Kargil and Kandahar

By Mukund Padmanabhan

IF KARGIL induced a misplaced feeling of victory, then Kandahar has generated an inappropriate sense of defeat. The two events are related insofar as the national response to them has been horribly skewed. In both cases, our distorted reactions have served to cloud the lessons we should have learnt from them.

In Kargil, a flagrant security lapse, which results in hundreds of square kilometres of Indian territory being occupied unnoticed for months, becomes the surprising cause for a bout of national euphoria. The lapse results in the death of some 400 Indian soldiers and leaves many more injured. There is a huge financial cost incurred in evicting the intruders during the conflict. Yet, the pleasure of beating back the enemy has - somewhat perversely - conquered the pain inflicted on the country. Our boys won and that's what matters. The callous negligence which forced them into a conflict which should never have occurred in the first place is all but forgotten.

The story in Kandahar is the same in reverse. Flagrant administrative lapses - which result from a combination of indecision and inefficiency - allows the hijacked aircraft to fly out of India and, finally, results in the militants-for-hostages swap. The nation, or at least India's large and burgeoning middle class, reacts as if it has been defeated. The sense of gloom and ruination is so great that it generates discussions about Indians being a timid, spineless people. The RSS/VHP view that Kandahar primarily reflects `Hindu cowardice' appears to have found ready acceptance with a large section of the middle classes. Their boys won and that's the bottomline. The bungling and the inefficiency which forced the militants-for-hostages swap on us is too easily forgotten.

It may be easy to understand why Pakistan induces such extreme sentiments in this country, but a dispassionate look at Kargil and Kandahar should make one thing quite plain to us. They should not be described in the parlance of victory and defeat; rather, they should be analysed principally in the language of inefficiency and negligence.

To labour the obvious, Kargil did not convert us into a virile people just as Kandahar did not suddenly make us timorous. It is also foolish to use these events to draw bizarre conclusions on the nature of the Indian state as some politicians and newspaper columnists have done. If we are a soft state, it is not because we swapped hostages for militants (as worthies ranging from Mr. L. K. Advani to Mr. Rajendra Singh in the Sangh Parivar have implied). If anything, it is because we seem unable, or perhaps just unwilling, to take quick and effective action against those who are guilty - whether for plunging the nation into an unnecessary war or for failing to follow the prescribed procedures in the manual on hijack situations.

Take Kargil to begin with. Six months after the conflict, the nation is still in the dark about how swarms of Pakistan-backed intruders could have stealthily occupied the higher reaches in different places in the Kargil area and remained there for months before being discovered. Common sense suggests that this would not be possible without a massive failure at both the operational and the intelligence levels.

Those who hoped that the committee headed by Mr. K. Subrahmanyam would get to the bottom of the sorry mess may have reason to feel disappointed. By the committee's own admission, the voluminous document submitted to the Government has been sanitised. If the ``sensitive information'' excised from the report was held back only to prevent jeopardising national security, then there can be no complaints about this. But the committee has given the impression it has fought shy of what ought to have been one of the main responsibilities of a body set up to ``review the events leading to the Pakistani aggression in Kargil district'' - telling us who was responsible for this shocking lapse.

Mr. Subrahmanyam's explanation that he was more concerned with ``what went wrong'' than ``who went wrong'' - accompanied by newspaper reports that the committee has refrained from fault- finding or ``finger- pointing'' - has a high-minded air about it. But the question really is whether we are missing something in the adoption of a purely ``systemic'' approach to the Kargil question. It is obvious even to a layman that intruders could not have occupied such enormous swathes of Indian territory and held it unnoticed for months merely because our systems were deficient or not streamlined enough. Surely, someone was also not doing his job?

Yes, of course, we may sorely need better mechanisms for coordination between the armed services and the intelligence set- up may well require a total revamp. But, however important the committee's specific recommendations are about such matters - and significant they are bound to be having been made by a body of well-regarded experts - it need not have taken a Kargil for the Government to seek such counsel.

Our response to Kargil follows a depressingly familiar pattern every time we are faced with a crisis or a disaster - from railway accidents, to building collapses, to stampedes in public places and fires in cinema halls. A study is commissioned, recommendations are made and it is back to business as usual. The pattern continues - disaster, study, recommendation, disaster.

It is a process which reveals our near-total inability to pin people down for their lapses and to punish them effectively. A capacity to do this is critical to prevent the recurrence of such incidents. For example, every major railway accident is followed by some recommendation or the other for streamlining procedures and upgrading technology - steps which, over the years, have done little to reduce the number of such disasters. When was the last time someone remembers that a railway official was made to pay for a catastrophe on the tracks?

In most other countries, many heads would have rolled for a lapse such as Kargil. (It is conceivable that a similar situation would have forced a Government out of office rather than contributed to its re- instatement as it did last year.). In Kandahar too, our response appears limited to measures such as enhancing security and tightening procedures at airports. No one in the Government seems bothered enough to seriously examine whether the crisis management group fouled up and, if so, what action should be taken against those who continue to man it.

When confronted with negligence or rank inefficiency, this is what a truly effective State - leave alone a ``hard'' one - ought to be able to do. Mr. Vajpayee's post-hijack reflections about the desirability of being a hard state are meaningless babble in the absence of the requisite administrative will to quickly determine who - if anyone - messed up at Amritsar and initiate action on the basis of this.

All the Sangh Parivar has done instead is to react in an ashamed manner about the hostage-militant trade off. Mr. Advani's sorry admission that the Government's image has been dented, Mr. Rajendra Singh's pop-sociological conclusions about ``Hindu cowardice'' and Mr. Ashok Singhal's ruminations about why we need to become a more courageous people are nothing more than a collective lament about a hopelessly embarrassing incident.

Our reactions to Kargil and Kandahar can hardly be determined by mere feelings of elation or anguish. We need to see them for what they really are; more importantly, we need the requisite will to initiate the tough steps to prevent incidents like them from recurring.

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