At the peak of the IPKF operations in Sri Lanka in the winter of 1987, when the Indian army was still suffering more casualties than at any time during the war in Kargil, I had a conversation with then-Lt Gen (and later chief of army staff) Bipin Joshi, its director of military operations. “These LTTE people,” he said, “were just macho young people with no other purpose in life but to kill and die.” I thought, then, that it was in fact Gen Joshi’s remark that sounded so much like a macho soldier talking. And this was after the LTTE had already inflicted on his army several hundred casualties, in some cases annihilating entire platoons or fighting patrols, and blowing up armoured personnel carriers on landmines so big their one-and-a-half-tonne doors would land a hundred yards away. Five brigades advancing on Jaffna, with tanks and Mi-24 helicopter gunships (though only one brigade commander used these, famously on the bazaar in Chavakacheri, an LTTE stronghold on the axis he was pursuing to Jaffna. The risk of a few civilian casualties, he reckoned, was worthwhile if it saved his soldiers’ lives. Of course his was the brigade that got to Jaffna with a fraction of the casualties the others suffered.).

To me, in fact, it was the Indian army that had looked arrogant and macho to the extent of being imprudent. Gen Sundarji, then army chief, had a dashing style that rubbed off too easily on his protégés and sometimes created a “bash on regardless” mindset, as if the enemy did not matter. I had seen this in Operation Bluestar where he lost nearly 140 men in one night in the Golden Temple. In Jaffna too, infantry assaults were launched on a still largely unknown and well-defended city, in some cases by units that had landed a couple of hours earlier from India. The tanks looked good, but did not have the high-explosive ammunition they required. They carried, instead, the tank-busting, titanium-tipped ammunition called, in acronym-heavy army parlance, APFSDS (armour-piercing, fin-stabilised, discarding sabot). But behind that impressive description, it was useless in Jaffna. As an officer in the battle zone had told me, if you fired it at a house where an LTTE group was hiding, it would go clean through the walls, leaving the marauders unharmed. Plus, they would know where you were. So it was our own army that had gone in under-prepared and under-gunned against a largely unknown enemy, had suffered initial setbacks and casualties, and Gen Joshi was calling the LTTE macho and irrational!

... contd.