High On Himself

General K.V. Krishna Rao’s In the Service of the Nation adds to the growing archive of writings by the leadership of India’s security forces at the highest level. This is certainly a trend to be welcomed. Far too much obfuscation and secrecy has characterised public discourse on matters relating to internal and external security in this country. Worse, an enormous wealth of experience is lost in the silence of those who have seen, participated in and often shaped the destinies of the nation in some of its moments of gravest danger.

Sadly, the personal memoir—a form most encouraged by Indian publishers—is far from the best medium to share the experiences and insights accumulated over a career of over four decades in the army alone, and nearly a decade thereafter as governor, first in the northeast and then in two tenures in strife-riven Jammu & Kashmir. The best of memoirs are vulnerable to allegations of selective memory, personal bias and a combination of defensiveness and self-projection that can only be covered up by very fine writing. Regrettably, the general lacks the necessary flair and penmanship, and his book is not among the best examples of a military memoir.

It is, nevertheless, an interesting book, with the enormous temporal and geographical sweep of the general’s experience. But there’s an uncomfortable tension between the personal and the professional that is never sufficiently resolved throughout the book. There is some interpolation of personal details and anecdotage, but this occurs more as an interruption of the official record. Unfortunately, the bulk of the book reads like an official record, replete with bureaucratese, a record, however, shorn of operational details. The dates, the events, the personalities are all there, meticulously reported, but these fail to create a graphic, empathetic image of the enormity of the events the general has been party to.

There are, of course, occasional flashes, and the opening pages do capture the excitement of the triumph in East Pakistan and the Pakistani surrender at ‘Dacca’. Later, there are several anecdotes relating to the counter-insurgency campaigns in Manipur and Nagaland that recover a degree of inspiration—but these are rare glimmers of relief. Indeed, some of the most momentous events—the counter-terrorist campaign in Sopore, to take a random example—are often dismissed in dry passages that fail totally to communicate the magnitude of the achievement. Other passages descend into banality, as, for instance, the general’s outline of his "action plan" for J&K: "Briefly, this envisaged controlling militancy at an early date, restoring democracy, and winning back the people." In other words, the solution of the problem was to solve the problem!

There is another vexing, and unfortunately recurrent, element in the book. The general repeatedly quotes passages of appreciation out of formal letters received from various ‘eminences’. Among these, he includes Robin Raphael, the then "US Assistant Secretary-designate for South Asia", who wrote him a "nice letter", remarking that "it is clear to me the right man has been chosen for the job" of sorting out the J&K problem. Gen Rao’s work and his enormous achievements through a remarkable career speak for themselves. He doesn’t need testimonials.

The book, of course, takes us through much more than the general’s experiences with insurgencies and terrorism and includes critical issues of policy, strategic planning, his role in shaping critical choices relating to military technology and the emerging integration of the defence forces. Through all this, however, one does feel the general would have been far better served by a professional biographer.