Majority of Kashmiris with India: Army

Tribune News Service

Jammu, September 1

The Army today claimed that there were only a ‘few noisy people’ who spoke about Pakistan in the Kashmir valley while the ‘silent majority of Kashmir was still with India’. It appreciated the role of Kashmiri people in the 1965 Indo-Pak war.

“Kashmir is an unfinished agenda of Pakistan since the Partition and the 1965 war was the outcome of its (Pakistan) obsession with Kashmir. Initially, they (Pakistan) wanted to give it the colour of an uprising in Kashmir as it had pushed in a large number of intruders but its plan failed. Hats off to the Kashmiri people,” Maj Gen Sanjeev Narain, General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Tiger Division, said while talking about how Kashmiris had fought against Pakistan in the war.

The GOC was addressing the faculty members and scholars at the University of Jammu during a daylong seminar to celebrate the 50 years of India’s victory in the 1965 war.

The seminar was organised by the department of history, University of Jammu, in collaboration with the Tiger Division of the Army.

The GOC said, “...There are a few noisy people who speak about Pakistan, but the silent majority is with us (India).”

The Army officer, who stressed analysing history in the right perspective, said the 1965 war was a misadventure of Pakistan due to its wrong assessment as the neighbouring country had underestimated India’s strength following the 1962 war with China.

“It (Pakistan) made wrong assessments about India’s strength that resulted in the misadventure on its part. Firstly, Pakistan thought that the Indian Army had not recovered from the defeat of the 1962 war with China. They also thought that they had better equipment as compared to India,” the Army officer said.

He said Pakistan had never thought that India would open up the front along the international border as it had believed that the war would be restricted to the Line of Control and Rann of Kutch.

“Pakistan also wanted to test its newly-acquired Patton Tanks and the Khemkaran sector proved to be the grave of those tanks, where over 400 tanks were either destroyed or captured by us,” the GOC said.

He said Pakistan was proved an aggressor in 1965 by a United Nations team, which also concluded that India’s action was in self-defence. “War is a national effort and everybody must understand it in the right perspective,” he remarked.

Earlier, Prof RD Sharma, Vice Chancellor of the University of Jammu, delivered the opening address and threw light on various aspects of the 1965 war. He shared his personal experiences of the war as a resident of the Jammu region.

Prof Jigar Mohammad from the history department delivered the welcome address.