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I think the author has drawn the right conclusions generally but he is so despondent about our mistakes that he sees failures even in self-evident victories. For instance the fact that there were blunders committed in Sri Lanka is undeniable but the military objectives were achieved were they not? If you read this book you get the impression we failed militarily in Sri Lanka! Same is true of the few pages that deal with Kargil. I do not understand this of the author, or of the entire media for that matter, around 500 dead and some thousands injured out of say 30,000 people in operation out of a 1 million in the armed forces is not heavy casualties by my reckoning. This book by labeling such losses as heavy is committing one of the very blunder that it is addressing. And I am sorry but if we Indians are not prepared to sustain such meagre losses and we insist on spending a mere 3% of our GDP on ther armed forces then we deserve to lose much more. China while invading Vietnam lost 50,000 plus in a week! That is more than the losses we have sustained in all our wars with all our neighbors by a factor of 2! Stop complaining and get on with it.
Another mistake this author makes is assuming that only we Indians, especially Hindus, in India were disunited. My reading of the history of Genghiz, Tamerlane, Babur etc leads me to the conclusion that there was disnunity all around. Only a strongman of the caliber of Genghiz or Tamerlane or Baur for brief periods of time kept people united otherwise brothers betrayed brothers and sons rebelled against their fathers. To expect unity from people purely because of their love of the country was a futile expectation. There was no concept of India. Your neighbor was as much of an enemy as the invader from a faw away land. But that does not mean that we should not expect greater patriotism from all of us living in India today.
This book is an important addition to the work on the subject of Indian military but it needs a thorough rewrite. Perhaps this was the first edition.
Rating:  [3 of 5 Stars!] |
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