Opinion How rude reality set in at Thagla

Who was to succeed Umrao Singh was the next question. Thapar recommended Lt Gen “Sam” Manekshaw,and received a mouthful from an enraged defence minister. Strangely,the army chief seemed not to be aware that Sam was Menon’s bete noire. Menon’s own choice was Lt Gen B.M. Kaul,his favourite,then serving as the Chief of General Staff (CGS) at the army headquarters. Another source of Kaul’s immense influence was he was distantly related to the prime minister. As the future trajectory of tragic events cruelly showed,Kaul’s choice as the battlefield commander was a mistake of monumental proportions — for the country as well as for himself. It is worth adding that Kaul’s appointment in 1959 as the CGS by superseding some of his seniors was one of the reasons for the row between Menon and Gen K.S. Thimayya,arguably India’s most popular army chief so far.

This said,let me not be unfair to Kaul and ignore his many qualities. He was an excellent,indeed outstanding,military bureaucrat. He was also a man of phenomenal energy,drive and dynamism,exceeded only by his ambition. No matter how difficult the task assigned to him,his response was “can do”. Actually,he tended to “overdo” it. Unfortunately,he had hardly any combat experience and this turned out to be a fatal flaw.

Characteristically,Kaul left to assume his new responsibility the very next day after making sure that this landmark in his career would be reported adequately in both The Times of India and The Statesman. The Times’ story was under the byline of G. K. Reddy (though Kaul had personally tipped off Prem Bhatia,then the paper’s resident editor and later Delhi editor of Indian Express). I wrote the item in the Statesman on the basis of information conveyed by a trusted aide of Kaul.

Both Reddy and I made one mistake. We reported that Kaul had been appointed commander of the “task force” formed to evict the Chinese from Thagla. The reality was different,complex and somewhat phony. As the ministry of defence (MoD) clarified,Kaul was to head the newly raised IV Corps based at Tezpur. In fact,Kaul’s Corps was a phantom. No new troops except for the Corps headquarters staff were sent to it. He had to make do with the meagre forces already deployed. At the same time,Umrao Singh was not sacked. He continued to command the Siliguri Corps but his jurisdiction was confined to Sikkim,Nagaland and the East Pakistan Front. The whole of North East Frontier Agency (NEFA),now Arunachal Pradesh,threatened by the Chinese,was made Kaul’s exclusive domain.

True to his style,on his very first day at Tezpur,Kaul flew to Lumpu and then trekked to Namkachu valley where Brigadier John Dalvi’s 7 Infantry Brigade faced the more numerous Chinese occupying the commanding heights. No general officer had ever before visited Namkachu. Despite his gung-ho personality,Kaul was shaken by what he saw of the terrain and the enemy. After this brush with harsh reality,he sent from the spot a string of top priority signals that had a “sobering,not to mention dismaying,impact on the army and the (defence) ministry”,in the words of Maj Gen D.K. Palit,then Director of Military Operations at the Army Headquarters in the rank of a brigadier.

However,such was Kaul’s make-up that despite having discerned the grave vulnerability of Indian positions,he ended his dispatch reassuringly,telling New Delhi that he would take the first step to implement its directive before October 10. Ironically,it was exactly on that day that the Chinese delivered a far more shattering blow.

On October 9,in keeping with his promise to initiate some action,Kaul sent a platoon-strong patrol to take control of Tseng Jong,a small knoll somewhat to the northwest of the Chinese positions that they hadn’t occupied. Kaul calculated that once the Indian patrol got there,the knoll could be used as a “jumping point”. In launching this operation,Kaul had brushed aside warnings by Brigadier Dalvi and the divisional commander in the area,Maj Gen Niranjan Prasad. Surprisingly,the Chinese did nothing to stop the Indian patrol. But the platoon reported late in the evening that the Chinese were “massing a whole battalion” against it,and he therefore expected an attack at dawn.

Nothing happened at first light on October 10. An hour later,however,nearly 800 Chinese soldiers,supported by mortar fire,threw an assault and wiped out the Indian patrol at Tse Jong. According to Prasad,Kaul was “too stunned for an hour or so to speak coherently”. All he said later was that Delhi would have to do “a complete rethink”.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator