OP Parakram, launched in the wake of the
December 13, 2001 terrorist attack by Kashmiri militants on India’s Parliament,
was the first full-scale military mobilisation against Pakistan since the 1971
India-Pakistan war. It began on December 19, 2001 and was completed by January
13, 2002. It finally ended on October 16, 2002 when India’s Cabinet Committee
on National Security (CCNS) belatedly recognised that the law of diminishing
returns had been operative for many months already, and in a face-saving move, the
CCNS declared that India’s mobilised military personnel were being
‘strategically relocated’, and constant vigil would be maintained.
In the aftermath of OP Parakram—hailed
as being India’s first venture in offensive defence—several well-thought-out
evaluations (see http://ipcs.org/seminar/indo-pak/coercive-diplomacy-operation-parakram-an-evaluation-577.html & http://ipcs.org/seminar/indo-pak/operation-parakram-670.html) concluded that
the full-scale military mobilisation was a total disaster and uncalled for due
to India’s failure to think through the end-game, due to lack of political will,
due to the inability to calibrate coercion, due to the lack of
politico-military synergy, and due to the absence of an exit strategy, all of
which resulted in the futile threat of war being made to persist for a period
long beyond its relevance. The operation emphatically illustrated the fact that
India was not in a position to overwhelm Pakistan through exercises in coercive
diplomacy, and that India’s capability of engaging in coercive diplomacy was a
myth and is not India’s cup-of-tea (as she then lacked the three essential
components required, namely, i) political will, ii) war preparedness, and iii)
strategic vision), and this still remains so, since India lacks the essential
‘killer instinct’ to carry out such tasks, as the facts will reveal in the
following narrative. It will also disclose that India’s military plans for
undertaking a successful short duration, limited war under the nuclear
threshold through punitive action and surgical strikes in January 2002, and an
all-out war in June 2002, have eventually turned out to be nothing but
voluminous disinformation.
During the CCNS meeting on December 19,
2001 in which the three armed services chiefs (COAS Gen Sundarajan ‘Paddy’
Padmanabhan, CAS Anil Yeshwant Tipnis and CNS Admiral Sushil Kumar) attended,
none of them were even consulted about the available military options.
Furthermore, the verbal order for full tri-services mobilisation was given NOT
by the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee (who was silent throughout the meeting),
but by his alter-ego, Brajesh Mishra, the then National Security Adviser &
Principal Secretary to the PM. When the armed services chiefs asked Mishra what
exactly were the higher directions of war (i.e. what was to be achieved, in
what kind of time-frame) and what would be the rules of engagement (ROE) on
land, at sea and in the air, they were blandly told “wo sab baadmein bataaenge” (all that will be revealed later). While
the service chiefs clearly found this to be totally bizarre, they decided not
to question the CCNS’ decision, hoping that by the time mobilisation was almost
80% complete (within the next fortnight), the higher directions of war and
related ROEs would be clearly spelt out in writing. This, as we all now know
never happened, since the NDA government of the day never had the stomach for
either limited high-intensity conflict or for full-scale hostilities against
Pakistan. Instead, it has been falsely propagated—thanks to disingenuous
political naivety—that international pressure, especially the US, had dissuaded
the NDA government from initiating hostilities against Pakistan. Yet another piece
of disinformation was put out on February 17, 2003 by none other than the then
President of India, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, who stated this in Parliament: “After
the December 13, 2001 attack on our Parliament by Pakistan-based terrorists, we
were constrained to deploy our troops along the international border. This
decision achieved its purpose by showing both our firmness and our self-restraint
in dealing with our hostile neighbour”.
The truth, however, is absolutely devastating,
and it clearly emerges from the book “No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in
Washington” by former US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State
Dr Condoleezza Rice, who wrote that back in early January 2002 it was Brajesh
Mishra who was pleading with Dr Rice to do something, anything, that would
subdue the ‘for-war lobby’ that was gaining strength within India (meaning the
NDA government-in-power never wanted to go to war with Pakistan). According to
Dr Rice’s recollections, the US by early January 2002 had already been resigned
to a war between India and Pakistan when Brajesh Mishra frantically called her
for help. “I cannot constraint the war lobby here without some help,” he had
said. This led the then US President George Bush Jr to speak with Pakistan’s
President-cum-COAS Gen Pervez Musharraf to persuade him to make the statement
on January 12, 2002 that Pakistan’s soil would not be allowed to be used by
terrorists (an ashen-faced Gen Musharraf made this commitment in a nationally
telecast speech), the fig-leaf for India to not start a war. Brajesh Mishra, on
the other hand, had indicated (i.e. lied) back in 2002 that it was because of
India’s successful coercive diplomacy that had forced Gen Musharraf to make the
January 12 statement.
Meanwhile as the military mobilisation
was underway, India’s numerical advantage over Pakistan in main battle tanks
(MBT) and infantry combat vehicles was 1.45:1, while the India-Pakistan
fixed-wing combat aircraft ratio stood at 2.58:1. The ratio between India’s and
Pakistan’s inventories of high-performance combat aircraft—which is a more
telling indicator of the air imbalance than overall numbers—was approximately
3.03:1 in India’s favour. The ratio of India’s to Pakistan’s blue water naval
vessels stood at 3.47:1. However, the Indian Army’s (IA) ineptness and its
inability to wage sequential, estimates-based warfare (thanks to its doctrinal
slumber, which prevailed even after OP Vijay in mid-1999) became evident in late
December 2011 when the then GOC-in-C of the IA’s HQ Northern Command, Lt Gen R
K Nanavaty, clearly told Army HQ that his Command was not in a position to go
to war and required more preparatory time, as it was suffering from critical shortages
of equipment, stores and spares. There were several other shortages, which, if
not overcome, would have made the IA a sitting duck in case the Pakistan Army
went on the offensive. Take, for instance, the import of 26,000 rounds of 125mm
ammunition worth US$27.17 million (Rs 116.83 crore) for T-72M1 MBTs that was
approved by India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) in June 1999 from Israel Military
Industries Ltd. Though procurement action for this contract had been initiated
in August 1997 and user-trials of the ammunition had been conducted a year earlier
in August 1996, contract signature took place only on July 2, 1999 and that too
for the delivery of only 2,800 rounds within two months and another 7,000
within six months (the actual delivery of the first 2,800 rounds, however, took
place only on December 14, 1999). Similar shortages existed in early 2002 for
ammunition like 12.7mm cartridges, plus 130mm and 155mm artillery rounds, which
prevented the IA from even waging a series of contact battles, leave alone
multi-pronged armoured thrusts deep into enemy territory.
The same was the case with the Indian
Navy (IN), whose warship-related spares inventories were down by 50%, thanks to
on-going investigations against corruption involving several spares-supply
procurement plans, due to which the IN’s Directorate of Logistics was
paralysed. To break this logjam, the IN’s then CNS Admiral Madhvendra ‘Madhu’
Singh obtained special clearance from the MoD to authorise the IN’s then Chief
of Naval Materials, Vice Admiral Pramod C Bhasin, to immediately begin placing
bulk orders for warship-related spares worth Rs 250 crores.
By December 24, in
an effort to attain numerical superiority, IA HQ began redeploying to Jammu
nearly two-and-a-half Divisions—elements of 20 Mountain Division, 27 Mountain
Divisions 57 Mountain Division—to the west from the east facing Mainland China.
This was made possible after Brajesh Mishra reportedly briefed Beijing about
India’s so-called coercive diplomacy objectives (i.e. stating that India had no
plans for invading Pakistan), which in turn enabled China to assure India that
in the prevailing geo-strategic environment, China would not openly support
Pakistan. 20 Mountain Division, 27 Mountain Divisions 57 Mountain Division, which
have a dual-tasking role against both China and Pakistan, had never been switched
before for two reasons: A) India had feared that China could open up a military
front during an on-going India-Pakistan war in order to relieve pressure on
Pakistan, and B) these Mountain Divisions from the east would require at least three
months of re-orientation training to face the threat from Pakistan. It was thus
felt that in a war with Pakistan so much preparation time would not be
available, and hence, the dual-tasking role of these Mountain Divisions had
remained largely on paper. OP Parakram, however, provided this opportunity to
the IA and consequently, between January and June 2002, the IA had enough time
for training and re-equipping these formations for an operational role in the
militarily vulnerable Jammu corridor, especially the Shakargarh Bulge.
In late December 2001, while the IA’s
Pivot Corps were ready for battle in 72 to 96 hours from the word ‘go’, the
three strike corps—I ‘Vajra’ Corps (Mathura), II ‘Kharga’ Corps (Ambala) and
XXI ‘Sudarshan Chakra’ Corps (Bhopal)—took 22 days to reach their wartime
locations, following which on January 11, 2002, Gen Padmanabhan publicly
declared that a limited war was a truism and went on to say in a televised
press-conference that “there is scope for a limited conventional war” between
India and Pakistan. However, the US knew very well about the IA’s acute
hardware deficiencies and therefore never expected the IA to go on an all-out
offensive over the next six months (this was precisely the reason why the US
never issued any advisory to its nationals to leave India and Pakistan
immediately, and instead issued such an advisory only in May 2002). Pakistan
was at that time obtaining paid-for overhead recce satellite imagery showing
forward-deployed Indian military dispositions NOT from China (which never has a
SAR-equipped satellite at that time) but from Canada’s RADARSAT-1 SAR-equipped
satellite, owned by RADARSAT International (RSI).
By January 7, 2002, while the IA had no
options to launch offensive operations across the LoC in the snow-bound areas
of Jammu & Kashmir, in the plains of Punjab and Rajasthan the climatic
conditions were ideal for surgical operations backed up by punitive air-strikes
(i.e. high-intensity conventional war with tactically limited objectives).
Despite all this being communicated by Gen Padmanabhan (who by then was also
the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, or COSC) to the CCNS, the Govt
of India (GoI), through the CCNS, never spelt out any war-waging directives and
related ROEs to either Gen Padmanabhan, or to Admiral Madhvendra Singh or to
Air Chief Marshal Srinivasapuram Krishnaswamy. This in turn resulted in the
armed services chiefs being subjected to severe psychological stress, since their
respective theatre and fleet commanders were constantly badgering them for seeking
approvals for activating their OP-PLANs. The IA’s Western Command (HQed in
Chandimandir, Punjab) was then the most important theatre command as far as
Pakistan went and held extensive strike power. II ‘Kharga’ Corps was then the
most important offensive formation (possessing 50% of the IA’s offensive
capabilities) and was tasked to tear through the Thar/Cholistan Desert at/near
Rahimyar Khan and race towards Jacobabad, thereby cutting Pakistan into two.
Lt Gen Kapil Vij, the then GOC of II
‘Kharga’ Corps, was unaware of all that was happening back at Army HQ and the
shenanigans within the civilian corridors of power in Delhi, and therefore
proceeded to unveill the operational art dictating his OP-PLAN on the premise
that the “law of the initial advantage of the aggressor” assumes critical
importance, as it is the aggressor who generally sets the pattern which
operations will take. Since no further operational instructions were emanating
from either HQ Western Command (since IA HQ had not been issued any directives
regarding the higher directions of war and related ROEs from the GoI), Lt Gen
Vij decided to take the initiative with perfectly honourable intentions and by
mid-January 2002 ordered a third of his warfighting armoured and mechanised infantry
formations along with supporting field artillery assets—all located about 150km
away from the international boundary (IB)—to be forward-deployed just 40km away
from the IB, ready for the initial contact battles. The rest of his warfighting
strength (follow-on forces for waging the breakthrough battles), including
operational reserves, were positioned in a three-arrowhead formation along
three probable routes-of-advance (a deployment done just prior to initiating
the offensive). This was immediately picked up by US overhead recce satellites
and was viewed by the US as an escalation, since it violated the India-Pakistan
confidence-building measures (CBM)—formalised in the late 1980s after EX BRASS
TACKS—that called for all land-based warfighting assets (men and material) of
both countries to be kept 10km away from the IB and working boundary (WB),
while the airspace of both countries would be no-fly-zones for combat aircraft
and military helicopters 10km on either side of the IB and WB during peacetime.
Therefore, it was not Pakistan that alerted the US about this, but the US
itself saw all this through its overhead recce satellites and then reportedly confronted
Brajesh Mishra with the evidence and bluntly asked him whether the GoI really
wanted a full-scale war, or did it sincerely want the US to lean over Pakistan
and prevent it from taking the Indian military’s bait, which in turn would
serve to subdue the ‘war-mongerers’ within the GoI and the three armed services.
Consequently, a highly embarrassed Brajesh Mishra, in order to save his face
and credibility in front of the US, allegedly directed the MoD under the then
Defence Minister George Fernandes to force Army HQ to relieve Lt Gen Kapil Vij
of his command of II ‘Kharga’ Corps (he was replaced by his junior Maj Gen
Bhupinder Singh Thakur by January 21, 2002) as proof of Mishra’s ‘sincere’
intentions about averting a full-scale war. Subsequently, the MoD mischievously
began giving off-the-record briefings in which it was said that Lt Gen Vij had either
“gone on leave on personal grounds”, or had been relieved of his command for committing
tactical errors.
Against this backdrop, OP Parakram’s
military aims were changed drastically between mid-February and June 2002.
During this period, the IA remained focussed on how to regain the element of
operational surprise. The initial military aim (of launching surgical AirLand
joint operations backed up by punitive air-strikes against some 75 select
transportation nodes/hubs) no longer looked attractive because Pakistan had
taken adequate counter-measures to neutralise probable Indian land offensives
in both West Punjab and Cholistan. It was therefore decided by IA HQ and Indian
Air Force (IAF) HQ by early February 2002 that India ought to utilise its three
military advantages: its three Strike Corps as against two of the Pakistan
Army’s, the IAF’s edge over the Pakistan Air Force, and the fact that the three
redeployed Mountain Divisions would, from March 2002, be operationally
re-oriented and ready for war.
However, before deciding to formulate
new OP-PLANs, all three armed services chiefs approached the CCNS and asked for
ironclad proof of the capabilities of India’s minimum credible nuclear
deterrent, and consequently, for the very first time in India’s history, approval
was accorded for all three armed services chiefs to be given a series of
no-holds-barred and on-site briefings by both the Dept of Atomic Energy and the
Defence Research & Development Organisation at locations in Trombay and
Hyderabad, which included visual inspections of both the fabricated
weapons-grade plutonium cores and the triggering mechanisms of four types of
nuclear devices—these being fission-based and boosted fission-based unitary
warheads capable of being launched by ballistic missiles or NLOS-BSMs; and fission-based and boosted fission-based
unitary warheads encased within aircraft-launched gravity bombs.
Fully satisfied with such presentations
and briefings, the IA, between mid-March and mid-April 2002, as part of an
audacious theatre-level OP-PLAN (that had never been war-gamed before), had
deployed all its three Strike Corps in the Thar Desert, with the military
thinking being that once the balloon went up, the IA would cross the border
boldly in Thar/Cholistan, and the subsequent series of attrition battles lasting
between four to six weeks would end with India's advantage. This was in
consonance with the IA’s then prevailing warfighting doctrine of strategic
defence with operational-level offensives, which stated that: “The Indian Army
believes in fighting the war in enemy territory. If forced into a war, the aim
of our offensives would be to apply a sledgehammer blow to the enemy”. Thus, the
IA’s newly-formulated warfighting strategy was manoeuvre-and-attrition combined
in the Thar/Cholistan deserts. This strategy, if implemented, would have given
India two advantages: the Pakistan Army’s centre of gravity, which are its two
Strike Corps, would have been destroyed in detail, and land captured in Cholistan
would have yielded some advantage on the negotiating table after the war. It
would also have called Pakistan’s bluff about using nuclear weapons early in a
conventional war with India (contrary to India’s declared retaliatory-strike
policy on nuclear weapons employment, Pakistan has stuck to the attitude of
ambiguity regarding the usage of nuclear weapons, which in turn has led the US
to believe that that a full-scale war between India and Pakistan would easily
escalate into a nuclear exchange, something the IA disagrees with till this
day).
By late April 2002, overhead recce
satellite imagery obtained by India’s Defence Intelligence Agency through
Israel had detected the movement of a convoy of 15 TELs of the Chinese People’s
Liberation Army’s 2nd Artillery Corps and escorted by a Motorised
Infantry Brigade, which had moved out of storage areas located within the
Chengdu Military Region’s Sivhuan province, and was headed westwards towards
the Tibet Autonomous Region. Persistent surveillance of this convoy’s movement
revealed that it had entered Pakistan through the Northern Areas. By late May
2002, while Gen Musharraf on one hand said that Pakistan could not be expected
to fight India with both its hands tied, Gen Padmanabhan on the other hand
stated that he had credible reports about Pakistan’s possession of tactical
nuclear weapons (TNW) that are optimised for use against hostile battlefield
formations, are limited in their destructive power, have localised radioactive
fallout, and which do not inflict widespread devastation upon areas that are
thickly populated with civilians. It is widely believed that it was this news
about the arrival in Pakistan of China-supplied TNWs that deterred the NDA
government from issuing politico-military directives to the three armed
services chiefs for execution even after the May 14, 2002 terrorist attack that
killed 34 Indian soldiers and their relatives near Jammu. The US, on the other
hand, in an unprecedented act, decided to pull out more than 60,000 US citizens
from India in mid-May 2002, prompting several other countries and the United
Nations to do the same.
By June 9, 2002 the element of surprise
was lost and in operational terms, the continued deployment of the IA along the
IB and WB was reduced to a futile effort. By late July 2002, troops of the
Pakistan Army had ventured into Point 3260, a relatively low feature having
little tactical significance in the Gurez-Machal sector in Jammu & Kashmir,
and had occupied Loonda Post, located approximately 800 metres inside India’s
side of the Line of Control and overlooking the Neelam Valley in the Northern
Areas. The intruders were spotted on July 26, following which a joint IA-IAF
operation was launched on August 2 to evict them. In this operation, 12 IAF
combat aircraft participated, of which four were Mirage 2000s that dropped
laser-guided bombs over Loonda Post as part of actions taken to successfully
evict the intruders.
It was only in August 2002 that the CCNS
directed the COAS-cum-Chairman of COSC to draft a directive to extricate the
three armed forces from the imbroglio. Therefore, put into perspective,
ordering full mobilisation of the three armed services was a knee-jerk reaction
of the NDA government in the vain hope that Pakistan would get coerced.
Instead, here was a government which, instead of coercing, got coerced, while
the three armed services got fully mobilised without even knowing what they
were supposed to do and achieve. Throughout the 10-month period of OP Parakram,
the NDA government kept the three armed services on the fringes of national
security policy-making, since neither understood one another. All this,
obviously, greatly pissed off everyone, especially Gen Padmanabhan, who
subsequently aired his views in public on November 9, 2002, which can be read
at:
The world would well have bought the NDA
government’s ‘coercive diplomacy’ argument as a well-meaning one had Mishra
from the very outset taken the three armed service chiefs into confidence and
stated that an all-out war as never an option meant to be exercised. Instead,
the idea was just to raise a lot of dust, heat and noise throughout the IB, WB
and LoC, all of which would compel the international community to ratchet up
the heat on Pakistan. If only all this had been communicated by Mishra to the
three armed services chiefs on December 19, 2001, then everyone would have been
on the same page, the IA’s, IAF’s and IN’s top-brass would not have been
required to persistently try to refine their respective war-plans (especially
the Army’s audacious deployment of all its three Strike Corps in the Thar
Desert), and consequently Beijing would not have felt the urgent need to send a
detachment of the 2nd Artillery Corps equipped with TNWs to
Pakistan. Instead, what happened was that the NDA government kept India’s armed
forces insulated from the national security decision-making loop, which
consequently resulted in the IA upping the ante by trying to retain the
operational initiative between March and May 2002, which in turn compelled
China to not trust India’s earlier word (about not forcing an all-out war on
Pakistan) and rush to Pakistan’s assistance in a last-ditch effort to prevent
both India and Pakistan from dangerously climbing the escalatory ladder to war
any further. In China’s eyes, therefore, India could not, once again, be
trusted to keep her word. The consequences of such a folly on India’s part are
bound to be enormous.
If such a travesty of national security could not be further imagined, one had
only to wait for what transpired within the corridors of power in Delhi in the
immediate aftermath of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Here’s what
reportedly transpired, based on the recollections of one of the armed services
chiefs who was a first-hand witness to all the proceedings. Between November 26
and 29, 2008 as the 10 Pakistan-origin terrorists were creating mayhem in Mumbai,
the GoI was in a tailspin, with the political decision-makers not bothering to
contact the three armed services chiefs through the offices of the COSC, and
the three armed services chiefs in turn not bothering to consult one another,
leave alone approach the PMO or the then National Security Adviser (NSA) Mayankote
Kelath Narayanan through the COSC channel. It was only on November 30 that
Narayanan called the three armed services chiefs for a meeting with Prime
Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, in which the Director of IB and the Secretary of R
& AW were—strangely—not present. The mood in the PMO was tense and all
those present agreed that Pakistan should not be allowed to go unpunished for
this audacious act of terrorism. When asked for his opinion, the then COAS, Gen
Deepak Kapoor, suggested that long-range artillery fire assaults and raids by special
operations forces across the LoC be conducted. The IAF’s CAS, Air Chief Marshal
Fali Homi Major, suggested that punitive air-strikes be conducted inside
Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir/Azad Kashmir against terrorist camps, to which Gen Kapoor
added that this would certainly lead to full-scale war and the same would have
happened had the IAF crossed the LoC in mid-1999 during OP Safed Sagar. There
was disagreement between the COAS and CAS over whether the Pakistan Army would
climb the escalatory ladder if the IAF launched a few punitive air-strikes
across the LoC. The then CNS, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, kept his views to himself
since he was neither asked much nor did he offer any advice. There was
absolutely no talk about the prevailing nuclear balance-of-power, and most of
the time was spent on debating the most insane issue: Pakistan’s motives behind
the 26/11 terror carnage (NSA Narayanan reportedly asked—rather innocently—whether
Pakistan would stop sponsoring further spectacular terror attacks in future if
the Indian Army shelved its ‘Cold Start’ warfighting doctrine). The overarching
sense, it seemed, was to explore retaliatory military options that would not
lead to full-scale war. As none existed, the meeting concluded after the PM
told the three armed services chiefs to prepare for war. However, Gen Kapoor
was explicitly told by NSA Narayanan not to recall any Army personnel from
leave nor move any warfighting formations to their forward staging areas till
further orders, as this would surely alert Pakistan. On December 1, 2008, Minister
of Defence, Arackaparambil Kurien Antony, held a meeting with the three
armed services chiefs and senior bureaucrats of the MoD to discuss a single
point: the need to procure on a fast-track basis all the critical war-waging hardware
required by the three armed services. Thereafter, nothing else happened for a
week and the three services chiefs never heard anything from the PMO during
this period, after which NSA Narayanan informed them that India would not
initiate any form of military campaign against Pakistan. Therefore, the only
two conclusions of this single meeting between the PM and the three armed
services chiefs are that A) no one in India’s officialdom wanted war and all of
them hoped that the crisis would blow over quickly, and B) no one wanted to
talk about the nuclear weapons factor, as there are still several unresolved
issues. The three armed services sought to make use of this crisis to make
emergency purchases of critical military hardware (something the IA never quite
seems able to do in peacetime).
Few countries would have let 164 people
die in vain as India did after 26/11 without seeking retribution for the
aggressor. The terror strikes of 26/11, which had the rest of the world worried
about another military showdown between two traditional rivals, thus became a
non-event for India and her armed forces. Regrettably, nothing has changed
since then, and till this day the three armed services are condemned to
second-guessing the intentions of the country’s civilian political masters and
their inability to have the stomach for going to war with India’s adversaries
should the need ever arise. Maybe that is why till this day, there does not
exist any formalised or codified national warfighting doctrine, and consequently
none of India’s three armed services have clear-cut and fully integrated OP-PLANS
and related rules of engagement. Therefore, Cold Start, Pro-Active Strategy, Two-Front War and
Transformation all remain mere notional/still-born concepts.
+&+Bharani+manportable+tactical+air-defence+radars+in+Demchok.jpg)
