Valiant Deeds, Undying Memories: a book review
By Mukul Pandya*
February 6, 2022
In May 1991, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi went to Sriperumbudur, a town near Chennai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, for an election campaign meeting. A young woman named Dhanu approached him to place a garland around his neck. Then she bent lower to touch Gandhi’s feet, and in doing so, detonated a bomb hidden under her clothes.
Gandhi and the suicide-bomber were killed instantly, as were several others. It turned out to be a plot masterminded by a man named Sivarasan, nicknamed One Eyed Jack because of his prosthetic eye. The assassination of the Indian leader was headline news around the world. It also shone a spotlight on the civil war in Sri Lanka and the intervention in that country -- at Gandhi’s behest, when he was the Prime Minister in 1987 -- of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF).
The civil war in Sri Lanka, which started in the late 1970s, was launched by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The guerilla group sought an independent state in the Northern and Eastern parts of the country, which is dominated by the Tamil population. It organized attacks and suicide bombings, killing hundreds of Sri Lankan soldiers as well as Sinhalese, who are the majority in the country.
By 1985, the Tamil Tigers took control of large parts of the north and set up their own government in Jaffna. Two years later, Gandhi and the Sri Lankan government agreed to have Indian troops in Jaffna, and other regions, enforce a ceasefire between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government – which failed to materialize.
Now, far from the corridors of political power and the bureaucracy in New Delhi, a new book offers perspectives on that tragic period, from the point of view of the Indian officers and soldiers who served in the IPKF. Titled Valiant Deeds, Undying Memories: The Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, the book’s editors are retired Lieutenant Colonels Atul Kochhar and B.R. Nair, both of whom were part of the IPKF.
At its peak, the Force had four infantry divisions with about 88,000 troops and 12,000 officers; roughly 2,000 manning the tanks and other armored vehicles; about 1,000 servicing and handling more than 50 aircraft, including helicopters, for ferrying soldiers and supplies; and roughly 25 naval ships patrolling the coast and bringing supplies and ferrying troops to and from Chennai and Mandapam bases in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The book recounts several tales of quiet heroism. For instance, a soldier’s limb is blown off by a land mine planted by the LTTE. When an officer seeks to reassure the soldier, he responds nonchalantly: “It’s not going to grow back.” Some of the tales are colored by dark humor. For instance, an IPKF soldier accidentally sets off his gun. Responding to the sound, several in his unit also begin firing their weapons, believing that they are under attack by the LTTE. Afterwards, the IPKF soldiers and officers wondered why the attack never materialized.
The contributors and editors of the book express surprise and disappointment over the actions of the political establishment in both Sri Lanka and India. Tragically, an operation that was intended to bring peace and disarmament to Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking regions escalated into a full-fledged counter insurgency conflict.
The air was slowly sucked out of the IPKF operation as Gandhi was replaced by V.P. Singh as Prime Minister in India, and, as Ranasinghe Premadasa succeeded J. R. Jayewardene as President in Sri Lanka, By 1990, all Indian troops were withdrawn from Sri Lanka.
The soldiers were performing an assignment which the Indian government and the two warring sides - the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE - agreed they should carry out: enforce peace. So, as the authors note, they feel betrayed that their heavy sacrifices, including loss of lives of colleagues, has not been honored by the Indian government.
The book notes: “Sadly, the top echelons of the (Indian) armed forces too were complicit in ignoring the sacrifice of the over 1,200 killed and over 3,000 wounded in the IPKF who only went into Sri Lanka under legitimate orders, to do their duty in the best traditions of the Indian Armed Forces. This legacy needs to be restored and the (failed) campaign must be studied with all its warts, so that similar mistakes are never repeated in the future.”
The civil war continued until January 2009, when the Sri Lankan army took full control of the regions run by the LTTE. More than 70,000 died in the conflict and several thousands were displaced.
Wilfred Owen, a poet who fought in the First World War, once wrote: “My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.” More than a century later, this book shows that such pitiful tragedies are still being repeated.
*Mukul Pandya was editor in chief and executive director of Knowledge @ Wharton until 2021, and senior fellow at Wharton Customer Analytics and AI for Business at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in 2020-21.