Lessons from Kargil: 25 years on

The war demonstrated India's ability to effectively conduct tri-service operations, even in the absence of a formal tri-service doctrine

- ANUJ SHUKLA

A quarter of a century has elapsed since MayJuly 1999, when India and Pakistan fought a .74-day mini-war in the Kargil sector of the Line of Control (LOC) - the de facto border between the two countries. The so-called Kargil conflict took the lives of more than 500 soldiers from each side and marked the culmination of a geopoliticallycharged period in South Asia. It is worth revisiting the tactical, strategic and diplomatic lessons that emerged from that conflict.

New Delhi went into the Kargil War at a particularly turbulent juncture in its history. India's higher command structure led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and advised by his hawkish principal secretary Brajesh Mishra, and Cabinet members George Fernandes, Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha was inclined to project power and favoured expeditionary (outward-looking) solutions to regional problems, such as the long-running Tamil Tigers insurgency in Sri Lanka.

In the circumstances, India's military was already bloodied by confrontations. By 1992, the decade-old Pakistan-backed Sikh insurgency in Punjab was winding down, with even the most fanatical Sikhs realising they had run out of popular support in Punjab - the only Sikh-majority province in India. Earlier, the Indian military's intervention in Sri Lanka from 1987-1990 had been wound down, with the Tamil Tigers giving the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) a sharp lesson in the limits of power. Assam was in turmoil due to the United Liberation Front of Assam. Even as the IPKF was withdrawing from Sri Lanka, Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) went up in flames in 1989-90, with thousands of Kashmiri youngsters crossing the LoC into Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) for weapons training in Pakistan-run camps. The Union defence budget was at an all-time high of almost 4 per cent of gross domestic product.