A picture of the ‘Tangail Airdrop’, an airborne operation launched on December 11, 1971, released by the PRO of the Defence Ministry.

Shubhadeep Choudhury

THE military treats its media interface as part of the information warfare (IW) package. A fine example of IW — perhaps the most successful in the history of the Indian Army to date — was revealed during the “Vijay Diwas” celebrations by the Army’s Eastern Command here.The Tangail Airdrop was an airborne operation launched on December 11, 1971 by the 2nd battalion of the Indian Army’s Parachute Regiment during the 1971 war with Pakistan.The airdrop and the subsequent capture of the Poongli Bridge gave the advancing Indian Army the manoeuvrability to side-step the strongly held Tongi-Dhaka Road to take the undefended Manikganj-Dhaka Road right up to the Mirpur Bridge at the gates of Dacca.Maj Gen Inder Singh Gill was the Colonel of the Para Regiment at that time. He met the Ministry of Defence PRO in Delhi before the airdrop, and asked him to ensure good publicity for the airdrop. This was critical for building up pressure on the East Pakistani military establishment. As the Army had no prior access to Tangail, photographs of the airdrop could not have been arranged. The PRO, Lt Col Ramamohan Rao, was not one to get dissuaded owing to such trifles. Rao had been to Agra a year earlier to cover an exercise by the 50th Independent Para Brigade. He fished out one of those pictures, and had it released with the caption that troops of the Indian Para Brigade were airdropped over East Pakistan in the morning of December 12.The 2nd Para Battalion, which was actually airdropped, could not have consisted more than 700 odd soldiers. A brigade, on the other hand, can have around 4,000-5,000 men. Rao had turned his constraint into an advantage!The next day international media carried the picture with the news that an entire para brigade was on its merry way to Dhaka. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Gen AAK Niazi, the Pakistani military commander in the East caved in and surrendered with over 90,000 of his men. When asked later regarding the reason for his surrender, Niazi pointed to a copy of the Times London, on his desk, carrying the doctored picture of the “Tangail Para drop”.RN Kao, the founder of the external espionage agency Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) was impressed by Rao’s pyro techniques. He complimented Rao and the latter soon became a “kaoboy” as the spooks in the RAW were then called.

Didi’s cartoon blanked out

A leading English daily recently blanked out a cartoon on West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee from its Kolkata edition.The decision drew flak from none other than Taslima Nasreen, the exiled Bangladeshi writer who occupied a central place in the cartoon.“The cartoon is about Kolkata and it’s CM. But this has not been published in Kolkata edition,” Nasreen, who had to leave Kolkata following violent protests by Muslim fanatics, tweeted.In the cartoon (published in all major editions of the paper, including Delhi and Mumbai), a caricature of Mamata is seen having a telephonic conversation with another woman who complains against curbing of her creative freedom by some patriarchal characters who enjoy the backing of the state. Mamata, touched by caller’s plight, addresses her as “Padmavati” (of the controversial movie of the same name) and says she is welcome to Bengal. The caller at the other end then says she is Taslima Nasreen, not “Padmavati”. Mamata, shocked, drops the receiver from her hand.Nasreen, who has earned the wrath of Islamic zealots because of her branding of the Islam as a misogynist religion, is in exile since 1994. She spent three years in Kolkata in the last decade. She left the city in 2007 following riotous protests by Muslim fanatics. The so-called secular Left Front government, which was in power in Bengal then, did not do anything to give her protection.Mamata Banerjee, who succeeded the communists, has also made it clear that Taslima is not welcome in Bengal. “She (Mamata Banerjee) thinks she will lose Muslim votes if she allows me to enter West Bengal”, Taslima (55), who has a fatwa on her head and now lives in the US, recently said in an interview.Mamata, even though she likes to appear as a staunch defender of the freedom of expression, does not take kindly to criticism. In the past, action had been taken against people for drawing her caricature and posting it on the Facebook.

Security forces launched a cordon and search operation. Tribune file

Srinagar, December 11

Three militants and a woman were killed during an encounter with security forces in Handwara area of north Kashmir on Monday, police said here.Director General of Police SP Vaid said the slain militants were apparently Pakistanis.Security forces launched a cordon and search operation in the early hours at Unisoo village of Handwara following intelligence inputs about the presence of militants in the area, a police official said.He said the search operation turned into an encounter as the hiding militants fired upon the forces conducting the searches.During the gunfight, three militants were killed, the official said, adding that the slain militants were most probably affiliated with the Lashkar-e-Toiba.

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He said their bodies, along with three weapons, were recovered from the encounter site.One woman was also killed in the exchange of fire, the official said.Vaid said on Twitter, “In Unisoo Handwara all three terrorists apparently Pakistanis have been neutralised by joint team of J&K Police, RR & CRPF. It has been raining whole night & boys were out there in the cold.” PTI

Jasmine Singh

Faith, trust or bonding; if you ever start doubting these attributes, well, then you should check out the videos of Shwet Ashw team, the motorcycle daredevils that have set three Guinness Book Of World Records! At the Sukhna lake, on the opening day of the first Military Literature Festival, these daredevils surely proved how one can blindly trust teammates.Power packedThe lake area was cordoned off from both the sides and police made sure the audiences watched from a safe distance. Some of the visitors, all set for a sunset photo-shoot and selfies, were taken by surprise, but they did not mind. With the track Maa tujhey salaam and Yeh shehar hai veer jawaano ka playing in the background, people waited patiently.  And then, the action began! Dressed in red and white tracks, these brave men displayed exemplary stunts on the bike.Ride onMoving together in a parallel position, making a diamond position and then moving on to the figure of eight; balancing in a flower position, swimming or stretching out hands in a Christmas position and doing bhangra; it all happened on the bike! The temple position, reverse sunbath or flying fish… this team led by Naib Subedar Navneen Kumar Tiwari kept the adrenaline pumping. However, the last two stunts — the fire tunnel and breaking the tubelight —fetched a thunderous round of applause. Time stopped as the two daredevils crossed through the tunnel of fire; they raised their hand in victory sign, signalling that the task was accomplished! Sound of clicks drowned in the applause; one wonders how well can we catch the essence of such events in our cameras? Don’t eyes and memory do the job well? 

jasmine@tribunemail.com

Andrew Griffin

WhatsApp will now tell you friends where you are, so you don’t have to.

The chat app is introducing “Live Location”, a feature that lets people give out their location in real time to their friends. None of the information will be public, and it’s intended only to be used for a short amount of time.

So if you’re going to meet someone and are not sure where they are, you can show them on a map, for instance.

It’s used by heading to a WhatsApp chat, clicking on the “add” button, press on Location and switch it on. It can be used with just one person or in group chats, where everyone will get access to your location and everyone in the chat will be shown on one map.

The feature will be rolling out on both Android and iOS “in the coming weeks”, WhatsApp said. Some people claim to already have access to it.

A number of apps have recently run into trouble over location services. Snapchat, for instance, recently added a feature that allows people to see precisely where people are — and those people might not even know they’re being tracked.

But WhatsApp will only enable the feature with explicit consent, and will let people do so for a specific amount of time if they choose.

The app has allowed people to share their location for some time. But until now it was only static, so that you could send your current location but it wouldn’t then be updated.

The new feature is similar to one offered in iMessage, but only for people who are using Apple products. From a chat, you can click the little “i” button in the corner, and opt to share your location forever or just for a short while.

— The Independent

There are paeans dedicated to Indian Armymen, but their wives remain the unsung heroes. A handful of books take in their perspective and examine their stories

Aradhika Sharma

While taking oath, a soldier swears that he will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution and honestly and dutifully protect the country, even to the peril of his life, there is an unwritten oath that the woman who weds an armyman takes as well. They pledge to commit to a life of constant ‘postings’, long separations and fears and non-salubrious climes and living quarters. No wonder, most army wives are pragmatic and have developed a sense of acceptance and humour. These women have their own code of conduct — almost as strict as that of their husbands. There are protocols in place that must be adhered to at all times. So while the Army marches ahead with its rank and file; spit and polish; cavalry, artillery, infantry et al, the indomitable ladies do their part by committing to the lives they have chosen to live, representing the softer side of an establishment that is essentially warlike. While some of these ladies have penned down their personal experiences, others have given journalistic and historical accounts in the form of books and articles. All of these works examine different angles of domestic and social lives of soldiers and their spouses and provide a significant sociological commentary on one of the most important institutions of society down the ages. The British Victorian ladies, who came to India in the halcyon days of the Raj, chronicled the lives in those times in the forms of sketches and letters. Though not an army wife Emily Eden (sister of Governor General George Auckland) wrote Up the Country: Letters From the Upper Provinces of India in 1867 . This is a collection of letters that Emily wrote to her sister Fanny. Emily’s wry and caustic style has been compared to that of Jane Austen. Her travels provide insights into the life at the top as well as her brother’s catastrophic policy in Afghanistan.A comparatively modern work on the lives of the Indian Army wives is The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India by Pat Barr (1979). It is a wonderfully witty account of British women who came to India as soldiers’ wives, fiancés and sisters in the 19th century and set up a sub culture that the ‘brown memsahibs’ (up to an extent) follow till date. Pat Barr established a reputation for herself as a popular historian. Award-winning journalist Tanya Biank wrote Under the Sabers (2006) and Army Wives (2007). Both books explore the unwritten, complex codes of military marriages. Western literature is overflowing with novels, stories, handbooks, how-to books by army wives. Some of the titles by the western authors are: Homefront Club: The Hardheaded Woman’s Guide to Raising a Military Family. It examines the actualities and challenges of being married to a military man, “from keeping a marriage together and raising good kids to maintaining some semblance of normalcy.”Portraits of the Toughest Job in the Army: Voices and Faces of Modern Army Wives by Janelle H. Mock, who explains, “It’s hard to explain to people that your husband wants to go to war, but he does. He wants the experience. That is what he is trained to do.” Today’s Military Wife by Lydia Sloan Cline is a handbook on how a wife can prosper in a service milieu. She gives information on family-friendly programmes, coping with periodic separations, managing a separate career, living overseas, raising a family, while fully participating in the military social life. Faith Deployed: Daily Encouragement for Military Wives by Jocelyn Green is a ‘collection of devotions that addresses the challenges wives face when their husbands are away protecting freedom.’There’s even A Family’s Guide to the Military for Dummies by Sheryl Garrett and Sue Hoppin and Married to the Military: A Survival Guide for Military Wives, Girlfriends and Women in Uniform by Meredith Leyva (founder of CinHouse.com, a community for army spouses). Surprisingly, Indian Army wives haven’t been writing much. Although some brave better halves have ventured into the field of literature, this category of publication is sadly in the deficit. Fin Feather and Field by Simren Kaur (also the author of childrens’ books: Ladakh: Mountains of Adventure, Mystery of the Missing Relic) is the account of 40 years of her life in the armed forces with her husband. A Soldier’s Love Story by Sonia Kundra Singh (an army officer’s wife) is more about a traumatic love tale than an account of the army life. Soldier and Spice: An Army Wife’s Life by Aditi Mathur Kumar is another foray by an army wife into writing novels. It is the story of Pia who gets married to an army officer Arjun. After she gets married regular life is a thing of the past. She is now an army wife, a memsahib. Considering that the Indian Army is one of the largest in the world, surely there is space for recounting the complex personal challenges of keeping your love alive during deployments, adjusting to  constant moves, understanding how to maximise the salaries and benefits, juggling your own career and kids and the confusing protocols and roles demanded by the institution. 

Commandant Lt Gen SK Jha with Mr IMA Tarun Vasudevan. Tribune photo

Dehradun: The IMA Ball, one of the eagerly-awaited social events, for the Autumn term was held at the Indian Military Academy. The evening of joy, merriment and nostalgia was commenced by Lt Gen SK Jha, Commandant, IMA. The highlight of the evening was the selection of Mr IMA and Miss IMA. Meenakshi Chaudhary was adjudged as Miss IMA and Gentleman Cadet Tarun Vasudevan was declared as Mr IMA. The IMA Ball is held towards the end of each term to mark the culmination of the rigorous training schedule. tns

SHADOW BOXING: Maleeha Lodhi was ridiculed for holding up a fake picture. TWITTER

G Parthasarathy

MALEEHA LODHI, Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN, is known among her friends and admirers in Pakistan and elsewhere as being high profile, ambitious and loquacious. Lodhi is regarded as being close to the military establishment since her days as an editor in Islamabad. She was also close to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s, but at loggerheads with Nawaz Sharif during his first two terms as Prime Minister.  Insiders believe that Nawaz agreed to her appointment as ambassador to the UN in his third term, after “persuasion” by the military. Having served twice as Pakistan’s envoy to Washington, as a close friend of the India-baiting Robin Raphael, Lodhi evidently thought that she would crown her tenure in New York by getting the issue of J&K back on the UN agenda, with the support of her many friends and admirers in Washington.Lodhi persuaded Pakistan’s interim Prime Minister, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, to launch a broadside against India in New York. Abbasi resorted to the usual rhetoric about alleged violations on human rights in J&K and references to antiquated UN resolutions, whose texts have long been thrown into UN waste paper baskets. Pakistanis, however, never speak of the Simla Agreement, while in New York! Not surprisingly, India’s External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, responded sarcastically, drawing attention to Pakistan’s record as a state sponsor of terrorism. She noted that while India is building institutions that are “the pride of the world”, Pakistan has only “produced terrorists and terrorist camps” of groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and Haqqani network. But, what appears to have got under Lodhi’s skin was the description of Pakistan as “Terroristan” by a young Indian First Secretary, Eenam Gambhir. An irate Maleeha became a subject of ridicule internationally and was blasted even in the Pakistani media when she displayed a photograph in the General Assembly of a young Palestinian girl wounded by Israeli pellets, bizarrely claiming that this photograph exposed Indian excesses in Kashmir.How then does one deal with a Pakistan which faces growing isolation, when ruled by a government deprived of its elected leader Nawaz Sharif, following a farcical trial, where the investigators included members of the military intelligence services, with the judiciary dancing to the tune of the military? It is evident that the military has no intention of permitting Nawaz to return to power. The Generals are determined to see that a supine judiciary disqualifies him from participating in the 2018 general elections. In the meantime, the Intelligence Bureau, which reported to Nawaz, is seeking to hold the ISI responsible for backing terrorist outfits. In the meantime, Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves are falling sharply and the IMF has thus far shown disinclination to bail it out. Pakistani economists are warning about the long-term problems posed by the China’s “One Belt, One Road” project, where Pakistan has to soon commence repaying Chinese loans of over $50 billion at near-commercial rates of interest. This, while Japan provides India long-term loans, requiring negligible interest payments.American academic Ashley Tellis, who undertook his graduate and post-graduate studies in Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College, is a highly regarded analyst on sub-continental strategic studies in Washington. In a recent study he published, Tellis clinically argues that routine calls for a “continuous India Pakistan dialogue” are “misguided” and “counterproductive”. Tellis notes that differences between India and Pakistan are fuelled by “Pakistan’s irredentism, its army’s desire to subvert India’s ascendancy as a great power, seeking revenge for past Indian military victories”. He adds that the Pakistan army has “aspirations to be treated on par with India, despite their huge differences in capabilities, achievements and prospects”. Senior officials, particularly in the Pentagon and White House, share these views of Tellis.Even influential and previously pro-Pakistani Senators like John McCain are stating that their patience is wearing thin with Pakistani duplicity. The fact that US Defence Secretary General Mattis visited India and Afghanistan and deliberately bypassed Pakistan, speaks for itself. But, given the propensity of President Trump to change his stance suddenly on foreign policy issues, India would be well advised not to be overly dependent on consistency in Trump Administration policies. Significantly, almost immediately after the Mattis visit to India and Afghanistan, Pakistan’s army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa led a military delegation to Kabul to meet Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. It is clear that General Bajwa and the ISI will decide how relations with Afghanistan and India will be conducted. The emasculated civilian leadership in Pakistan, under a cloud legally and preparing for elections, will merely be spectators, carrying out the wishes of the military.New Delhi now has to undertake a concerted diplomatic effort to take advantage of current developments.  No effort should be spared to make Pakistan pay a heavy price for its errant conduct. Dialogue, if any, with Pakistan, should be almost exclusively focused on terrorism. India has to simultaneously take measures to engage people and organisations across Pakistan who seek better ties with it, while meeting humanitarian needs of people, particularly children, in Pakistan requiring medical treatment in India, as External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has consistently demonstrated. Indian diplomacy should have a humane dimension. There are sections of people in Pakistan who are tired of the country’s domination by the army.Diplomatically, India should make common cause with Afghanistan, insisting that Pakistan does not just put all its terrorist outfits temporarily in cold storage to win American “understanding”, but defangs and dismantles them. These range from the Talban and Haqqani network, active in Afghanistan, to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, operating against India. China should be reminded to fulfil its obligations, agreed to during the BRICS Summit, to pressuride Pakistan to act against designated terrorist groups. The international community and multilateral financial Institutions like World Bank should be asked to link development funding for Pakistan to action against terrorism. President Trump will, hopefully, take up these issues when he visits China. But, ultimately much will depend on the ability of the Afghanistan government to develop an internal political consensus and effectively address issues of corruption, national security and economic development.Winter snows will soon close Himalayan mountain passes in Kashmir. India should be ready with effective covert, pre-emptive and proactive measures to respond effectively to infiltration across the LoC, when the snows melt in 2018.