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What comes to the fore as the book
proceeds is the true patriotism of a lot of Indian officers and
soldiers who put to great, risk their career and life for the
love of the motherland. Besides the threats that Prime Minister
Nehru's ideology and self-centred characters like Krishna Menon
posed, these brave men did their best to safeguard their country
from the barbarism of the Chinese invasion. They had laid down
everything at stake, even their lives. The hypocrisy and the
blind-mannered, bull-like attitude of the politicians and
bureaucrats as they worked for their vested interests is
something we are aware of but have never raised our voices
against seriously. What comes as a surprise is a man whose love
for adventure and admiration for another country leads him to
take such a big risk against his interests and safety for the
good of that country. Sydney's description of the route, the
nature and the scenery comes from the heart of a man who loves
the mountains and has an affinity with them deep down in his
heart. His in-between splattering of the description of the
Indo-Tibetan culture is a source of knowledge for foreigners,
and yet somehow it never manages to break the continuity of the
spirit of adventure. The fruitlessness of war, how it doesn't
only harm those who are conquered but also tears to pieces the
total character and personality of the conquerors gets
highlighted intermittently throughout this book.
The cruelty
that gradually begins to mar their personality overtakes the
conquerors, totally wiping out the line which divides the
brutality of animalism from the humanism of human beings. His
description of the animalism among the Chinese soldiers and the
catharses they found in being cruel with men and animals is
bloodcurdling to say the least. Besides the destruction of man
and property, war also destroys culture and heritage as well as
distorts history." They were some years later to destroy
more than 99 per cent of all Tibetan lamaseries, and throw an
equal percentage of lamaseries and monks into labour camps where
most of them died. The great lamaseries at Taklakot and
Kojarnath were torn down brick by brick, the brass Buddhas were
melted for the base metal, the Sanskrit archives burned and the Mani
wall stones with their Om Mane Padme Hom inscriptions
used as paving stones".
The inhuman
living conditions of the writer and his colleagues during his
imprisonment and the cruelty meted out to them somehow evokes
within the backs of a reader’s mind the pictures of the life
that the Indian prisoners of war (POW) must have met with in
China and Pakistan which unfortunately the world seems to have
closed their eyes to.
The sufferers
are those POWs and their relatives who have a never-ending wait
ahead of them. Sydney Wignall and his friends were the lucky
ones to have the bureaucratic back-up of their country behind
them. The list of those who still lie in those dark, humid,
rat-infested dungeons is endless, and yes, they are those who
took the risk for the safety of their country and their people,
be they soldiers or journalists.
It was unfortunate for India
and the many soldiers that sacrificed their lives that the
useful information that Wignall got about the building up of
Chinese army in Tibet borders were not taken seriously by the
government as well as the Prime minister. We were to suffer
humiliation at the hands of the Chinese for this neglect. To
this day, the Chinese still occupy 15000 square miles of Indian
Territory, and the reason why they withdrew from NEFA was
because of the assignment of a carrier task force up into the
Bay of Bengal, within striking distance of the Chinese advance
units. Sun Tzu had rightly remarked in his book The art of
war: "Spies are the most important element in war,
because upon them depends an army's ability to move."
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MAYBE
when Sydney Wignall grabbed the chance of a lifetime for doing
something for the country he so admired, he had no idea as to
the great risk he had undertaken in his enthusiasm and love for
mountaineering. Throughout his book, Spy on the roof of the
world, the writer's character of a strong-minded,
self-willed person and a man of great courage comes to the fore.
The fact that he kept silent for 25 years about the hidden
aspects of his mission, by itself portrays that he is a man of
strong character.
