a cautionary note. The next war, he writes, would likely be waged on two fronts, and India would find itself alone in it. It is not a doomsday prediction. His warning comes from logic, an understanding of emerging geopolitical situations and the experience of past wars.

He foresees a collusion between Pakistan and China against India, which is a rising power that everyone, including the US and Europe, envies. While the US may view India as a counter to China, Pakistan remains its “favourite protégé”. In the event of a war, he writes, it will side with Pakistan, the way it did in earlier conflicts. Britain too, he reminds, had sent destroyers into the Arabian Sea in 1971 to intimidate India. As for Russia, while it has backed India in the past and would now be “grateful for India’s political support” at a time when it is facing isolation over its invasion of Ukraine, its deepening ties with China cannot be ignored. In any conflict between India and China, Russia would probably maintain a neutral stance.

The lesson, then, is that India needs to be self-reliant in defence. It needs to stop dragging its feet on strategies agreed to: “greater jointsmanship (sic)” among the defence services, theatrisation, better synergy between the armed forces and the government, and ensuring that the “army morale is not eroded by ill-conceived policies like ‘Agnipath’”.