In the Eighties, the way we saw ourselves in the region influenced a shift in our Burma policy and, more importantly, in the way Burma began looking at us. It was a period characterised by some muscle-flexing. Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister by accident. One day he was a pilot, the next day he became a Prime Minister, when his mother was assassinated. He had an adventurist Chief of Army Staff, General Krishnaswamy Sundarji, described by one obituary writer as “whisky-sipping” and “thinking”. They were the chief drivers of changing the strategic environment of the country and its neighbourhood.
Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister embarked on a high-risk course, imposing an economic blockade on landlocked Nepal. It was classic Big Brother. Nepal and Bhutan are buffer states with our giant northern neighbour, China. To put it simply, the blockade caused hardship to the people and gave rise to greater sympathy for the Maoists who began using the situation to their advantage.
Then General Sundarji embarked on Operation Brasstacks. It was aimed at Pakistan. The General mobilised practically the entire army and conducted a massive exercise along the border with Pakistan. In a sense our soldiers were eyeballing theirs, all the way from the reaches of the Himalayas and downwards along our western borders. Only it was an exercise, not the real thing. Brasstacks was meant to show force, not use it, which went somewhat contrary to the philosophy of use of power where the certainty of the use of force counts for more than the severity of it. Soldiers will agree there is a thin line between the show of force and the use of it. Sooner or later, the bluff is called. But together, Operations Blue Star and Brasstacks pushed Pakistan into depending more on proxy war, notably via Operation Tupac. It has recently been suggested that Rajiv Gandhi did not know about the true intent of Brasstacks and the direction in which it was taking India, but that is another story.
But it is certain Rajiv Gandhi did not know where his southern misadventure would take him. On the southern front, he sent the Indian peacekeeping force into Sri Lanka. We had created a creature we couldn’t control and sent the army there to sort it out. The army went in cockily. They thought just one division of troops would do, and they thought they could return soon. The 54 Division from Secunderabad was flown in. One division is about 17,000 soldiers commanded by a Major General. We got it totally wrong and ultimately almost four divisions went into tiny Sri Lanka and got sucked into the morass of our making till the Sri Lankans ordered us out. The monster we created was to come back later to bite Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur, but that is also another story.
Then General Sundarji did Operation Checkerboard in the Northeast, by throwing a division of troops into Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, into areas vacated by the Chinese in 1962 when they went back after giving us a bloody nose. People who have attended boundary talks with China will tell you that the Chinese took the disturbance of the status quo seriously. Soldiers who have served in Ladakh and the Northeast will tell you their lives there became suddenly tougher: the Chinese had begun supplying Northeast insurgents with more arms. That is where Burma, which began calling itself Myanmar sometime in the late Eighties, comes in. Our mantra for Myanmar was to prescribe democracy. The military junta believed democracy would lead to the disintegration of Myanmar. Were we prepared for the blowback?
Sudarshan is the author of Anatomy of an Abduction: How the Indian Hostages in Iraq Were Freed
sudarshan@newindianexpress.com