Kutch Key to Sindoor Sequel

Kutch is our most forgotten war with Pakistan. Learn from it and draw up a plan for the next six months, two years and five years

- SHEKHAR GUPTA

While it is only India that still formally calls Operation Sindoor an unfinished business, both countries are seeing it as something of a trailer. Or a prelude to the next round. Not an issue fought to any conclusion.

The subcontinent's record tells us this is not the best place to be in. We have a precedent in the short Kutch conflict of April 9, 1965. Both sides called a truce, but the first full-scale India-Pakistan war followed five months later.

Pakistan launched the war having learned the wrong lessons from Kutch. We might hope for better sense six decades later. But hope isn't a plan or strategy.

It takes a lot for Pakistan to accept defeat, liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, or a clear capitulation in Kargil, for example. Anything less than inarguably decisive, you can count on them to call it a victory. And once they psych themselves into a "see we won that little war" state of mind, you can expect them to come back, sooner rather than later.

At this point, each side is drawing its own lessons. Just hours before I sat down to write this column, Lt Gen Rahul Singh, one of the three deputy chiefs of Army staff, had reflected on some lessons learnt and pointers for the future. This is good thinking. At least one side (the good side, us), isn't mindlessly celebrating victory, but thinking ahead. This too has parallels with Kutch.

India drew its lessons, too, more sensibly and realistically, and the result was a strategic victory in the subsequent war. A strategic victory for India because Pakistan was the only side with an objective (grabbing Kashmir) and started the war. The objective was denied, and it was forced back on the defensive across the entire frontier. A stalemate, with the aggressor and first-mover Pakistan on the defensive, was victory for India. In the end, the difference was the lesson the two sides drew from Kutch.