A war no one won

India may be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 war this month but it will need a lot more than a “war carnival” at Rajpath to etch it in public memory. If 1965 is truly India’s forgotten war, there are reasons for it.

Sandwiched between the humiliation suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962 and the exhilaration of a Pakistani surrender in 1971, the 1965 war resulted in a stalemate. There were no surrender ceremonies at Dhaka’s Race Course Ground like in 1971 nor was there an emotional “Ae mere watan ke logon…” which brought Jawaharlal Nehru to tears like in 1962. 1965 didn’t change the political geography of the sub-continent; no territories exchanged hands. Before the ink on the Tashkent Agreement had dried, then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri passed away, overshadowing everything that had happened earlier.

The war was the product of a certain geopolitical and temporal context. The Indian Army had lost badly to the Chinese in 1962, which created a sense of false superiority in the Pakistan army. Hoping to squeeze India with Chinese support, Pakistan had ceded land in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir to China. As a member of various Western military alliances, Pakistan had also benefited from American aid and military equipment. Pakistan was politically stable and its economy was held up by top economists as an example for other developing countries.

Meanwhile, India was still in the process of strengthening and modernising its armed forces following the 1962 debacle and 1965 seemed like an opportune time for Pakistan to move in. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub’s young and ambitious foreign minister, had been speaking of an Algeria like uprising in Kashmir which would finish “the unfinished business of Partition”. Bhutto was the brain behind Operation Gibraltar, where Pakistan aimed to stage an insurrection in J&K through massive infiltration, sabotage and subversion.

NEW DELHI: Pakistan has long claimed victory over India in the 1965 war, celebrating September 6 as the 'Defence of Pakistan Day', when most objective assessments have held that the war ended more or less in a draw.

India was always more realistic, with its official war history recording that the 1965 war was more of a stalemate than anything else. Military gains were also lost on the negotiating table.

But with the Modi government deciding to celebrate the 1965 war as a "great victory" on its 50th anniversary, with even a "commemorative carnival" being planned, a new reader-friendly history of the war unabashedly concludes: "India won the war."

Commissioned by the Army's official think-tank Centre for Land Warfare Studies, the new book titled '1965, Turning the Tide: How India Won the War' has been written by defence analyst Nitin Gokhale. The book is part of the defence ministry's ongoing major project to rewrite histories of all wars and major operations to make them "simple and reader-friendly", as earlier reported by TOI.

While IAF's new history of its operations in the 1965 war debunks accounts that its Pakistani counterpart was the victor since the former lost more aircraft, as was reported on Sunday, the Army book goes several steps further.

"It is clear India not only thwarted the Pakistani designs but also inflicted unacceptable losses on the Pakistani military, triggering many changes within that country's politico-military structure," argues the book, which will be released on September 1.

confuzzled dude wrote:

India may be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 war this month but it will need a lot more than a “war carnival” at Rajpath to etch it in public memory. If 1965 is truly India’s forgotten war, there are reasons for it.

Sandwiched between the humiliation suffered at the hands of the Chinese in 1962 and the exhilaration of a Pakistani surrender in 1971, the 1965 war resulted in a stalemate. There were no surrender ceremonies at Dhaka’s Race Course Ground like in 1971 nor was there an emotional “Ae mere watan ke logon…” which brought Jawaharlal Nehru to tears like in 1962. 1965 didn’t change the political geography of the sub-continent; no territories exchanged hands. Before the ink on the Tashkent Agreement had dried, then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri passed away, overshadowing everything that had happened earlier.

The war was the product of a certain geopolitical and temporal context. The Indian Army had lost badly to the Chinese in 1962, which created a sense of false superiority in the Pakistan army. Hoping to squeeze India with Chinese support, Pakistan had ceded land in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir to China. As a member of various Western military alliances, Pakistan had also benefited from American aid and military equipment. Pakistan was politically stable and its economy was held up by top economists as an example for other developing countries.

Meanwhile, India was still in the process of strengthening and modernising its armed forces following the 1962 debacle and 1965 seemed like an opportune time for Pakistan to move in. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub’s young and ambitious foreign minister, had been speaking of an Algeria like uprising in Kashmir which would finish “the unfinished business of Partition”. Bhutto was the brain behind Operation Gibraltar, where Pakistan aimed to stage an insurrection in J&K through massive infiltration, sabotage and subversion.

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/big-picture-1965-fifty-years-later/