Reconstructing the IPKF disaster, piece by poignant piece, brought me
face to face with rare courage —and inexcusable complacence.
India's unexpected war in Sri Lanka caught me on the wrong foot by 12,000
km. I was still finishing the last month of my sabbatical year in Washington DC
when the fighting broke out. And as I returned home, the media was full of
coverage, often loaded, of the IPKF disaster in Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula.
Loaded because the Bofors scandal, and many other missteps, already had Rajiv
Gandhi under widespread attack. Sri Lanka was therefore seen as
"babalog" political stupidity, rather than military incompetence. In
the process, we were guilty of both insensitivity to Indian soldiers, their
courage and sacrifice, and conveniently overlooking the complacence of our
higher commanders. Now, this was obviously not a war we were going to ever lose
— though my friend Hardeep Puri, who was by then our first secretary in Colombo
under J.N. "Mani" Dixit, tells you, sort of semi-lightheartedly, that
there was one evening so tense that it sounded as if Palaly (Jaffna airbase and
the IPKF's 54 Infantry Division HQ) was going to fall. Hardeep had just seen
the truce agreement he had so painstakingly drafted and signed with Mahattaya
(Madras Cafe's Mallaya) fall apart.
It is creditable how much of that initial messiness Shoojit Sircar has got
accurately. The fact that early IPKF patrols were routinely ambushed, pinned
down and annihilated. How its officers were picked out by snipers. How the LTTE
seemed to have inside information on all IPKF moves (more about this a little
later). The most creditable footage, however fleeting and sensitively handled,
is of the Tigers ransacking Indian soldiers' bodies and picking weapons,
souvenirs and trophies from them. Note, particularly, a boyish Sikh soldier
sitting, frozen in rigor mortis. That quality of research you didn't expect
from a mainstream Indian filmmaker, and we will shortly explain why.
On my return to India, I was deeply saddened — even offended — by the
celebratory coverage of the war. Cover pictures of Indian soldiers' bodies,
close-ups of Tigers displaying caps, identity cards, boots of dead Indian
soldiers. You had never seen an Indian war covered like that, and you haven't
since. Of course, I also felt rotten having missed out on the big story which,
for the magazine, was covered by my friend and colleague Anita Pratap, who
later worked for Time and CNN. She believes that Nargis Fakhri's Jaya was
styled after her, and has sent emails to her old friends saying so. The
photographer accompanying her, Shyam Tekwani, was my frequent travelling
partner in Sri Lanka subsequently, and now teaches at the Asia Pacific Centre
for Security Studies, Hawaii. I did get into many arguments in our newsroom on
how we had covered the story and why it was necessary to now reconstruct what
exactly had gone wrong, and the lessons learnt, etc. My reward was being
assigned that story now. And in the third week of December, 1987, I landed in
Colombo, having been briefed by Gen Sundarji, his DGMO Lt Gen (later army
chief) Bipin Chandra Joshi, and his staff.
Since association by events is sometimes the safest way to remember dates,
particularly if you do not maintain elaborate notebooks — in my case, in fact,
hardly, and notoriously the sketchiest ones, if at all — I can tell you I was
on way to Jaffna from Colombo in a rented Mitsubishi Lancer on December 24 and
had just crossed Vavuniya when everything came to a standstill. Angry, grieving
mobs blocked the streets. MGR had just died — that's how I know the precise
date — and a bandh had been declared by Tamils. I couldn't go forward or back,
knew no Tamil, had no food or shelter, and you know how early the winter sun
sets that far in the east. But I was lucky again, as an IPKF patrol of Maratha
Light Infantry Regiment passed by and its leader, then a very young Captain
C.K. Menon, offered me shelter in his camp. We connected decades later at the
ITC Grand Central Hotel in Mumbai, where he was serving in a senior capacity,
having left the army as a colonel (he has moved up the ladder in ITC hotels
now). From him and his colleagues that night, in that small camp in the danger
zone, I heard my first stories of the ordeal Indian soldiers had just been
through. True enough, after absorbing the initial setbacks, they had taken and
secured the entire Jaffna peninsula. But the price had been a shocker: 350
killed and 1,100 wounded in this month-long charge. The casualty rate, at 7 per
cent of all troops involved, was twice as high as in our wars against Pakistan.
One of the five brigades that assaulted Jaffna, the 41st, which was airlifted
on October 17 and launched straight on the coastal road axis leading to Jaffna
Fort (see sketch), had 272 casualties, or 17 per cent of its strength. The 72nd
also suffered heavy casualties, including its deputy brigade commander, Col
D.S. Saraon. The heavily armoured BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle he was riding
was blown up by a 200-kg mine. The 13.2-tonne vehicle was tossed more than 30
feet and its doors, each weighing more than 250 kg, were found more than a
hundred yards away. Another illustrious battalion, 4/5 Gurkhas, had its
commandant and all but one of its majors killed one afternoon. This is not a
war anybody had expected and, regrettably, prepared to fight. I wrote a
five-page reconstruction and analysis headlined 'In a rush to vanquish' (India
Today, January 31, 1988).
T-72 TANKS, Mi-25 helicopter gunships had come without ammunition,
infantry had been airlifted from places as far as Gwalior and thrown into
battle without even three hours of familiarisation. There is no excuse for this
kind of complacence. The IPKF's first casualties were five soldiers from its
finest unit, the paracommandos. Waylaid by the LTTE while casually going to
collect provisions on October 8, they were burnt in public with tyres thrown
around their necks. That disastrous beginning spilled over into the most talked
about setback then: the combined, heli-dropped paracommando and infantry raid
(October 11) on the Jaffna University campus where Prabhakaran and his top
aides were living. It went wrong from the word go. Only two-thirds of the
commandos (10 Paracommando) could be landed and the infantry company (13 Sikh
Light Infantry), which was to secure the landing ground, the football field
from where IPKF helicopters used to routinely pick up LTTE commanders for
talks, failed to fetch up, and the special assault forces contingent was
reduced to fighting a battle for survival instead. As for Sikh LI, only a
platoon could be landed, and in the wrong playground, several lanes of
buildings away. The rest of the company could not land as helicopters came
under medium machine gun fire. The platoon, led by Major Birendra Singh, a
close relation of diplomat-politician K. Natwar Singh, was encircled and wiped
out after a valiant fight. Only one of the 30, Sepoy Gora Singh, survived, and
was taken prisoner by the LTTE. It is believed Prabhakaran displayed him to his
fighters, kicked him in public and said, let him go, so he will tell them not
to fight us again. Gora Singh, however, brought back the story of one of the
Indian army's most poignant battles ever, where, out of ammunition, the last
three survivors even carried out a final, suicidal bayonet charge. The LTTE
looted and stripped all the bodies, piled them in the nearby Nagaraja Vihar
Temple on public display, and then cremated them by simply throwing a barrel of
oil over them. That's why it is so revolting now to see Tamil Nadu politicians
feeling so sorry for the Tigers.
And this is why we had said earlier that Madras Cafe's footage of the first
battles, along with the young Sikh soldier (remember the Sikh LI platoon) in
rigor mortis and the LTTE boys plundering the bodies, was so remarkable. It was
the first instance of Indian filmmakers challenging the old Haqeeqat-Hindustan
ki Kasam-Border notion of Indian war cinema. I walked around that ground weeks
later and still found shreds of the Sikhs' uniforms. In the nearby building,
there was more evidence of the sickening plunder of those bodies: pieces of
Sikh LI battle fatigues, cross-belts, boots, water bottles, epaulettes, all
mixed with .50 mg MMG shells, sometimes ankle-deep. That tells you how much
fire that one lost platoon withstood in the course of those valiant 12 hours.
The commandos, separated in the football ground, had done a little better,
with six killed and nine wounded. They were finally rescued in an audacious and
brilliantly innovative operation by their commanding officer, Lt Col Dalbir
Singh, covered by three T-72 tanks of 65 Armoured Regiment. Since by now it was
known that the Tigers had mined all approaches, Major Anil Kaul, the tank
commander (his father had first raised this regiment), remembered a railway
line skirting the campus and decided to drive the tanks on the rail tracks
instead, for once surprising the LTTE. But his own tank was hit on the turret
by an RPG shell (or an MMG burst) and he lost his eye and hand as he bravely
peeped out to navigate. His inspired troops put him on morphine, bashed on, and
ensured that heroic rescue of the commandos. The Col Kaul with an eye-patch
that you see on your TV channels, usually furious over some military issue or
the other, and who once famously demanded that I be hanged upside down from a
tree and flogged (after our story on the army movements on the night of January
16, 2012, that spooked Raisina Hill), is the same valiant cavalry man.
Pardon me for leap-frogging the calendar, but Col Kaul's latter day anger
apart, in Sri Lanka I got nothing but large-hearted access, affection and
hospitality from the Indian army. I did have only one tough scrap, though well
meaning. This was at Batticaloa in September 1989, where, after a briefing and
lunch with the GOC of 57 Mountain Division there, I was stepping out to go to
the city. As Tekwani and I came out of the general's ops room, we found three
army trucks and a Jeep, machine guns mounted, tarpaulins ripped and
battle-ready Sikh soldiers spilling over from each one. "This is your
escort," said the general. We protested that we were safest as
journalists, and going out with such a convoy would endanger our lives and the
soldiers', as the LTTE may just presume we were some Indian VIPs. The argument
became heated. And the irritated general gave up on us, saying, "All
right, then you are on your own, and I am taking the chopper to an outpost.
Then, if something happens to you in this area, at least I will not be
responsible." But that "you are being stupid anyway". He was, of
course, speaking from sincere concern. He was a wonderful soldier and his name
is Maj Gen Ashok Mehta, who is now one of your more sensible and articulate TV
generals. Yet another aside: he subsequently married prominent political journalist
Aditi Phadnis. I can make a disclosure now, the original tip-off on Tamil rebel
training camps in India, that led to the first story of March 1984, had come
from Aditi's mother, Urmila, a highly respected international affairs professor
at JNU. Now don't say that reporters' stories are filled with digressions.
Shoojit's film suggests that the LTTE knew all about IPKF moves because some
traitor was leaking to them. He is only halfway right. There were no traitors,
but the LTTE knew for sure. As the IPKF later discovered, the LTTE's
communications, electronics and eavesdropping ability was on par with modern
armies. An army College of Combat team later researched the disasters,
particularly at Jaffna University, and concluded that the Tigers had intercepted
the IPKF wireless on that assault night. Even the range and height settings of
their machine guns were perfect when the helicopters arrived.
