Sunday, September 11, 2016

Who Won the 1965 War? India or Pakistan?

How did Gurdaspur, an overwhelming Muslim majority district of Punjab, end up in India?

What was its significance for Kashmir? What role did Nehru and Abdullah play in Kashmir prior to the war of 1965?

Front Page of Australia's Leading Newspaper on Sept 11, 1965 


Who started the India-Pakistan War in 1965? What was Operation Gibraltar? Why did Pakistan initiate Operation Gibraltar?




Why did India cross the international border to attack Lahore and Sialkot on Sept 6, 1965?




What was India’s strategy? What was Pakistan’s strategy?



Did either country succeed in achieving its objectives in 1965? Did the 1965 war make India get a tighter grip on Kashmir?

Viewpoint From Overseas host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with panelists Ali H. Cemendtaur and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_VAqyClS-0





https://vimeo.com/182288648

Did India beat Pakistan in the 1965 war from Ikolachi on Vimeo.

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

FM Manekshaw on Pakistani Military's Performance in 1971

1965 War: The Inside Story

Pakistan Army at the Gates of Delhi

Demolishing India's War Myths

Kashmir Uprising Against Indian Military Occupation

15 comments:

Singh said...

Historian Akbar Zaidi admits Pakistan lost terribly during 1965 war against India

http://www.indiasamvad.co.in/special-stories/historian-akbar-zaidi-admits-pakistan-lost-terribly-during-1965-war-against-india-6545

Riaz Haq said...

Singh: "Historian Akbar Zaidi admits Pakistan lost terribly during 1965 war against India"


If one has to choose between Akbar Zaidi, a Pakistani historian with no inside knowledge of the 1965 war, and YB Chavan, the Indian defense minister with deep inside knowledge of the 1965 war, I would always go with YB Chavan for authenticity and accuracy. Read excerpts of "1965 War: The Inside Story" by RD Pradhan.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2013/09/inside-story-pakistan-army-at-gates-of.html

Singh said...

wow a Pakistani trusting a Hindu over a war analysis den his fellow Muslim brother. Whole time you dislike Hindus and now you referring to him for his analysis. Kinda ironic

Riaz Haq said...

Singh: "wow a Pakistani trusting a Hindu over a war analysis den his fellow Muslim brother. Whole time you dislike Hindus and now you referring to him for his analysis. Kinda ironic"

Wrong! My analysis has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the knowledge and expertise of the people being quoted. In this instance YB Chavan and RK Yadav know a lot more of the facts than Akbar Zaidi.

Avish D. said...

lol..Sheikh Abdullah Was imprisoned by none other than but Karan Singh...hahaha..sir atleast get your facts straight before appearing in a talk show...it was later that Nehru was told abt this whole issue...BTW Sheikh Abdullah was nehru's chaddi buddy. lol

Riaz Haq said...

Avish: "lol..Sheikh Abdullah Was imprisoned by none other than but Karan Singh...hahaha..sir atleast get your facts straight before appearing in a talk show...it was later that Nehru was told abt this whole issue...BTW Sheikh Abdullah was nehru's chaddi buddy. lol"


Read "Nehru: A Contemporary Estimate by Walter Crocker". He talks about Nehru's imprisonment of Abdullah.

"Speaking of Nehru's imprisonment of Shaikh Abdullah, (Arnold) Toynbee has said, "It is more blessed to be imprisoned for one's ideals than to imprison other people, incongruously, in the name of the same of he same ideals. Nehru lived to have both experiences".


https://books.google.com/books?id=hQ8p4XTRZgEC&pg=PT64&lpg=PT64&dq=nehru+imprisoned+abdullah&source=bl&ots=tNjgAbbCUx&sig=XlE7d1XrBI3uE4o-28pDdmaGy98&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI9_qG64fPAhUJ32MKHRcDA-YQ6AEIQTAG#v=onepage&q=nehru%20imprisoned%20abdullah&f=false

Raaz said...

ار ہماری تھرڈ ورلڈ کی جنگوں میں وہ جیتے ہیں جن کا اسلحہ ہوتا ہے

وہ لوگ اپنا اسلح بیچ کے پیسے کھرے کر لیتے ہیں لوگ ہمارے مر جاتے ہیں
ہم سمجھتے ہیں کہ ہم جیت گئے

جنگیں ان کی ہوتی ہیں جن کا اسلحہ بھی اپنا بنایا ہوا ہو اور لوگ بھی ان کے اپنے ہوں پلاننگ بھی انکی اپنی ہو

پاکستان انڈیا نہ تین میں نہ تیرہ میں

Anonymous said...

What was the final outcome of 65 war? Practically nothing! Pakistan was not able gain any territory permanently. Interestingly 71 war was more conclusive. It changed map of Pakistan for good.

Jamshed said...

Is the aim of the Pakistani incursion in 1965 to capture Kashmir ? Pakistan did not get Kashmir so that answers the question.

Riaz Haq said...

#India swiftly rejects #UN request for a visit to the disputed territory of #Kashmir. #KashmirUnrest #Modi

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-india-un-kashmir-20160913-snap-story.html


India on Tuesday rejected a request by the United Nations’ human rights chief for a visit to gather information on the disputed territory of Kashmir, where security forces have been accused of using excessive violence in trying to quell unrest.

Zeid Raad Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, called for “access that is unconditional to both sides of the Line of Control,” the boundary between India and Pakistan that runs through Kashmir.

Speaking to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Hussein said his request was granted by Pakistan, which accuses Indian forces of human rights violations in the Himalayan territory that the countries have skirmished over for seven decades.

“I believe an independent, impartial and international mission is now needed crucially and that it should be given free and complete access to establish an objective assessment of the claims made by the two sides,” Hussein said.

In the main government hospital in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, more than 800 people have been treated for eye injuries caused by the pellets, which are made of metal and encased in a thin rubber coating. Many of them have lost at least partial eyesight.

The violence continued Tuesday when two people were killed, including a 19-year-old man, and dozens injured in clashes with security forces who were enforcing a rare curfew on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

Authorities imposed the curfew across all 10 districts of Kashmir to thwart plans by separatist groups to march to the local offices of the United Nations, Indian news media reported.

India and Pakistan each control portions of Kashmir but claim the territory in its entirety. Separatists in the Muslim-majority territory have taken up arms to seek independence from Hindu-dominated India or a merger with Pakistan.

Under a controversial security law, Indian authorities enjoy broad powers to crack down on unrest in Kashmir. Human rights groups have assailed tactics used by security forces, accusing paramilitary police of firing pellets that have injured or blinded peaceful demonstrators and even children sitting in their homes.

“These weapons are inherently indiscriminate and always carry the risk of causing serious injury to people who are not engaging in violence,” said Amnesty International’s India director, Aakar Patel. “There is simply no proper way to use these weapons, and they should be prohibited.”

On Sept. 2, Indian officials approved an alternate to the pellets – a shell packed with a compound derived from chili peppers – that it said would be used only in rare cases. But Amnesty said more than 100 cases of pellet injuries were reported at hospitals in Srinagar in the first week of the month.

Riaz Haq said...

Top Congress leader: If #India is to make Jammu & #Kashmir love India, referendum is the only way http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/out-of-my-mind-azadi-indian-parliament-p-chidambaram-ghulam-nabi-azad-kashmir-pok-atal-bihari-vajpayee-india-2945138/ … via @IndianExpress

There is celebration in heaven when a single sinner repents. In Indian Parliament, there is little freedom for back benchers to speak their own mind. Yet P Chidambaram has boldly spoken the unspeakable about Kashmir. He is the first ranking member of any of the political parties to say openly that India (that is all except J&K) has reneged on the bargain the Kashmiris were promised. He was shot down for this by Ghulam Nabi Azad as not reflecting Congress policy. That alone guarantees that he was telling an unpalatable truth to his own party.
What was the bargain?
There were two steps for princely states to join the Indian Union. First was accession and then came integration. In Junagarh and Hyderabad, a popular vote cemented integration. Kashmir was also promised such a popular vote but it never happened because of the war and the ceasefire policed by the UN. Any plebiscite became impossible as both parts of J&K could not be got together. Sheikh Abdullah was put under house arrest for 11 years without trial for arguing for plebiscite.
Elections were then rigged and a pliable leadership found to do Delhi’s bidding. The entire issue of popular consultation was forgotten. Article 370 remained in the Constitution but the state lost its autonomy as defined therein. The mantra became Kashmir is an integral part of India, proof of its secularism.
The Congress failed in the 50 years after Independence to win over the minds and hearts of the people of the Valley. The reconciliation process began with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The issue involves three parties — India, Pakistan and J&K (plus PoK?). The solution has to be sought in a two-pronged fashion — India and Pakistan and India and J&K. It is when the small number of separatists try to join up the third side — Pakistan and J&K — that India sees red. The fear of the third connection has restricted and distorted India’s efforts to win the love of the Kashmiris.
Islamist terrorism began to infiltrate in the late Eighties and has been a nagging presence ever since. Each time someone falls victim to police or Army bullet, there is a funeral procession where young people shout ‘azadi’, which leads to more deaths. Azadi is a shout not for independence from India, but for autonomy, for the status quo ante, when the head of the government was called prime minister (as were all chief ministers of provinces before 1947) and the head of the state, Sadar-i-Riyasat.
Chidambaram has now broken the silence about the original bargain. Of course, he will be criticised.
But as a former home minister as well as a member of the Cabinet in several governments, he is well aware of all the issues. There is a bold way out. That is to conduct a referendum where all the citizens of J&K have a vote, as would have happened if the maharaja had acceded in good time before the invasion from Pakistan. Ask them if they want to be integrated in the Union or be autonomous. The latter is not the same as independence but what they had between 1947 and 1953, with Article 370 restored effectively.
If India is to make J&K love India, this is the only way.

Riaz Haq said...

Silence over #Indian atrocities in #Kashmir speaks volumes

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/aug/14/silence-over-kashmir-conflict

nce known for its extraordinary beauty, the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest and also the most obscure military occupation in the world. With more than 80,000 people dead in an anti-India insurgency backed by Pakistan, the killings fields of Kashmir dwarf those of Palestine and Tibet. In addition to the everyday regime of arbitrary arrests, curfews, raids, and checkpoints enforced by nearly 700,000 Indian soldiers, the valley's 4 million Muslims are exposed to extra-judicial execution, rape and torture, with such barbaric variations as live electric wires inserted into penises.

Why then does the immense human suffering of Kashmir occupy such an imperceptible place in our moral imagination? After all, the Kashmiris demanding release from the degradations of military rule couldn't be louder and clearer. India has contained the insurgency provoked in 1989 by its rigged elections and massacres of protestors. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators that fill the streets of Kashmir's cities today are overwhelmingly young, many in their teens, and armed with nothing more lethal than stones. Yet the Indian state seems determined to strangle their voices as it did of the old one. Already this summer, soldiers have shot dead more than 50 protestors, most of them teenagers.

The New York Times this week described the protests as a comprehensive"intifada-like popular revolt". They indeed have a broader mass base than the Green Movement does in Iran. But no colour-coded revolution is heralded in Kashmir by western commentators. The BBC and CNN don't endlessly loop clips of little children being shot in the head by Indian soldiers. Bloggers and tweeters in the west fail to keep a virtual vigil by the side of the dead and the wounded. No sooner than his office issued it last week, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, hastened to retract a feeble statement expressing concern over the situation in Kashmir.

Kashmiri Muslims are understandably bitter. As Parvaiz Bukhari, a journalist, said early this week the stones flung randomly by protestors have become "the voice of a neglected people" convinced that the world deliberately ignores their plight. The veteran Kashmiri journalist Masood Hussain confessed to the near-total futility of his painstaking auditing of atrocity over two decades. For Kashmir has turned out to be a "great suppression story".

Those western pundits who are always ready to assault illiberal regimes worldwide on behalf of democracy ought not to be so tongue-tied. Here is a well-educated Muslim population, heterodox and pluralist by tradition and temperament, and desperate for genuine democracy. However, intellectuals preoccupied by transcendent, nearly mystical, battles between civilization and barbarism tend to assume that "democratic" India, a natural ally of the "liberal" west, must be doing the right thing in Kashmir, ie fighting "Islamofascism". Thus Christopher Hitchens could call upon the Bush administration to establish a military alliance with "the other great multi-ethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism" even as an elected Hindu nationalist government stood accused of organising a pogrom that killed more than 2,000 Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat.

Riaz Haq said...

War That Never Was: The Story Of India's Strategic Failures
by
Ravi Rikhye

In the Chapter 4- How India Lost All Its Wars of the book, the author gives analysis of the proposition that war of 1947-48 and 1965 were a favorable stalemate and that of 1971 was an outright victory has been carried out in this chapter. Here the author comments that in all security crises, there have been very serious misperceptions of adversary behavior and that India repeatedly commits same mistake.

https://booksynopsis16.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-war-that-never-was-ravi-rikhye.html

Anonymous said...

Its gross simplification to frame the issue in terms of winning or losing. The long term strategic consequences of 1965 war were profoundly negative for Pakistan. The Eastern wing not being part of combat felt alienated and insecure. The theory that defense of East Pakistan was by maintaining a strong western wing proved wrong. The strategic goal of Operation Gibraltor of getting a foothold in Kashmir and getting India to negotiate on the disputed issue was not achieved. In fact Pakistani establishment was forced to plead for ceasefire as they did not expect to hold Indian troops movement for long. Ayub's desperate secret visit to China during the war to get help clearly shows that the military was not hopeful of being able to hold Indian troops from advancing for too long. Yes the Pakistani information ministry under Altaf Gauhar did a remarkable job of galvanising the people and making them believe the it was Pakistan that had won. Though in the chapter on the was in his book on Ayub Khan, Altaf Gauhar paints a very different picture particularly that of Nawab of Kalabag begging Ayub to get a cease fire as body basgs started arriving.

Riaz Haq said...

C-130's Havoc! How Pakistan's 'Modified Bomber' Wreaked Havoc On Indian Positions After A 'Disastrous' Paradrop by Ritu Sharma


https://www.eurasiantimes.com/c-130s-havoc-how-pakistans-modified-bombe/

The wars in the Indian sub-continent have been dissected threadbare, but there have been little-known operations done by the American-made C-130s during the 1965 India-Pakistan war. The cargo aircraft supplied to the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) was modified to become a bomber and raid the Indian runways.

The other important mission carried out by the C-130 fleet was the audacious para commando attack planned by Pakistan. The commandos were inserted by C-130B to cripple three frontline airbases of the Indian Air Force (IAF) in Punjab – Pathankot, Halwara (near Ludhiana) and Adampur (near Jalandhar).

The US Air Force (USAF) is now considering the dispersed nature of warfare that it will experience in the Indo-Pacific against China. It is turning its airlifters, C-130J, into traditional bombers and giving them more offensive capabilities. The PAF made the modification in 1965.

On the intervening night of 30-31 August 1965, the general atmosphere in the Indian subcontinent was tense. News of Pakistan’s military build-up along the border hinted at impending war. The IAF ordered its units to arm all its fighter jets and bombers on September 1, 1965.


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On the same day, PAF’s Sabres entered the Indian airspace and hit the Pathankot airfield. This strike resulted in the destruction of eight IAF aircraft on the ground at Pathankot. The Sabres were heading towards Adampur and Halwara airbase but were stopped by the IAF’s Hawker Hunter fighter jets.
On September 6, the PAF’s raid on Pathankot airbase inflicted large damage. The IAF had also suffered an early setback over Chhamb and had lost four Vampires. This was supposed to have left the IAF in disarray.



Till 6th September, the lack of significant activities on PAF’s side was intriguing the IAF. However, it was just a lull before the PAF put its most audacious plan into action. The Pakistanis dropped paratroopers at Pathankot, Adampur, and Halwara in the intervening night of 6-7 September. Three C-130 aircraft of PAF dropped 60 Special Service Group Commandos each in the wee hours.

The three groups of 60 paratroopers each were dropped in the vicinity of each airbase. Each group was led by one or two officers and a junior commissioned officer (JCO).

The drop was successful, but the Pakistan commandos ran into unforeseen difficulties. A concerted effort by civilians and the Punjab Police resulted in the apprehension of most of the Commandos.
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C-130 Bombers Modified
As the war proceeded, the Pakistan Air Force modified the C-130s to drop bombs. C-130 bombers targeted Indian tanks and guns in Ramgarh of the Sialkot sector. As part of its riposte strategy, the Indian Army had made advances in the Sialkot sector in response to Pakistan’s advent in Jammu and Kashmir.

In addition, Indian tanks advanced in the Chawinda region. Both areas resulted in two of the biggest tank battles in the history of the Indian subcontinent.

Two C-130s PAF came out in support of their forces and dropped nine tons of bombs each on the night of 15 September. On the following night, a single C-130 strike was repeated against Ramgarh, destroying Indian tanks and guns as well as ammunition and fuel dumps.

Seven officers of the Transport Wing were awarded the Sitara-e-Jurat, and 2 JCOSs the Tamgha-e-Jurat.

Some estimates suggest that the IAF flew over 4,000 combat sorties and the PAF a little over 2,000. The Indian account of the 1965 war suggested that the IAF lost 36 aircraft while still parked on the ground.

On the other hand, in aerial dogfights, the IAF lost just 14 aircraft while shooting down 18 Pakistani jet fighters. Pakistan ended the war, having depleted 17 percent of its front-line strength, while India’s losses amounted to less than 10 percent.