Col Gautam Das (retd.) speaks with Col Anil Bhat (retd.) on his book “Crafting a New Indian Art of War For Future Challenges” | SAM Conversation
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00:00 Welcome to SAHAM Conversation, a program of South Asia Monitor.
00:14 Our guest today is Lieutenant General Gautam Das, whose latest book, "Crafting the New
00:25 Indian Art of War for Future Challenges" has just been published and released.
00:35 And this is what I consider a very important book and one which will be very informative
00:46 and interesting.
00:47 "Crafting the New Indian Art of War for Future Challenges".
00:56 I would like to begin by reminding the audience that the Indian Army may have been put together
01:10 by the British, but in the period between 1758 and 1818, 60 years, they battled the
01:21 Marathas and it is from the Marathas that they learnt about guerrilla warfare.
01:30 The Marathas were specialists in the tactics of fighting, taking and withdrawing before
01:40 the enemy could react.
01:53 It was this tactic that the British learnt from the Indian soldiers, the Marathas.
02:05 And now let's come to the First World War, 1914 to 1918, the first very highly technological
02:16 war in which there were high rate of firing weapons at long ranges.
02:23 There were 1.5 million Indian troops who won the First World War for the Allies.
02:30 This is no exaggeration.
02:31 Everything was new to them, the climate, the people, the cultures, they overcame everything
02:45 and they excelled.
02:46 The British had to change their policy of not awarding the Victoria Cross to non-whites,
02:56 with Khudabad Khan becoming the first recipient of the Victoria Cross.
03:04 Then came the Second World War, 2.5 million Indian soldiers were the winning factor for
03:15 the Allies again.
03:16 Now came independence, the First War, 1948, 47, 48, in Jammu and Kashmir, it is the civilian
03:29 leadership which didn't allow the war to be completed.
03:37 Then came 1962, again the civilian leadership was very, very flawed.
03:49 And it's great to say that you fight with the last man, last bullet.
03:56 But what happened to Major Shaitan Singh and his company should not have happened.
04:02 You should not have, any army should not have reached a situation where they are short of
04:08 men and they are short of ammunition, they are short of equipment.
04:12 In any case, fighting that war with a rifle which was very old, the .303 Lee and Thiel.
04:23 Then 1965, we were at the gates of Lahore, we were stopped again.
04:34 1971, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi listened to the then Chief General, later
04:46 Field Marshal, Sir Manik Chauh, and the result was a 13-day war and a division of Pakistan.
04:58 East Pakistan became liberated and became known as Bangladesh.
05:08 Along with independence came insurgencies.
05:15 The Indian soldiers became specialists in counter-insurgency warfare also.
05:23 And also in 1947-48, the Indian Army redefined mountain warfare by fighting at Hajipur with
05:32 tanks, taking tanks there, 14,000 feet.
05:35 What I am trying to say is that there is probably no better soldier in the world at adapting
05:48 and amount of resilience.
05:51 So what Colonel Gautam Sen has to say about crafting the new Indian art of war for future
06:02 challenges, without saying anything further, I request Colonel Das to please share his
06:13 thoughts, share the ideas of his book, please.
06:19 Thank you Colonel Gautam.
06:22 Colonel, we have known each other a long time and you have in a way introduced the topic
06:30 for me.
06:31 I have known you very much indeed with Shivaji and his Gani Nikala, the term used by them
06:37 and by his professionals, Maratha soldiers, the Bargir, the mounted soldier whom you did
06:43 not mention by the way.
06:44 But let me come to this particular book.
06:45 Those who were fortunate, I was fortunate that they were attending the launch.
06:46 I told them that this particular book was born out of sorrow and born out of a sense
07:00 of grievance.
07:01 I will repeat that for you and your audience.
07:06 The sorrow was that on the 15th of November 1962, I came down from boarding school along
07:12 with a lot of my schoolmates, barring the class 11 lot, I was in class 10, just finished
07:20 school, just finished that year's exams and we all came down to Siri Gudi station from
07:23 boarding school in Bargiril and the 62 war was still on at that time.
07:29 And there were casualties coming in from what is called Miffa at that time, not east-central
07:34 region, Sigma or Nachal Pradesh and coming to the same platform in Siri Gudi junction,
07:39 no longer used very much now because it is a mortgage station.
07:44 But those who were Indian soldiers, walking wounded, stretcher cases and being an army
07:51 brat, I was very badly affected.
07:52 I had grown up in the cocoon of the army and it's what made up my mind to take up the
07:59 profession of arms at that stage, just having finished class 10.
08:05 But the sorrow comes from there.
08:08 The grievance comes from the fact that in my service as an infantry officer, very often
08:15 I while practicing advance to contact as a Banglad family commander and such like, I
08:24 did with consideration realize that perhaps we could have done some of those practical
08:31 maneuvers better in our practice phase and therefore avoided some of the mistakes that
08:38 we subsequently did starting from the first time of my second lieutenant service.
08:46 And sure enough, there were mistakes, some pretty horrendous ones, the ones which affected
08:52 me most at the time in the 71 war was the 14 Grenadiers attack on Gorinchur.
09:00 Now curiously enough, the core commander, if the equivalent core commander of 15 core
09:08 men which is like today's Northern commander, General Sattar Singh, Lieutenant General Sattar
09:14 Singh, he came to the picket I was commanding, picket 561 in Southern J&K, in the Nishera
09:21 sector along with him K. Bhatt, the original commander, the lead commander and so on to
09:28 discuss a particular approach we were following.
09:33 And along with them they brought Lieutenant General Jitsen, CO of the 15 Grenadiers who
09:39 was the reserve battalion commander of the whole division.
09:43 Very smart, very handsome, sicko, CO of the reserve battalion.
09:49 And I happened to meet him there.
09:52 Within a year this battalion was decimated by the attack they were forced to put in.
09:59 And I felt that there were serious mistakes in the way this was launched and executed.
10:05 So therefore, in this book I cover the period starting from August '47 and I take it to
10:15 the end of my period of grievance that I have used which is August 2020, the Galwan episode.
10:22 Where I, depending upon whose calculations you are using, we have lost anywhere between
10:29 or lost the rights to patrol if you want to be so diplomatic, a certain large amount of
10:35 equipment.
10:36 So that is my grievance that we are still there from '62 to this place.
10:41 Sir, thank you very much and I am very glad you have come to the point of Galwan because
10:52 with the Chinese we learned a new kind of war.
10:57 A war from 1967 where after which they pressed very hard for us not firing at each other.
11:11 Because they lost almost 400 in those skirmishes in Natula and Chola in 1967, September.
11:17 They lost about 400.
11:19 We lost 67.
11:21 And thereafter they pressed very hard that let's not fire at each other.
11:25 So now began a new kind of warfare where we are doing border management, bulletless border
11:32 management by mukke bazi, fisticuffs, pushing, pulling, wrestling, grabbing, you know.
11:42 And finally even throwing stones at each other and the medieval barbaric way of iron rods
11:53 with nails on them which the Chinese tried and they killed 20 of us and what the official
12:06 reports of how many we killed are about 43 but there are other reports which say they
12:13 have killed more than 100.
12:15 And again ironically without arms, without firing back at them, with bare hands.
12:24 I mean you are again proving a point here that this is the kind of adaptability.
12:37 Now we have this, now please if you can tell us what we require to be considering the fact
12:48 that we face two foes, two enemies, China and Pakistan.
12:54 Both are nuclear armed.
12:56 It's a great scratch each other's back kind of friendship that they have and I know of
13:08 a lot of support of building up the nuclear arsenal.
13:14 Sir?
13:15 The agreement between China and Pakistan is what they are calling the iron bond of TIRCA.
13:25 The iron bodies in London.
13:27 But to come back to the book and to the things I have put in and to answer the question just
13:35 posed by Tony Anil Kap, the book covers the period from August '47 to August 2020 which
13:44 is the Dalian issue and I have taken examples both good and bad.
13:51 One of the first good examples that I have in the book is the one Tony Bhatt has referred
13:56 to himself, the tanks at Zorjala.
13:58 There are others which I am happy to point out that we have been, our commanders at different
14:06 levels have been able to think of and execute.
14:09 So it's not that we are not capable of it.
14:11 We are and our commanders are capable of coming up with tactical solutions to actual tactical
14:20 problems on the ground at the spur of the moment.
14:24 So I emphasize in this book that I feel we have our shortcomings over time, the same
14:32 period that I am talking about for which I have given specific examples in detail from
14:37 published works including the official histories is that our policy that we have, our military
14:46 doctrinal policy which by the way is not something that is not unpublished like the National
14:53 Security Strategy, this military, the Indian Army's doctrine is a published document
14:59 available on the net to anyone but it needs to be more aggressive.
15:05 This is my first point that our tactical doctrine and the doctrine for the level above it that
15:14 of operational law needs to be inherently more aggressive than what we are telling you.
15:21 No doubt sir, no doubt.
15:23 Therefore what we need to have number one is an aggressive defensive policy and not
15:29 advocating an offensive policy such as the American policy for the world, the military
15:35 policy for the world where they are clearly in a completely different mindset of putting
15:45 in assaults, attacks, capturing territory anywhere in the world.
15:49 I am not talking of that.
15:50 All I am saying is that where we are pressed by two political armies whom we are facing,
15:58 the Pakistanis because the Pakistan army also tries to handle the politics of Pakistan,
16:04 it has been very famously described as every country has an army, every nation has an army,
16:11 Pakistan is the only country where the army has a country.
16:19 Yes.
16:21 On the other side is China.
16:23 Now China is avowedly a political army but it is part of their actual official status.
16:30 It is not the Chinese army that we face.
16:35 It is the army of the Communist Party of China.
16:38 It is reiterated at their army day parades by no less than the president of the country
16:48 who is also the head of the army and head of the government and he says that your duty
16:57 lies to the Chinese Communist Party and not to the Chinese government.
17:01 So therefore they are prepared to act against any government of China irrespective of the
17:06 fact that it is set up by the party.
17:09 If required they will act against the people of China, it will act against the government
17:14 of China in the interest of the party and they cite the collapse of the Soviet Union
17:22 to say that we will never nationalise the army.
17:25 They say so.
17:26 He says so.
17:27 We will never nationalise the army.
17:30 The Soviet Union first made the mistake of nationalising their armies, including the
17:37 Russian army, the Dushanbe army, that army.
17:39 The mere fact that they nationalised the army according to the Chinese is the reason of
17:43 the doubt there.
17:44 So they are very clear that they are never going to nationalise the People's Liberation
17:48 Army.
17:49 It is the army of the party.
17:51 So we have two political armies against us who are apolitical and are also run on a basis
18:00 of strategic expediency, military, political as well as military expediency by the government
18:08 of the day irrespective of the time.
18:10 I mean we have one government till tomorrow and under the party which has been in power
18:17 since 2014 and we have had a party which has been in power for much before that, but this
18:23 does not set a policy of appeasement or semi-appeasement against the Chinese.
18:29 This causes problems in the sense that these two political armies are aware that we are
18:37 very wary or hesitant to actually use force in addition to the fact that we have actually
18:45 signed these agreements with China which they break at will and we are left holding the
18:52 thing trying to appease them.
18:53 So this is one factor and the major factor.
18:57 Thereafter I have gone on to talk of in the book after examining the practices, but therefore
19:05 we need what I call the 10 commandments.
19:07 I will not bore you with details, but they are all based on apart from the defensive,
19:13 but purely defensive when needed, fixed defenses wherever, plains, mountains, wherever needed,
19:20 where there is a threat to that area it has to be defended and therefore the army will
19:25 do it.
19:26 We are meant for this.
19:27 When I say we, it has been over 33 years since I left the army, but nevertheless I still
19:34 say we for the army.
19:35 The issue here is that I believe that our defensive policies should be such that if
19:45 we are very closely threatened we should strike back, we should counter attack.
19:49 We should counter both.
19:52 The Chinese after 1962 have been describing their assault, their offensive on us as counter
19:59 attack in self-defense.
20:01 And this is before we did any such thing other than occupying the Tagla Ridge.
20:07 That was for them, that was the attack and that was the...
20:10 Is that correct?
20:11 I will end here and hand you back to Fenugreek.
20:16 So the point here is that we need a more aggressive offensive strategy even as part of our defensive
20:24 posture.
20:24 To tell you any more would be tedious.
20:28 I would have to name the 10 phenomena which I don't think it's worth...
20:31 No, no, sir, absolutely.
20:33 You have hit the nail on the head with how you, you know, in your, stressing this point
20:42 again, the assertiveness of the government, you know, in policy and not have, you know,
20:54 statements being repeated that, "Oh, China has not taken an inch of our territory."
20:59 What's the benefit?
21:01 Right from 2020 they have not budged from whatever they took.
21:05 And now finally what more we have to be very, very, you know, focused on is cyber, the cyber
21:16 warfare, espionage, psychological warfare, covert operations, artificial intelligence
21:26 and propaganda.
21:27 These are what we must use in very good measure against China because China is going to be
21:37 fighting us in every other way except bullets, which they are very shy of.
21:45 Sir, your book is, I recommend, should be read very widely.
21:51 And it's, thank you very much for bringing out these points.
21:58 Maybe we will be able to meet again for once I have the pleasure of reviewing the book.
22:07 Thank you very much, sir.
22:09 All the best.
22:10 Thank you very much, Kondal.
22:12 That it's been an honor and a pleasure to speak to you and to your viewers on South
22:17 Asia Monitor, SAM, representative of the SAM discussions.
22:22 Right.
22:23 Thank you.
22:23 Thank you very much indeed.