The origins of many a war in history remain disputed to this day. The 1965 War between India and Pakistan, however, has the unique distinction of there being utter confusion over the date on which it began. For Pakistan this happened only on September 6 of that year, when the Indian army started its march on Lahore. Remarkably, this date is still observed as the “Defence of Pakistan Day” every year. For many Indians the war started on September 1 and lasted 22 days. For, at the beginning of September a taskforce of Pakistani tanks had attacked the Chhamb-Jaurian sector in a bid to make a dash for Akhnoor, the fulcrum of the supply line from the rest of India to Jammu and Kashmir. The assault was thwarted by this country’s use of air power.

It is a different matter that all the resolutions of the UN Security Council demanded of both countries to withdraw their troops to the “positions they had occupied on August 5”. Most significantly, exactly this was the basis of the Tashkent Declaration that Lal Bahadur Sashtri and Field-Marshal Ayub Khan signed in the Central Asian city under the Soviet auspices on January 10, 1966. The prime significance of August 5 is that on that day were detected massive infiltrations of Pakistani troops in Mufti and other irregulars into Kashmir. As in 1947, so 18 years later this was Pakistan’s first step towards wresting Kashmir from this country.

The infiltrations, code-named Operation Gibraltar, were the brainchild of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister, assisted by the veteran and hawkish foreign secretary, Aziz Ahmed, Defence Secretary Nazir Ahmed and Major-General Ahktar Hussain Malik, General Officer Commanding of Pakistan’s 12 Division. The general drew up the operational plan. Ayub Khan, a cautious man, was most reluctant to risk a war with India. But Bhutto and his cohorts talked him into it. If Pakistan wanted to wrest Kashmir by armed force, Bhutto argued, 1965 was the “last chance”. The opportunity would vanish once the expansion and reorganisation of the Indian Army was complete in a few years’ time. At the opportune time, said Bhutto, India was badly shaken by its “humiliating” defeat in the 1962 War with China, Nehru’s death, his successor Shastri’s “ineffectualness”, acute food shortage and a virulent anti-Hindi agitation in the South. “It was now or never”. Bhutto’s logic did appear persuasive. But both he and Ayub failed to realize that its two fundamental assumptions — that the arrival of “raiders” would start a revolt in the “discontented” Kashmir valley, and that because of “fear of China”, India “would not dare” extend the fighting in Jammu and Kashmir into a “general war” — could be dangerously wrong.

... contd.