The army’s cerebrum

The Indian army ran up the Saltoro heights in the Siachen glacier just to prove Pakistan wrong.

Watching — or reading, or listening — Indian Army Chief General VK Singh shooting his mouth off over India’s ability to carry out a strike similar to what the US Navy Seals did vis-à-vis a certain Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad last week, brought to mind another caper by yet another former Indian army chief, General JJ Singh.

Soon after he was named to the top job in the early 2000’s, General Singh thought he would check out the cooler climes of Srinagar and reteach his boys how it was important for good soldiers to always be on the ready. Once there, in a lecture hall full of strapping young boys, Singh instructed someone to put a tumbler on a table, whipped out his pistol and, to the astonishment of his fellow officers, began to connect bullet with beaker.

To read the story, as reported in the Indian Express later, to deal with both astonishment and wonder at the exploits of India’s top generals, to sleep securely on one’s coir mattresses and down pillows in faraway Delhi and know that India’s frontiers were being safeguarded by men with nerve, pluck and flair; needless, to say it was an epiphanic moment.

Perhaps my fellow Pakistanis will wonder at the point of my little anecdote. After all, what was the big deal about cracking a glass or two at the speed of Mach, when Pakistan’s men in uniform had been fighting the best armies in the world and running the country at home at the same time, for several decades in the past?

That’s the whole point of being in the army, I suppose. For a moment let us forget the alleged intelligence failure, the biggest in the history of Pakistan, of not figuring out where Osama bin Laden lived and what he had been doing in Abottabbad for six-long years (ministering to three wives and several children cannot take up a whole day, after all).

Now, even if ISI Chief Shuja Pasha is able to explain to the CIA, over the next few days, what his organisation had really been up to, one wonders how the ISI-Army sisterhood will explain the debacle to its own people in Pakistan. After all, the people did elect Zardari & Co. to power only three years ago.

One also wonders if that’s asking for too much, that is, asking the army to abide by the political directives of an elected government? The question brings to mind the Indian Army’s unnerving ability to veto a deal on Siachen between India and Pakistan since 1989.

Now everyone knows the Indian Army ran up the Saltoro heights in the icy, nether regions of the Siachen glacier in 1984, thereby preventing the Pakistani Army from doing the same silly thing. Evidently, when you’re up there, you have a great view of the Kashmir Valley and if you have a couple of strange ideas up your sleeve — like a certain Pervez Musharraf had about Kargil, which he thought he could encircle, cutting off the Kashmir Valley from the rest of India, a strange thought indeed, not only because he hadn’t reckoned for the sheer bravery of the Indians, who were fired up with both nationalism and zeal, but because of the sheer inadequacy of the cerebrum that was involved in the planning process — then the rarefied, mountain air makes you feel like you, too, can follow them.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Indian Army is believed to have told all Indian prime ministers since Rajiv Gandhi cut a deal with Benazir Bhutto in 1989, in which Indian soldiers from Siachen would be withdrawn in exchange for Bhutto’s promise that nobody would occupy the glacier, that basically, you can’t.

Can’t trust the Pakistanis not to reoccupy the glacier, that is. So here’s the truth: In the last 22 years, since the Gandhi-Bhutto deal, no government in both Islamabad or Delhi has had the courage to conclude the Siachen deal.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2011.