Second lieutenant Ashok Dewan was on one of the missile boats that were launched by Commander Koppikar in December 1971 to strike at Karachi. They did a good job—they took the Pakistan Navy by surprise, destroyed much of Karachi's defences, sank a few warships, crippled the enemy's war-fighting capability, and returned home unharmed. Both went on serve the Navy for a few more years; Koppikar retired as a vice-admiral, and Dewan as a commander.
Last week, the two officers were put in the dock, and subjected to an hour-and-half of grilling. They had to explain virtually everything they had done in the operation, and its whys and hows at an Aap ki Adalat held as part of Shiv Kunal Verma's military history seminar, the second edition of which was held last week at Welham Boys School, Dehradun.
Verma, who styles himself as a military historian-cum-filmmaker, has been propagating his new style of school seminar to spread the value of teaching military history. Instead of papers being read which would bore children, the seminars have been designed after popular TV programmes such as Aap ki Adalat, Big Fight, and We the People. He gets officers who took part in the operations to talk in his seminar, which is into its second year now, with more than 35 schools from across north India taking part in it.
If Aap ki Adalat model was adopted for discussing the Karachi bombardment, the issue of women in the armed forces was discussed in We the People style, with three women officers amidst a panel of schoolchildren. Whether India and China can get along strategically given the history of hostilities was discussed by schoolboys and girls themselves in Big Fight style.
In between were talk shows by Lt. Gen. Ata Hasnain, who redefined the Indian Army's counter-insurgency strategy; a discussion with Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar on 'Make in India' and the history of aircraft-building in India; and an illustrated talk by Bangalore-based banker-turned-tramp K.V.K. Murthy who has been motoring across Sinkiang and the central Asian expanse. Murthy, a military history buff, has been blowing up his life's savings tracing the footsteps of the fabled British spies and adventurers who reconnoitered the region when the Russia and British India were playing the Great Game with Russia in the 19th century. I call him a modern-day William Moorcroft.
Murthy swears that these regions, which lay just beyond Siachen, ought to interest India's strategic thinkers. He believes that “the strategic concerns that compelled the British to push those men into the bleak expanses ought to be India's concerns today, especially with the Chinese building the CPEC (China–Pakistan Economic Corridor).”
However, he too moans that India has been neglecting these regions strategically. Western strategic thinkers have often mocked at India's lack of strategic culture, which perhaps has a lot to do with the absence of historiography in India. Save the comet-like appearance of a Kalhana in the middle ages, India has never had a home-grown historian. The result: all the accounts of the battles that we have—Kanauj, Thanesar, Panipat, Karnal, Plassey, Buxar, Delhi or Chilianwala—are the ones rendered by the invaders. Indeed, as Winston Churchill observed, winners write the history, but we took it too literally. And we never attempted to write, even on the few occasions we won.
The lack of military historiography continued even after independence. The accounts of independent India's wars were kept secret for a long time, and even now they have only been leaked, not released. And the Henderson Brooks report, which is not actually history but an inquiry report into the conduct of operations in the Sino-Indian war of 1962, is still under wraps, despite the BJP's pre-election promise to release it.
Lack of military history in turn had led to the lack of a strategic culture in India. Kings and commanders never bothered to learn about the previous battles, nor was there any attempt to impart lessons in battle tactics to succeeding commanders. This had led to disastrous results in the battlefield—like when Prithviraj Chauhan deployed his war elephants in the same manner in his second battle with Muhammad Ghori as he had in the first battle.
Two days at the seminar made many of the expert participants wonder: are we beginning to learn?