Courage and Conviction: The Story of A Lifetime Spent in Tussle With the System
A third-generation army officer, a war hero, an insider who fought the system, and a general accused of spying on his political masters, marching troops to the national capital to stage a coup and toppling governments, General Vijay Kumar Singh is a man looked at in extremes, and Courage and Conviction is the story of his life. Writer and filmmaker Kunal Verma, who himself has a long record of being a decorated army chronicler, is Singh’s co-author.
One’s story is not just their own. It is as much theirs as it is of those who came before them. Singh’s story begins with that of his forefathers from the Tomar clan where the way of life dictated two choices: you either join the army or you till the land. Singh’s grandfather, father, and all of his uncles served in the army. The uniform was a natural calling.
Singh was groomed at Birla Public School in Rajasthan’s Pilani. It was here that he felt the humiliation of the 1962 debacle. It was here during the 1965 War that he and his fellow students patrolled the streets to enforce the blackdown and used a room on the school’s top floor to track the sky for Pakistani air incursions.
They say you can figure out a person’s life trajectory in their actions quite early in their lives. When you read about Singh’s early career, his later years that we are more familiar with make sense. He was in the first year of his service when his unit, the venerated 2 Rajput, was thrust into the Eastern theater where it fought to liberate Bangladesh.
Singh chronicles the good, bad, and the ugly of the war — he writes about the everyday life on the frontlines, the raw courage and calm wits of men and the officers, and also of the cowardice and the top-down corruption that let down men and the lower leadership. The way the Eastern border was practically open because the leadership looked the other way and how a company commander went to the ground the moment the enemy opened fire and only stirred forward when the brigade commander reached the place and personally prodded him — Singh writes everything in detail.
While he writes of the leadership letting them down, he also writes of commanders who joined the troops on the frontlines in their shelled cars.
Singh is blunt and descriptive in his comparison and criticism of the training at the Indian and the US armies. A graduate of the US Army Rangers course — said to be among the toughest in the world — and the US Army War College, Singh writes how the US training is much more realistic than Indian. In the United States, Singh writes that the instructors would do everything to fail a student-officer in order to push them harder (and many would indeed be failed). In India, however, the idea of failing would be scandalous. The Army HQ would jump in case student-officers failed, Singh writes, and the entire focus would be on passing officers through.
In the Indian set-up, student-officers would have the audacity to tell the instructor that their father served as the area commander and ask for a better grading!
In a career spanning 42 years, Singh saw everything from the 1971 War to Operation Blue Star and the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka. He writes how Indira Gandhi bypassed the then army chief General AS Vaidya and the Army Headquarters (both against army intervention) in favour of the Western Army Commander Lieutenant General K Sundarji. General Sundarji said he would “flush out” armed occupants from the Golden Temple in no time.
It was therefore the Western Command that planned and executed the operation. We now know how it turned out to be. Indira Gandhi was assassinated. General Sundarji became the army chief.
As chief, to a different prime minister but from the same line, General Sundarji yet again promised to “flush out” the problem. This time, it was in Sri Lanka. Again, we know how it turned out to be.
In Sri Lanka, the army had no maps or a semblance of a strategy from the top and were marched from one place to another through the jungles for a long time. Singh writes at length the way the lower leadership cultivated sources, attempted goodwill, and executed operations while the top leadership largely let them down.
Having read the memoir, you find one thing that’s consistent throughout — backing his men and standing up to the system: be it the time when he sent the list of all the 300 men and officers of the unit present on the spot during a inter-unit brawl when he was asked to name a few scapegoats for a cover up or the time he highlighted the ammunition shortage when he was posted in the Western sector.
A recurring theme in the memoir is that of his date of birth. A controversy that seems to be a child of the army bureaucracy when you read Singh’s side of the story. When people think of him, this one episode overshadows much of his career as it is closely related to arguably the biggest controversy a general can ever have — an alleged coup.
On 16 January 2012, Singh approached the apex court on the date of birth issue after the government (and the preceding army chief) did not address the anomaly. In April, a leading English daily reported in a rare full page-one story that on the night of 16 January (the day Singh moved to the Supreme Court), two army units moved towards the national capital in the thick of night and that had spooked the government. The daily’s editor-in-chief shared the byline. Soon after, stories began to emerge about a covert intelligence unit that Singh had sanctioned. The unit was accused of snooping on the government and trying to topple the Jammu and Kashmir government of the day.
Singh writes this episode and comes off scathing of the establishment. He turns all-guns-blazing at the then Prime Minister’s Office and asks how can confidential letters between an army chief and PMO get leaked? He writes about the source of all the hell that broke loose in that episode.
In his office, Singh was offered a bribe for clearing a contract by a recently retired three-star general. That moment forth in the book, you can feel Singh’s anguish — he served in an institution that seemed to have the very best and the very worst of people. An army chief — not a low-ranking officer — was battling the arms lobby. The retired senior officers’ lot was against him. His bureaucracy was against him. His ministry was not interested in his complaint. The Prime Minister’s Office, well, it was apparently pulling all the strings. From the arms lobby to previous army chiefs who “fixed” the line of succession to ensure certain officers end up being at the top in the line for the army’s top post, Singh writes it all in the book.
Even after seven decades of independence, the Indian Army remains a very insulated institution to most of the Indians who know more myths than real stories about it. It can be credited in part to the army’s own isolationist tendency, believing into the “exclusiveness” of the institution, and partly to lack of writings that have been disseminated to the general population. Much of the writings on the subjects by veterans tend to be full of jargon and lingo that make them incomprehensible for the uninitiated. Singh’s book is fairly easy to read in this regard. There are not many abbreviations that common readers will find issues with. At times, one does feel that a little explanation of some terms or phrases while describing tactical operations could have been better. After all, when a battle is being narrated, a phrase that seems central to the narrative but cannot be understood by the reader breaks the flow.
Singh gives scenic descriptions of the places his career took him to — from the Northeast India to Bhutan to Rajasthan. Narrating some of the most consequential events in India’s recent history, humour is never far — at least not in the first half of the book. As it progresses, it tends to get serious and you start to feel the gravity of the situation, the power play, and the forces that are always there around you but which you never get to see.
How strong those forces, those lobbies, and those bureaucrats are can be gauged from the fact that the chief of the country’s most venerated institution struggled to battle them. Courage and Conviction is the story of the officer and that battle with the almighty forces and a must read to get an understanding of India’s military affairs and power corridors.
Madhur Sharma is a student of journalism at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, and a graduate in history from the Delhi University. He tweets @madhur_mrt.
