These tales of bravery of the Indian army would have been better with less bias and more accuracy

The first casualty of war, they say, is truth. It is impossible to find what really happened in the fog of war. In a country such as India, which does not have a functional declassification policy, it is even harder to discern fact from fiction and the unvarnished truth from personal memory.

But how do you react to a stunning confession that an Indian Army unit was involved in killing an unarmed woman and a two-year-old child in war, mentioned in passing, and then quickly buried in the overall narrative? Papering over what would be an act that could be tantamount to a war crime, is just one of the many shortcomings in Sushant Singh’s Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military.

The book is an attempt to capture important chapters of India’s post-independent history, but ends up telling tales that are disappointingly short on addressing the fog and complexity of war. Instead, it does a great disservice to the subject at hand.

Missing episodes

India’s wars have been written about, but its military adventures in distant lands is less known. Years ago, I was introduced to the story of Captain Gulbachan Singh Salaria, India’s only posthumous Param Vir Chakra awardee, who was killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on a UN mission that we know nearly nothing about. His history has been largely forgotten.

India’s military past, even through the years when Indians fought as part of the allied forces across the globe in the first and second world wars, contain nuggets essential to its past and its future. Unfortunately, the lack of institutional memories and the absence of efforts to document these nuggets have ensured that the time has buried much of its history.

Recently, Juggernaut published the story of India’s military operation, Op Cactus, an effort to rescue the beleaguered President of the Maldives when mercenaries invaded the island-nation. Also authored by Singh, a former military engineer who left the army after 20 years of pensionable service to become a journalist, it provided a racy read on a long forgotten military engagement.

That tale has now been coupled with two others, one of which has been written about extensively in the past, while the other one has been largely ignored. The stories are written like thrillers, and aimed at the mass market. In some ways, they are the version of the military quickie, developed by authors such as Andy McNab, a British Special Forces veteran who built a second career after his autobiographical book Bravo Two Zero, about an SAS patrol that was lost in Iraq, became a major success.

A biased tale

Singh’s tales, though told with a lot of details, suffer from the bias of the handful of protagonists he has spoken to. Make no mistake – this is an important work and adds to the literature that is not easily available. But readers of military history looking for a factual and well-researched book will be disappointed. This one seems to be written more to sell than to inform.

For instance, the story of the ill-fated commando raid on the LTTE leadership in Jaffna, in October 1987 is one of the most extensively reported and written accounts in modern Indian military history. Ever since the first reports appeared in India Today, the raid has been detailed, debated and discussed in books, memoirs and blogs. However, Singh’s re-telling suffers from the bias of the one participant he quotes extensively. In fact, it is even factually incorrect in some parts.

Indeed, the entire tale is centred around Major Sheonan Singh, who was a military engineer, just like the author. However, Major Singh volunteered for the Special Forces and was inducted into 10 (Para) Commando just before the unit moved to Sri Lanka. As a result, while Sheonan was part of the Jaffna raid, he was not the team commander.

Strangely, Rajeev Nair, a major at the time, who was the team commander and led the operation, gets only passing mention. This is unfortunate, because he must have played a critical role in Major Singh’s citation, which eventually led to a Vir Chakra. Nair’s contribution as the team commander is dismissed in favour of Sheonan’s exploits, and the tale reads like a tribute to one man, when the fact is that many people played a key role in that operation.

The role played by Lt Col Dalvir Singh, the commanding officer of 10 Para (Commando), is also largely absent. Dalvir Singh retired as a Major General and confirmed to me once again that Major Rajeev Nair was the team commander. Significantly, Dalvir also played a key role in extricating the men who were trapped behind enemy lines.

Dalvir Singh also won a Vir Chakra. Battling attacks of asthma, he fought through the LTTE defences and brought his men out. The role played by a local tank commander, Major Anil Kaul, is also largely missing, as is the story of the IAF helicopter pilots who faced withering fire to land the Indian troops. These are important aspects of one of the most gallant actions of the Indian Army, but has been largely ignored in this story.

Inaccuracies

The third tale, of an operation carried out by Indian Special Forces in Sierra Leone, is sketchy and fails to capture the significance of the operation. It is also surprising that the author, despite serving 20 years in the army, gets a basic fact wrong. He mentions that the Special Forces wear their “Balidan” badge on the left pocket (page 170) but the fact is that as per army regulations, it is worn on the right breast pocket.

This may sound insignificant, but the author draws on such observations to build his tale. The bias of the small number of protagonists the author has spoken to and the inaccuracies that have crept in do disservice to the book and the tales it attempts to record for posterity.

Having served in the military for two decades, Sushant Singh had access to important material, and also makes a commendable effort to track down some of the key players of the stories he tells. But the book fails to bring in the objectivity that is essential to any re-telling of history. The war stories captured by Cornelius Ryan, one of the greatest war correspondents of his time, resulted in meticulously researched page-turners that have stood the test of time and competing narratives for decades. Sadly, the current book is a missed opportunity, with great but unfulfilled promise.

Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military, Sushant Singh, Juggernaut Books.