What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
Jammu and Kashmir took shape thanks to the great Dogra General Zorawar Singh. He marched his army north from Jammu to Batote, turned east to Kishtwar and Padar, then crossed the might of the main Himalayan range to get to Padam, then conquered Kargil, Skardu, and Leh, before crossing Aksai Chin into Tibet. We hear Whites-obsessed Western analysts talk of how Russia’s winter defeated Napoleon as well as the Third Reich’s attempt to conquer Russia, but we should be talking instead of how the Tibetan winter determined the geography of Asia.
General Zorawar Singh’s samadhi is on the bank of the Mansarovar Lake. His triumphal progress may have been stopped partway through Tibet, but that awesome general determined the contours of Jammu and Kashmir state long before the East India Company made a deal with his master, Raja Gulab Singh, which made the latter maharaja of all the hill territories they had won from Gulab Singh’s Sikh overlords at the Battle of Subraon in 1846. They had no idea that the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh had not only won Kashmir when he defeated the Afghans but that Zorawar Singh had established Gulab Singh’s banner over the vast mountain expanses north and east of the Kashmir Valley thereafter—so that their treaty with Gulab Singh made him master of a state the size of Britain.
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Witless rulers
Our witless rulers broke that strategically vital state into two union territories in 2019, thus invalidating the declaration in the constitution of the state that the state of Jammu and Kashmir `is and shall remain an integral part of India.’ A highly-placed imbecile argued publicly that no merger had been required for `large principalities’—whatever `large’ might mean—when the merger of J&K had in any case been achieved through the state’s constitution in 1958 (when Nehru was the prime minister).
Since 2019, the witless have ceded territory to Chinese aggressors, even after the marvellously brave soldiers of the Indian Army fought gallantly at Galwan in June of that year. The least they ought to do now is keep alive the heroic memory of General Zorawar Singh. It is he who brought the Pangong Tso lake into what became the Republic of India. It would have been appropriate to install his statue on the bank of that lake, as a reminder of the courage and resilience that took a Dogra army halfway across Tibet.
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It was also the grit and determination of 40 Dogra soldiers, led by two young officers of that meritorious regiment, who volunteered to cross that mighty main Himalayan range again in the wintry March of 1948 to wade through high snow to Leh. They then held Ladakh until Major (later Major-General) Rajinder Singh `Sparrow’ led a tank regiment across the Zoji La to relieve them in November 1948. That too is a story of incredible grit and determination. There was not even a road to Sonamarg then. But Major General (later Field Marshall) Cariappa made it impossible for the troops to turn back after he leapt onto the lead tank as it struggled to ascend the steep mountain to a ridge at a height of 11,000 ft.
Memorialise the conquerors
If General Zorawar Singh’s memory was to be lost in the mists of time, at least that great ascent and the immense bravery of those 40 soldiers of the Second Battalion of the Dogra Regiment ought to be commemorated. But the British, and their globally very powerful allies, wouldn’t want that. In 1947 and thereafter, they did what they could to ensure that the state either became independent or went to Pakistan, which they believed—correctly, as it turned out, at least until the 1980s—they could control more easily than they could influence India.
The British did not want Ladakh to become a part of India. They literally gifted Pakistan the areas around Gilgit farther to the north, which they controlled through the Gilgit Lease. That is why those 40 soldiers and their two officers volunteered to go and were waved on by acting Brigadier (later C-in-C, Eastern Command) Lionel Protip Sen after Sen’s requests for Army Headquarters to clear that expedition had been ignored for weeks.
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Army Headquarters in both India and Pakistan were of course still headed by British officers. Generals Bucher and Gracey, the C-in-Cs of the two new countries met in London during the very month when those Dogra volunteers went across the Himalayas to Leh. In their capital, those traitorous generals putatively divided Jammu and Kashmir between their armies, giving all of Ladakh and all of Poonch to Pakistan.
One sometimes wonders if it isn’t a Western Deep State conspiracy to ensure that India only celebrates the memory of those dynasties which were finally overpowered by Western colonialism. For, it seems inexplicable that most of us, even within the military, do not know much about those heroes who expanded and defended the country’s borders, either in 1947-48 or before that.
David Devadas is an Indian journalist and author who has written extensively on Kashmir and its politics.
