With the BJP leadership tom-tomming their hawkish national security credentials by repeatedly invoking the 28/29 September 2016 ‘surgical strike’, former Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, in an interview on 2 May to Hindustan Times, asserted that “multiple surgical strikes took place during our tenure too. For us, military operations were meant for strategic deterrence, and giving a befitting reply to anti-India forces, than to be used for vote garnering exercises.”
Congress spokesperson Rajeev Shukla details six instances of the ‘surgical strikes’:
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BJP MP, Colonel Rajyavardhan Rathore (retd), countered, “We were in Army, we know what happened”. Minister General VK Singh (retd) added, “Will you please let me know which ‘so-called surgical strike’ are you attributing to my tenure as COAS?” (Army Chief from March 2010 to May 2012).
The following day, i.e., 4 May, Lt General DS Hooda (retd), who was the former Army Commander Northern Command (1 June 2014 - 30 November 2016), the main architect of the September 2016 ‘surgical strikes’, told the media that “Cross-border armed operations against terrorists were carried out even before the current dispensation led by PM Narendra Modi ... by the Indian Army across the Line of Control (LoC).”
With a war of words erupting over ‘surgical strikes’, and the latter emerging as a major election narrative, there is perhaps a need to examine what really has been happening – and that examination begins with understanding the semantics around the term ‘surgical strike’.
Was this the first trans-LoC raid by the Indian Army? The clear answer is NO.
Since the 1949 ceasefire, fire-fights, cross-border raids and artillery duels across the LoC have been the norm, as the LoC is not akin to an international border. This activity has seen spikes (after the 1971 war; 1984 occupation of heights at Siachen by India; 1988, commencement of terrorism in Kashmir; and after the 1999 Kargil conflict), as well as pauses (after the November 2003 ceasefire).
Given the need to prevent loss of territory, the close proximity of opposing forces and the troop densities on both sides, local duels have been a normal feature, with every action creating a ‘revenge cycle’. The trans-LoC actions of 1998, 2000, 2011, 2013, and many more, stand documented. Such fighting is the reason that a posting on the LoC is deemed as an operational deployment.
Former 15 Corps GOC Lieutenant-General Syed Ata Hasnain, is on record stating that such raids were ‘routine’. So is former chief, General Bikram Singh (retd) – commenting on the 2013 beheading of L/Nk Hemraj, he said that “India has avenged the murders of its soldiers along the Line of Control (LoC) by the Pakistani army last year”. As is Lt General HS Panag, former Northern Army commander: "We have done such operations on the Line of Control earlier also. And these are all local and tactical-level operations. It happens quite regularly. But this time we declared it."
The answer is both yes and no. They aren’t lying – but they also aren’t telling the truth – and are in fact, indulging in semantics and wordplay for political expediency.
The incumbent government however – eager to burnish its hawkish image – labelled the September 2016 trans-LoC raids as ‘surgical strikes’, in order to showcase that it is doing something really, really different from past governments.
And in a country where knowledge of military matters in the civil domain is extremely limited, few are able to deduce that in reality, trans-LoC raids and ‘surgical strikes’ are one and the same thing.
Importantly, there were operational and geopolitical reasons as to why the previous governments did not publicise trans-LoC raids:
Post-Independence, the fighting in the state of J&K had ended after both India and Pakistan agreed (in 1949) to withdraw all troops, behind a mutually agreed Ceasefire Line (CFL). The 1965 Indo-Pak War was unable to cause a change in this status on account of the dynamics of the Cold War and prevalent geopolitical circumstances.
After the 1971 Indo-Pak War, with East Pakistan being hived off from Pakistan, former Pakistani PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, desperate to get back the 90,000 POWs, agreed (July 1972, Shimla Agreement) to change the nomenclature of the CFL to LoC, implying that it was no longer created by war – but was a boundary that existed through mapped and recorded acquiescence of both sides.
During the 1999 Kargil Conflict, the stance of the international community was based around this precise understanding – Pakistan has illegally occupied what is deemed as Indian territory, and hence, must vacate its aggression. Left unsaid was its premise that the same logic applied equally to India.
Thus, for the BJP to say that there were no ‘surgical strikes’ in the past, deeply demeans the stellar contribution of thousands of veterans who participated in previous trans-LoC raids, intense firefights and artillery duels.
Some peers, comrades and subordinates died; many were injured; the others risked everything going across. When a soldier dies, he is reduced to a file in the Ministry of Defence, and his family is bereft of a husband, father, brother. And yet, we continue to see politically expedient statements that impinge on the legacy of laudable operational deeds in the annals of the Indian Army’s history – and the past contribution of our soldiers.
(Kuldip Singh is a retired Brigadier from the Indian Army. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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