India - Pakistan War 1971: Military Triumph and Political Failure

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1971 was an exceptional year for India for the development and exercise of its national power dynamics. It had won an outstanding military victory against a foreign power the like of which it had not known in the centuries of the sub-continental history before it. Politically and diplomatically it kept at bay the rest of the world while its soldiers decisively defended its vital national interests, decisively, defeated Pakistan's military regime and liberated the atrociously oppressed people of the erstwhile East Pakistan to become an independent Bangladesh. The Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the late Field Marshal SHFJ Manekshaw, decisively led the nation to use the vital instruments of statecraft and the nation's armed power to give India a brilliant military victory that the nation had not experienced in the centuries gone by. For the first time after the independence of India there was complete synergy between the political executive and its military power. When all other moves had failed, the soldiers created the necessary conditions for a political initiative to promote the long-term national purpose of peace with Pakistan. Unfortunately in the post war negotiations the political executive failed to build upon what the soldiers had won on the field of battle. Even more so in the years that have followed, the political executive and its vital military instrument of state power are being driven apart.

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Major General Kuldip Singh Bajwa was commissioned into the Indian Army on 22 December 1946. He had the rare distinctionof having served in the engineers, the infantry (3 Jat), and the artillery, three of the premier fighting arms of the army. He graduated from the Defense Services Staff College, Wellington in 1959, and in February 1972, he was selected to command infantry fromations. He had held a variety of command and staff appointments and took part in all the military operations from 1947 to 1971. After leaving service on 1 November 1979m he became a widely read defense columnist, an objectively critical military analyst, and an accurate military historian. His four earlier books, the Falcon in My Name-A Soldiers Diary, Jammu and Kashmir War 1947-48: Political and Military Perspective, The Dynamics of Soldiering, and India's National Security-The Challenges and Responses have become a must read inside as well as outside the military circles.