Pouring over "The Times" newspaper during the 1971 war, I expected an Indian walk over and in that I was not disappointed. A soldier's whole preparation is on the battlefield to do or die in trying. When you were called on to answer that call of duty, you did so with thorough efficiency and professionalism. War by necessity has to be a harsh reality if it is to achieve its objectives of peace. Pakistan's defeat inculcated in it the reality that Hindu majority Bharat would not be the walk over those Islamic marauders had been all too used to. Instead it now pursues a war inflicted by a thousand cuts in which Bangladesh joins in.
Bharat's armed forces wisely by all accounts saw its strategic interests as best served by leaving these two Islamic wings of India to preoccupy themselves with their own destruction. Politics under Mrs Gandhi, as so much under the Nehru’s dictated otherwise. The other actors that have since entered the scene have hardly been better. The greatest honour a grateful nation could bestow on their greatest war heroes, is to proffer to them the great offices of state. Indeed, Bharat as almost any other nation is the creature of its champion in war as it was with King Bharat. Mrs Gandhi saw in him that champion who could have eclipsed her reign. Manekshaw was for me that defining man of the nation for those few short weeks. India remains a sad nation that could not see in its war hero, a champion that could sue peace as well as war.
