From Kargil to Jammu, a saga of intel lapses

Kargil Vijay Diwas will be celebrated on July 26 to honour the memory of the 527 bravehearts who lost their lives in Operation Vijay. And this year is special, since it marks the 25th anniversary of that brief but bloody war. An audacious and stealthy operation by the Pakistan army that was conceived by then army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf was foiled and the intruders pushed back — but at a heavy cost. On July 26, 1999, the Kargil War came to a formal end.

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An emotive national recall is on the cards, and it is appropriate that families who lost their loved ones and soldiers grievously injured are acknowledged and comforted in an empathetic and appropriate manner. It is an unfortunate tenet of history since time immemorial that those who pay the heaviest price on the battlefield are soon forgotten. But deeply embedded and glossed-over institutional omissions of that war merit scrutiny.

This author dwelt on some aspects of the Kargil War last fortnight (July 8), but certain developments compel this revisit. Gen NC Vij (retd), who was the DGMO (Director General, Military Operations) during that war and later served as the Army Chief, has made significant observations in his soon-to-be-released book, Alone in the Ring, about the Kargil intelligence fiasco. However, it is reported that the book is now ‘on hold’, awaiting government clearance, and this is a poor reflection on how the narrative and history of the war is being shaped. Another development pertains to allegations made by a former Major about command failure.

In excerpts published in the media, Gen Vij notes that the Pakistan army had the element of surprise in the early stages and that India was caught unawares due to an intelligence failure. He adds: “Not only was the intrusion detected late, but also our intelligence agencies were unable to assess if the intrusion was by militants or the Pakistan army.” This observation is not a new revelation; much the same had been said in the preliminary reviews and assessment of the Kargil intrusion.

However, it draws attention to an abiding and tenacious structural inadequacy in India’s higher defence management — that of intelligence-gathering and effective assessment. This entails a continuous, multi-layered activity of seeking and collating disparate information inputs, analysing them and then distilling that which is relevant into actionable operational inputs during a war or similar challenges to national security and integrity.

India’s track record in this domain has been below par. From the October 1962 border war with China to Kargil (1999), Mumbai terror attacks (2008), Galwan clash (2020) and, most recently, the terror attacks in the Jammu region, systemic intelligence failures are a recurring feature. External intel inputs are provided by R&AW (Research and Analysis Wing), and the dominant Kargil narrative is that actionable inputs were not provided to the Indian military in a timely manner.

In the Kargil case, Gen Vij writes: “The assessment of R&AW was categorically that ‘there was no possibility of a war with Pakistan in the current year’. This inaccurate assessment resulted in a strategic failure.”

As is the case in any post-event review, there is a different appreciation of the Kargil fiasco by other actors and the intelligence community has argued over the years that specific intel inputs were provided to the Army well in advance and that it was the inability of the fauj to acknowledge and assess the inputs that led to the setback.

An alternative narrative that challenges the current received wisdom (the Gen Vij version) was highlighted in an unhappy development. In early July, a junior Army officer on active duty in Kargil served a legal notice on Gen VP Malik (retd), who was the Army Chief during the war. Major Manish Bhatnagar, Company Commander (5 Para) during the war, was court-martialled and dismissed from service in 2001. While he was deemed to be guilty of “acts prejudicial to good order and military discipline”, the more serious charge was that he did not obey orders to carry out an attack. This charge, however, could not be proved during the court martial, but he was still dismissed from service by citing another transgression.

The immediate trigger for the legal notice against Gen Malik was a statement given on TV, where the former Chief asserted that a lack of intelligence inputs and surveillance gaps led to the Kargil intrusions. Bhatnagar challenged this assertion by claiming that he had reported the Pakistani intrusions well before they were discovered in May 1999 and added that his warnings had been ignored by his superiors in the chain of command.

This is a jarring intrusion in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas but it draws attention to the institutional inadequacy in the Army’s intel domain. First-person accounts by those who had served in Kargil at that time support the Bhatnagar contention that the Army at the brigade level had received these inputs of intrusions, but the enormity of the occupation of the peaks in the Indian territory, the identity of the intruders (Pakistan army soldiers) and the firepower they had amassed were a huge surprise when it was revealed.

Twenty-five years after the war, the intelligence reforms that had been mooted by the Kargil Review Committee remain dormant. It is instructive that successive governments — led by Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Modi — have chosen not to touch this matter and initiate the much-needed reforms.

In a pithy comment, BB Nandy, a doyen of the Indian intel community, warned in 2004 that an overhaul of the ‘Intelligence Leviathan’ would be arduous and that the default position of successive governments was to perpetuate “a tradition of bungling”. His lament — who will bell the cat? — still falls on deaf ears.

Hopefully, the book by Gen Vij will be in the public domain soon and other inputs regarding glossed-over omissions of the Kargil War will encourage the Modi government to embark on the much-needed intelligence domain reforms and deliberate on the matter in Parliament. Concurrently, the Army ought to carry out its own internal review in the light of recent disclosures and accept the onus for command lapses, if these are established.

There should not be a repeat of Kargil in any form, wherein the supreme sacrifice of young officers and soldiers redeemed the failures of their superiors.