Monday, August 3, 2009

Strategic Blunders of India Niranjan Singh Malik - Vijayvaani.com

  • Vijayvaani.com

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    • Strategic Blunders of India        Niranjan Singh Malik
    • Pandit Nehru was the visionary who set us on this course of neglect of the armed forces. His vision of security was based on the flawed principle of Ahimsa, perhaps reinforced by an erroneous understanding of the freedom struggle, Congress having taken all the credit for it by Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. It failed to take into account the role of the Azad Hind Fauj and Netaji Subhash Bose’s relentless struggle for India’s freedom. 
    • This was to deny the greatest son of India his role in forcing the British to quit. The court martial of three officers of the Azad Hind Fauj, Col Shah Nawaz, Maj Prem Sehgal and Capt Gurbax Dhillon at Red Fort in 1945-46 ignited the nation and made the Indian Army uneasy.  Naval mutiny at Bombay and various mutinies by small units at various military stations, such as Karachi, Jabalpur, and daily fisticuffs in Officers messes and verbal duals between British and Indian officers made the British uncomfortable.
    • The Intelligence input was that if anything happened to the three INA officers under court martial, India would erupt and not a single British man or woman would escape to England.  The result was a hasty decision to leave India, even advancing the date of transfer of power from 30 June 1948 to 15 August 1947. 
    • The new Indian leadership, instead of strengthening the Indian Armed forces, decided to cut them to size, both in strength and standing. The Army’s pay packet was reduced by one-third. Its strength was brought down to 150,000 and later to 75,000 only, as Pandit Nehru told Parliament, ‘we are a peace loving nation, we do not need a large standing army, police will do the job.’
    • But the most shameful act was the acceptance of ceasefire, unilaterally declared by the Chinese, and not preparing to fight back. After all, nations suffer tactical reverses, but they do not necessarily become strategic defeats.

    • Unless a country is militarily strong, no one will respect it, and all economic gains will be for someone else to enjoy. Let us not repeat the story of the past seven hundred years.


      Lt. Gen. N.S. Malik, PVSM, is former Deputy Chief of Army Staff