1971: Those who undermine Sam Manekshaw’s role are off the mark

Recent attempts to undermine the contribution of Indian Army’s iconic army chief, General (later Field Marshal) Sam Manekshaw, to the strategic decision-making process in the run-up to the 1971 war are unfortunate. Two recent books by a former union minister, Jairam Ramesh (Intertwined Lives: P N Haksar And Indira Gandhi) and a seasoned diplomat, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta (India and the Bangladesh Liberation War: The Definitive Story), have contested the largely accepted narrative that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi delayed the military campaign in East Pakistan from April-May 1971 based on her army chief’s advice. Dasgupta uses his superior linguistic skills to condescendingly portray Manekshaw as a raconteur. He also suggests rather sensationally in a recent interview that the idea of delaying India’s military campaign in East Pakistan was essentially Indira Gandhi’s idea and that she used her army chief to create the final narrative.  Ramesh though gently calls this a ‘story bequeathed to us’.
There are two issues at play here that need to be dissected. It is quite clear that both Ramesh and Dasgupta have drawn very heavily on the memoirs and papers of P N Haksar and P N Dhar, two of Indira Gandhi’s closest advisors in the PMO and quite legitimately, her spin doctors. It is also evident that in the aftermath of the Shimla Accord where India failed to capitalise on a military victory by extracting adequate strategic concessions from Pakistan, both Haksar and Dhar worked overtime to retain PM Gandhi’s image as the ‘be all and end all’ of India’s 1971 campaign. Every single military historian, including this author, have recognised PM Gandhi’s stellar role in orchestrating the 1971 victory, but surely, it was not a single-handed effort! Dasgupta’s lack of graciousness and the unwillingness of Ramesh to take into considerations any recollections of the time by Indian Army officers involved in the planning process, induce an unnecessarily condescending twist to what was merely  an army chief doing his job and ‘speaking truth to power.’ Even more galling is Dasgupta’s suggestion that Manekshaw lacked an understanding of geopolitics — this too reflects the myopic approach of yesteryear within Indian intelligentsia that ‘generals know little about anything else other than war fighting.’

Manekshaw chats with a soldier in 1971. Two books now question his role in the campaign run-up

Sam Manekshaw’s firm advice to PM Indira Gandhi about the perils of getting bogged down by the monsoon in riverine East Pakistan is well recorded in three books on Manekshaw by Major General Shubhi Sood and Brigadier Panthaki, his ADCs, and Lt Gen Depinder Singh who served as his military advisor. Even more robust are Lt General BT Pandit’s recollections of a morning in late March 1971 at the Military Operations (MO) Directorate in an interview that is part of the author’s oral history collection. Pandit, a future corps commander, was then a major in charge of logistics planning at Army headquarters. He would go on to command his engineer regiment during the Battle of Basantar as a lieutenant colonel and win a Vir Chakra for gallantry.

Pandit recalls those momentous days of planning when Manekshaw was clearly seeking continuous validation from his staff to support his operational assessment that victory could not be assured should the Indian Army launch immediate operations against East Pakistan in April 1971. Sealing that decision was a clear assertion by Pandit to his chief that should the Indian Army be pushed into operations in April, sustaining one thrust line could be supported logistically in a time-frame of two-four weeks, and that putting together two or more axes of advance would take three months. The rest is recorded history wherein six months of stocking and planning resulted in four thrust lines into East Pakistan that both physically and psychologically overwhelmed the Pakistan Army.

However, India’s armed forces and particularly, the Indian Army, must accept that it has been unable to institutionally set this record straight due to the non-availability of any recorded minutes of all these important discussions that should/may have existed in the MO Directorate. These could then have been declassified to help historians deconstruct those momentous months for posterity. Instead, we have this undesirable jostling for space that is largely based on the personal papers of two influential officials in the PMO and a clutch of military biographies by Manekshaw’s military advisors and ADCs. In this melee, the clearest confirmation of the trajectory of events was his wistful response to Major Pandit’s timelines when he remarked ‘that bloody well takes me slap bang into the middle of the monsoons.’ Clearly, that planning conference indicated that Manekshaw understood the gravity of the refugee crisis, wanted to support his Prime Minister’s desire for speedy military action, but heeded sound military advice from subordinates and did not hesitate to speak truth to power in pursuit of larger national interest.