IT is now 28 years since the Indian Army last conducted a conventional military operation. And as it was in December 1971, this time too lead is being exchanged with Pakistan with the launching of Operation Vijay. The area of operations is limited to the Kargil sector, but the standoff is conventional in every sense. So what is the soldier thinking, feeling and experiencing as he goes into combat in the extremely rarified atmosphere of the heights around Kargil? To understand that better, we must first catch a glimpse of what the soldiers have been doing and experiencing in this period.

For the last 15 years the army has been involved in unconventional operations, all conducted in support of civilian authority in order to once again re-establish the rule of law within the parts of India affected by internal strife or disturbance. These fall under that broad spectrum term called counter-insurgency operations (Coin-Ops).

The logic of counter-insurgency operations demands that the soldier think like an insurgent. For, unlike conventional military operations, during Coin-Ops there is no set-piece battle, since in any case there is never a battle. The soldier serving in a Coin-Ops environment has to, therefore, operate in a dimension that is as unmilitary as there can be. There is no front, no border, no forward operating base and no identifiable enemy. And that, in essence, is the greatest challenge to a soldier trained as he is in the art of conventional warfare. At the same time it is also the source of his greatest fears, anxieties and dilemmas. For there is nothing in conventional military training, planning and execution that quite prepares a soldier for a counter-insurgency campaign. Some revel in it; most fail to live up to the asking.

The conduct of Coin-Ops, therefore, is a battle among the minds of the soldiers and the insurgents. Given that there is no identifiable enemy and no fixed terrain in which to carry out the operations, it is the sheer expanse of the operational area that comes as the first shock/surprise/revelation to the soldiers. These three words have been deliberately used conjointly only in order to underline a point made earlier, that the approach to counter-insurgency operations is a matter of personality and the perspective that flows from the individual’s mind. In the game to outwit the other, and in which lie the results of the campaign, possibly holds the key to the only similarity between conventional and Coin-Ops – the need to outwit. Soldiers and insurgents are able to use all available space, methods, tactics and manpower. Each is as important a component to the campaign as the other, and all will subsequently be explained.

Frank Kitson, the late British Army general, was a pioneer in the study of Coin-Ops from a military perspective, quite unlike the political or sociological analysis that had hitherto been the trend. Terming them low-intensity operations, Kitson said, very succinctly, that ‘these operations are won and lost in the hearts and minds of the people.’ And it is over the hearts and minds of the people that a counter-insurgency campaign is conducted by both the soldiers as well as the insurgents.

 

 

This only further underlines the difficulties faced by soldiers, trained as they are in the conduct of conventional military operations. The dictates of conventional war fighting demand that the maximum possible force and firepower be brought down upon the enemy in a given battle area. It is virtually the reverse of the demands of Coin-Ops in that fire control and restraint are the order of the day and there is no definite and demarcated combat area. It is then that the dilemma of the soldier is easier understood.

In a nutshell, the soldier has to confront, simultaneously, the luxury of space as well as the restrictions imposed by that expanse. The freedom of space, or the area of responsibility in military parlance, in which the unit conducts its operations, allows the soldiers plenty of movement. It enables the mind to expand its psychological restrictions, thereby encouraging in the soldiers that very vital widening of the mental horizons as well as the scope of operations. This freedom of expanse allows many soldiers to revel in the operational area, unburdened as they are by the confines of the predetermined battle zones. This is particularly true of Coin-Ops in rural areas.

 

 

At the same time there is a threat from the unknown, the unseen and the unheard. For the insurgent, the opponent in this new combat location is everywhere and nowhere. He is said to be somewhere, but nothing precise is ever really known. The survival of the insurgent, after all, depends on his ability to camouflage himself with the terrain and its people. The fact that he is among his own, in his own area, is his ultimate camouflage. Those that have violated this dictum have paid a heavy price.

Che Guevara operating in Bolivia, of course, was the most vivid example; the recent casualties among the foreign mercenaries in Jammu and Kashmir are only the most recent. In both cases the cardinal principles of guerrilla warfare were, and are being, violated, with the end result being a foregone conclusion. This makes the task of the soldiers far easier, with the local populace unable to identify with the supposed saviour, notwithstanding common faith or political programmes. When an insurgency is ethnically pure, soldiers have to try that much harder since the common bond between the people and the insurgents overrides many of the vagaries of the insurrection that befall the masses.

It is this terrain and people’s camouflage that unnerves some of the finest soldiers. Militarily and psychologically prepared for a straightforward battle in which there are identifiable targets and combatants, many are unable to clearly distinguish the subtleties that are involved in Coin-Ops. This is a failing not peculiar to India, but rather militaries around the world. In fact, the military that has not suffered from this handicap is a peculiarity, and there isn’t one such in the world till date. The camouflage of the insurgent is then the source of both fear as well as frustration for some of the soldiers, unable as they are to differentiate between the shades of insurgency. To analyse the varying degree of participation in an insurgency by the civil society would take up an entire essay; for the purpose of this note it will suffice to say that at various levels of society, cooperation with the insurgents is of differing proportions.

 

 

After all, in a civil strife of any sort there is no innocent section. This interweaving of the insurgent with the civil society at all levels results in the development of a terrible feeling of betrayal among the soldiers, a ‘breach of faith’ by the local political leadership or administrative machinery. This is particularly true of Nagaland and parts of Manipur, where the Coin-Ops have been underway for upwards of 40 years. Influential sections of the society are subverting the state, such that soldiers sent in there to clean up the mess find a strange bonhomie between the two.

And then they don’t have the added advantage of foreign mercenaries as in Jammu and Kashmir. The camouflage in these jungle states is complete, so to say. A complete camouflage, a near perfect subversion/bonhomie, is a cocktail that proves too heady for the soldier to digest. This provokes a sense of frustration in the soldiery that is difficult to explain, expressed only during fleeting interactions in transit camps, or in a stupor during a barakhana, or even in the dull ache of a ‘morning to night’ road opening patrol. And this is the strongest and the deepest feeling among the soldiers.

 

 

The loneliness of being away from home for long periods of duty in counter-insurgency areas, coupled with a growing sense of dismay at the callousness of the civilian administration and political authority, produce a frustration that is virtually complete. While trying to clean up the mess created by bureaucratic and political ineptitude, the soldier is also putting his own neck on the line. The sense of honour that has been instilled in soldiering prevents him from walking away and leaving the mess as it was. He bears it out – the loneliness, the strain and fatigue that accumulates from a constant 24 hour mental battle with the militants – with frequent taunts from the population whose lives he is supposed to protect. And all this while a polity and an administration does not discharge its duties.

The loneliness away from home and an anger against the system which has created the mess for him to clean up could have provoked a disaster in any other military. But the resilience of the Indian soldier is one of the essential ingredients in the country’s natural wealth. Stoic, and without a peer anywhere else in the world, the Indian soldier is still largely from the rural areas. And it is that heritage, the accumulation of centuries of battling the odds only in order to harvest a crop, which has armed him with the enormous patience that has been demanded from the soldier tasked for Coin-Ops. He will continue to take punishment from the environment, an apathetic population and the administration, but not bring infamy upon the unit, the village and his biradari.

Even while operating in Coin-Ops, and having been outwitted and out-thought by the militant, the soldier will not give up his sense of responsibility to the unit, village and biradari. With no set-piece battle, there is always another chance of getting the same militants, but that is not what the soldier will calculate. Given the task, and now in a firefight with the militants, he will not want to give up. And that precisely is what dominates the minds of those soldiers awaiting an opportunity, or already in operations under-way against Pakistani intruders; and some more as well. After years of telling his barrack mates, and his kith and kin in the village, that the solution to the problems in Kashmir lies in preventing the Pakistan Army from ever raising its hand again, he finally finds that opportunity by way of Operation Vijay in Kargil. High altitude combat is not for everybody, certainly, but he at least has an opportunity to trade lead with Pakistan. And that in itself is a significant motivating factor for a large number of the soldiery.

 

 

For a considerable period the soldier has identified Pakistan as the genesis of the problem currently prevailing in Jammu and Kashmir. Planner, trainer and instigator – these are the labels commonly attached to the Pakistan Army. And on this issue, the soldier does not differentiate between the Pakistan government, its army or the Directorate of Inter Service Intelligence.

‘They are all the same, all Pakistani,’ the soldier would say. And he would be saying that in Kargil today, as the build-up by the army to take out the Pakistani intruders from the heights around Kargil continues. He knows them as Pakistanis, and being a soldier himself, knows well that only an army could have launched an operation of this nature in Kargil. He identifies all the occupied positions as that of the Pakistan Army, for only an army could have undertaken an operation like this. Even if there are a few irregulars among the intruders, it is still largely an operation mounted by a conventional army.

 

 

Operation Vijay, then, provides the opportunity that the Indian soldier has been waiting for since the early part of this decade – the desire to engage the Pakistan Army into a conventional fire-fight. There is an eagerness for this fire-fight among the soldiery only so as to prove a point to the other army whilst getting out of the Coin-Ops syndrome. High altitude combat is certainly not the ideal ground on which to settle scores, but in an environment where such opportunities come but rarely, ‘any combat is better than no combat.’

Unlike Coin-Ops this is not likely to be a long drawn out affair. There is no camouflage behind a divided civilian population, no need to bother about administration and the polity, and most importantly for an army used to Coin-Ops, there is no collateral damage. The soldier can then bring in the firepower that he deems fit for the target, and the manpower that is required.

This escape from the shackles of Coin-Ops is then a luxury for the conventional soldier – trained, prepared and equipped for assaulting enemy positions. His mind is in any case tuned for this kind of an operation, notwithstanding the fact that the enemy is sitting on the heights. At least the enemy is there, identifiable, and occupying Indian territory. That is what the soldier is looking for, and that is what he has found in Kargil. And so he will make a go for it, unmindful of casualties. For he has been given an objective and seen an enemy. Only that much is required to launch him into an assault, and after 28 years, once again become a conventional soldier.