A cult of
toughness and eccentricity
By K.S. Bajwa
THE British officers were well
known for their reserve that often bordered on
frostiness. They left their role models as their
successors, who were catapulted into positions of
authority. Since they had not gone through the process of
balanced growth and grooming, they hid themselves behind
impenetrable facades of icy reserve and projection of
rank.
A general was known to
have stipulated that junior officers would not raise
their eyes before him. Many were the dictums coined and
enforced. "Do not speak until spoken to" and
"junior officers are to be seen and not heard"
became watchwords.
Not knowing any better,
many of the senior officers of the early post
Independence period were exponents of the cult of
toughness. Ruffled feathers and bruised egos were
commonplace. Even then some of them met their unexpected
matches. A well-known general, who died in harness, had a
great reputation for cutting everybody around him down to
size. When talking of him, the invariable postscript that
his bark was worse than his bite did not help the hapless
victim who faced the full onslaught of his fury. While
commanding a brigade in the rather isolated Tanghdar
valley, he impartially laid down his authority right and
left to reduce his commanding officers to the level of
mere school children.My heart sank when I was informed
that he was coming to visit my company. We were located
in bunkers and dugouts on a hillside. There had been
fresh snow, but we had taken great pains to clear the
snow and spruce up the area. I received the very
stern-looking Brigadier on the road and led him up into
my location.
Going around one of the
platoons, the freshly cleared path was our undoing.
The Brigadier slipped
and fell headlong into the deep snow about 10 feet below.
Instantly the platoon commander, a canny old jat, who was
following the Brigadier, too hurtled head-long into the
snow. After we had retrieved the Brigadier and before he
could blast off, he asked the old jat how he too had
fallen. His reply was "When such an exalted officer
fell, how could I remain on my feet?" found the soft
core in the Brigadier. The blast never came. After that
whenever the tough Brigadier came he would seek out the
old jat and both would yarn together. Years later when
the battalion was located at Cooch Behar, this Brigadier
stopped by while one his way to his headquarters at
Shillong, the first person he asked for was the old jat.
Perhaps a fall in the snow had penetrated the cultivated
facade of toughness, penetrated his soft human core and
forged an enduring human equation.
Senior military
commanders often display odd behaviour. Eccentricity is
what immediately springs to mind. Rarely, however, are
these quirks of behaviour cases of genuine eccentricity.
Most often these idiosyncracies are a deliberately
calculated exercise in image projection; to stand taller
than your own inner perception. Personal insecurity,
emotional complexes, uncertainty and wear and tear
inflicted by a high pressure environment play their part
in generating personal oddities.
Field Marshal Lord
Montgomery of Alamien was perhaps one of the most
renowned recent exponents of calculated off-centre
rhythms. His celebrated berret with two badges and his
fierce ego trips, have inspired many others including
some in the Indian forces to proclaim themselves as so
and so of Kargil or such and such of Basantar or Karir.
Fortunately, however,
the Indian Armed Forces have not thrown up really
outstanding eccentrics though we have had our share of
fixations. Carriapa, our first Indian Army Chiefs,
detested the sight of hairy and spindly legs. He decreed
that henceforth the soldiers will only wear trousers.
There, we lost the elegant shorts a restful duo to the
Indian summer. Then there was, Thapar, the Corps
Commander, who rose to be a cheif enentually. He would
see the night away with a whisky glass in hand swaying to
the fiery tempo of Punjabi folk songs. His hot favourite
was the ever-green "Lathe di chadar ute saleti
rang mahiya". All self respecting and aspiring
unit and formation commanders had trained their own folk
teams or arranged to lay their hands on some
especiallyfavoured group whenever the General came
visiting. The whole corps echoed to the delightful
strains of "Lathe di chadar" and all was
well. It was another matter that during his tenure as a
chief, the "Lathe di chadar" became the
covering of thousands of brave Indian soldiers so
callously scrificed in the self invited fight against the
Chinese in 1962 in the Eastern Sector. Not much was left
to cover our faces in shame at this futile national
humiliation.
To a Brigadier, motor
vehicle accidents were an anathema. A soft-hearted man
with a verytough exterior, he felt deeply grieved,
whenever soldiers lost their lives or were hurt in an
accident. He also deeply deprecated the loss to
government property. A perfectly laudable outlook but, it
was his particular approach to counter measures, that
really made him stand out.
First, he frowned upon
the use of transport and we were a brigade strong on its
legs. And when an accident took place, whatever little
use of transport was permitted was immediately denied.
Vehicles were jacked up on wooden blocks for months on
end. Human backs were all that the unit was left with to
transport its needs. This was not all. The poor
Commanding Officers and his Subedar Major,put on their
battle gear including large packs and marched to the
brigade headquarters to stand frozen while the brigadier
vented his spleen.
In a different class
were the two generals one distrustful of his
overloaded memory would jot down aides memoire on little
chits of paper sometimes, in the middle of a dinner or a
solemn parade and kept pocketing them. At the end of the
day, he would empty his pockets out and a heap of chits
would be left for his personal staff to decipher.
The other one carried a
small notebook at all times. It lay on his bedside table
before he went off to sleep. Ever so often, he would wake
up and switch on the reading lamp to furiously scribble
in the little red book before going back to sleep.
Protestations of his hapless wife and, finally, a fairly
solemn threat to walk out on him, did not cure him of his
nocturnal confidences into his trusty journal. He was
otherwise a delightful man, but sheltered within him,
were such amusing streaks of odd behaviour.
In the armed forces, the
awe of rank and unquestioned authority, perhaps give
undue licence. Besides, there is a popular belief that
unusual traits of behaviour add to the visible impact of
the persona of a senior officer. Who could ever ignore
the Brigadier who on his inspection tour would eye
critically even a spotlessly clean barrack, march up to
the high top shelf, climb up on the bed, run his hand
over its invisible top and triumphantly bark at his
deferential audience "Dirt!" or the Colonel,
who would walk into the officers mess after the evening
games, for a cup of tea with his officers switch over to
whisky or rum according to the size of his wine bill till
then, polish off a bottle and-a-half while holding court
and around four in the morning paternally tell the
officers, who had been busy swatting mosquitoes from
their bare legs "Go and have your dinner boys".
No wonder the mess refrigerator was always choked with
uneaten dinners!
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