The Lie Nailed

• IB chief Shyamal Datta’s signed report to the PM, home minister and army in June ’98 on infiltration ignored
• 45 intelligence inputs sent between May 1998 and April ’99. Only 25 per cent sent to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JC) for action.
• JIC reports not taken seriously at the highest political and bureaucratic levels
• Lack of awareness of critical and assessed intelligence
• Leadership lulled into complacency by the 1999 Delhi-Lahore bus yatra

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Why did Kargil happen? Was it intelligence failure or inability to comprehend and act on intelligence? The Kargil Review Committee(KRC) headed by defence analyst K. Subramanyam had gone into this question in great detail. Officers of the army, air force and the intelligence agencies haddeposed before it and top secret documents were examined closely. The report contained theKRC’s conclusions on intelligence operations—something that was expunged from the version made public by the thenNDA government. This segment of the report has been made available exclusively toOutlook. For the first time, one gets a sense of what transpired between June 1998 and the outbreak of war in May the following year.

While the official spin by the then Vajpayee government was that the authorities did initiate the best possible response to the Pakistani incursions, theKRCreport tells a different story. To quote from the expunged part: "The Director, Intelligence Bureau(DIB), did convey inputs on enemy activity in areas under the Gilgit-based FCNA (Force Commander Northern Areas) of Pakistan to the prime minister, home minister, cabinet secretary, home secretary and the director general of military operations(DGMO)." These inputs were given in June 1998, eleven months before the war broke out.

Former DIB Ajit Doval, who was posted in Srinagar before Operation Vijay, told Outlook that the intelligence reports were so serious that a letter signed by then dib Shyamal Dutta was sent to top political establishment and the army. Points out Doval: "See, theDIB signs barely two to three letters a year depending on how critical the input is. The
very fact that he did sign the letter shows that he was convinced that there were intrusions. So, why did the troops on the ground not take cognisance or action at all? Did army headquarters send out orders that no winter posts were to be
vacated in the light of these inputs?"

Doval says that it was the "prevailing mindset" then that led to the intrusions by Pakistan. "When we sent the reports, not many took it seriously. How else can you explain such a cold response by the army headquarters after they received our report— that too signed by Shyamal Dutta?" The "prevailing mindset" being the sense of complacency theBJP-led government was lulled into in the run-up to the Lahore Declaration signed in February 1999 during prime minister A.B. Vajpayee’s busyatra.

There are other revelations in the KRCreport which clearly establish that repeated intelligence inputs were ignored. Here are some of them quoted directly from the expunged part of the report:

• There was a general lack of awareness of the critical importance of and the need for assessed intelligence at all levels. JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) reports did not receive the attention they deserved at the political or senior bureaucratic levels.
• Of the 45 intelligence inputs generated between May 1998 and April 1999, only 25 per cent went through to the JIC.
• A Kargil-type situation could perhaps have been avoided had the Indian army followed a policy of Siachen-isation to plug unheld gaps along the 168-km stretch from Kaobal Gali to Chorbat La—such dispersal of forces to hold uninhabited territory of no strategic value would have dissipated considerable military strength and effort and would not have at all been cost-effective. The alternative should be a credible declaratory policy of swiftly punishing wanton, wilful violation of the sanctity of the LoC.

The KRC went into the details of the intelligence-related events and held 16 meetings with the Research and Analysis Wing (raw) and Aviation Research Centre(ARC) between August 1999 and December 2000. It looked for truth in the much reported and debated "intelligence failure". Its conclusion that intelligence inputs were actually ignored was so embarrassing, say sources, that theNDA government didn’t make it public.

Now, General V.P. Malik’s book—Kargil: From Surprise to Victory—has once again resurrected the debate on "intelligence failure". Here’s Malik’s take: "There was a failure to anticipate or identify military action of this nature. Intelligence agencies kept harping on the presence of jehadi militants. There were no intelligence reports on a planned armed intrusion. raw and IB were reporting directly to the prime minister and did not share their reports laterally". But theKRC’s chapters on the functioning of intelligence are categorical that reports from the dib did go to army headquarters.

Malik also claims that he did not return from his trip to Poland until May 20, 1999, because the intelligence agencies "kept harping on the situation as ‘jehadi militants’ intrusion". But intelligence gathered by theRAW’s ARC had already established a large Pakistani army presence in the Mushkoh Valley on the Indian side as early as May 16 (see interview).

What’s more, Doval points out, the Pakistanis were conducting a covert operation and posing as jehadis to spring surprise. "What is more important in a situation like this? Should we waste time debating whether the men intruding were jehadis, or should we first take action? Most of the army patrols that should have verified these reports were only on paper," says Doval.

So, who are guilty of the Kargil lapses? "Intelligence failure" has all along been a convenient scapegoat. But the truth lies elsewhere and will only be revealed if the generals of that time come clean.