Meghaduta (cloud messenger) is a Sanskrit poem written (c. 400 CE) by Kalidasa, considered one of the greatest Indian poets, about a message of love carried by a cloud to the Himalayas. This poem served as the code-name of the military operation launched by India to gain control over the ridges adjacent to the Siachen glacier.
By Ravi Baghel and Marcus Nüsser
Department of Geography, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University
Cluster of
Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context, Heidelberg, Germany
Meghaduta
(cloud messenger) is a Sanskrit poem written (c. 400 CE) by Kalidasa,
considered one of the greatest Indian poets, about a message of love carried by
a cloud to the Himalayas. This poem served as the code-name of the military
operation launched by India to gain control over the ridges adjacent to the
Siachen glacier. There was dark humour in the choice of the code-name, as
Operation Meghdoot, launched on 13 April 1984, consisted of Indian air force
helicopters carrying assault troops to the area to obtain control of key ridges
and passes. Pakistan had also planned Operation Ababeel to capture the same
ridges, but the Indians came to know of it and moved first. The attack of the
Pakistanis was unsuccessful as by then the Indians already held the commanding
positions on the passes (Musharraf, 2007, pp 68-69).
Even though it
has been presented at times as the first military incursion into the area,
there had been military activity prior to this. The Indian air force first
landed helicopters on the glacier in 1978 (Ministry of Defence, 2014). The
Indian army moved a large number of troops on foot to the base of the Siachen
glacier in 1983, and they had been trained for several weeks to be able to
fight there (Indian Army, 2014). The Indian General in charge of the operation,
acknowledged that he had been one of a small group of influential officers who
had begun lobbying for an aggressive Indian policy on Siachen already in the
late 1970s. However he stated that operation was intended to be just a show of
force, and not the permanent occupation that it later became (Wirsing, 1995,
pp. 208-209).
The initial
plan was to deploy troops to three passes on the Saltoro range that controlled
access to the Siachen glacier, from north to south, Sia La, Bilafond La and
Gyong La (Fig. 1). However, after these positions were secured, the two armies
began to compete to gain higher ground nearby.
Map Attribute: Satellite
image with toponyms, altitudes and villages of area surrounding Siachen
glacier. The 71 km long glacier runs diagonally from top left at Indira Col to
its snout near Dzingrulma, the last Indian military camp. The Indian Army
positions run along the Saltoro ridge, west of the glacier, along a line
connecting Indira Col, Sia La, Bilafond La and Gyong La. The Pakistan Army has
camps at Goma and Gyari and access over the Baltoro glacier to the Conway
Saddle and glaciers in the southwestern part. The area controlled by China is
located north of the ridge from K2 to the Teram Shehr plateau.
The belief
that if one side did not capture a height then the other would, led to the
militarization of the entire ridge-line. This rapidly increased the number of
troops required by the Indian army to hold the commanding positions, and made
the logistics of the operation even more complex. This large deployment combined
with a sophisticated logistic chain created the fear that India might attack
the Northern Areas (since 2009 called Gilgit-Baltistan) territory of Pakistan,
which ended up escalating the number of Pakistani soldiers in turn (Raghavan,
2002, pp 41-43).
In spite of
previous training, the extreme cold and high altitude produced very high
casualty figures. Of the 29 Indian soldiers who landed at Bilafond La, one had
to be immediately evacuated. Another soldier died on the second day of High
Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE), and 21 of the remaining suffered frost bites
(Gokhale, 2014). Many of the medical conditions that developed at such high
altitude could not even be diagnosed at first, and it was only after 1986 that
some of the conditions and ways of dealing with them became known (Anand,
2001). The Pakistani army termed the psychological effect of fighting at high
altitude “Siachen syndrome”, describing the progressive change in personality
of its soldiers at such extreme altitudes from normal to selfish, then
introverted and finally irrational (Ali, 1991, p. 12).
India had been
conducting research on high altitude mountain warfare since its defeat in the
1962 war against China, much of which was fought in the Himalayas. As part of
this a 200 bed hospital specialised in high altitude medicine, which is today
the main hospital supporting Indian troops on Siachen, had been set up in Leh
shortly thereafter (Bewoor, 1968). The “High Altitude Warfare School” was
established at the same time and created a large cadre of well trained military
mountaineers. This also meant that Indian climbing expeditions almost always
included army officers (Sircar, 1984; Raghavan, 2002, p. 32). This military
presence in fact was one reason why Pakistan was extremely suspicious of Indian
mountaineering expeditions that had entered the Siachen area (Khan, 2001, p.
224). Another reason India was willing to station troops around the year,
unlike Pakistan, was that it already had soldiers with experience in the
extreme conditions of Antarctica. The preparations for the first year round
occupation of the Indian Antarctic research station, Dakshin Gangotri, began in
December 1983, with the construction and scientific team primarily consisting
of people drawn from the Indian army (Stewart, 2011, p. 384). These same
officers were subsequently in charge of organising the training and logistics
for the year-round occupation of the Siachen glacier (Sharma, 2001, pp.
209-303).
As early as
1993, the hot war initiated by Operation Meghdoot began to become a frozen
conflict. Wirsing (1995) quotes a general of the Indian army summing up the
military situation at that time:
“Environmental
casualties … were down dramatically e by 90 percent e to a rate less, than that
of an ordinary military unit elsewhere in the country … there were no fighting
related casualties. The economic costs of Siachen were routinely inflated by
the media; India … could bear them indefinitely” (Wirsing, 1995, p. 214,
emphases in original).
A total of 846
Indian soldiers have died in the conflict between 1984 and 2012 according to
official figures (Ministry of Defence 2012). However, the casualties have
varied over the years and other estimates are that the Indian army lost around
30 soldiers per year till 2003, when a ceasefire began, after which fatalities
reduced to around 10 deaths per year, and subsequently to 4 per year (Pubby,
2008). This significant reduction in number of casualties is one reason the
Indian Army did not feel compelled to withdraw from the glacier (Thapar, 2006).
This
complacence of the Indian Army regarding the stalemate was challenged by the
Pakistan Army in the Kargil War in 1999, which took place along the LoC. The
possible strategic rationale for this was:
“A Pakistani
nuclear capability would paralyze not only the Indian nuclear decision, but
also Indian conventional forces, and a bold Pakistani strike to liberate
Kashmir might go unchallenged if Indian leadership was indecisive (Cohen, 1984,
p. 153)”.
Pakistan had
become overtly nuclear in 1998; and at the time of this conflict, India was
being run by a minority caretaker government, conditions that fit the above
scenario.
The Kargil War
was planned to be a “reverse Siachen” so that the Pakistan Army would occupy
high mountain positions along the LoC while they were vacated during the
winter, preempting the Indian Army's reoccupation (Tufail, 2009). Although this
would be a violation of the Simla Agreement of 1972, in the Pakistani
perspective, India had already violated it by militarizing the Siachen area.
Pakistan claimed to have no control over the fighters, alleging that they were
Kashmiri freedom fighters. The use of heavy artillery and identity documents on
the corpses of these fighters, made this very unlikely. A taped conversation
between the General in charge of the area, and the Pakistan Army Chief, (later
President) General Musharraf incontrovertibly established that the fighters
were Pakistani soldiers (Swami, 1999, p. 33).
An official
Indian government report on the Kargil conflict also noted the aspect of this
attack being Operation Meghdoot in reverse, but interestingly proposed a
response diametrically opposed to that on Siachen:
“[India] must
not fall into the trap of Siachenisation of the Kargil heights and similar
unheld, unpopulated ‘gaps’ in the High Himalaya along the entire length of the
Northern Border” (quoted in Nair, 2009, p. 37, emphasis added).
This
conclusion perfectly illustrates the dilemma of preemptive occupation of
heights and the logistical problems created as a result of this.
This article is an excerpt from a research paper "Securing the
heights: The vertical dimension of the Siachen conflict between India and
Pakistan in the Eastern Karakoram" Published by
Elsevier Ltd. under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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