God of War
"The trouble is, Prasad commands a great deal of personal standing in the army. I'm afraid many will not back your reshuffle. And we are on the brink of a major war. Do you really think this appointment is necessary?" Kahan asked, scepticism in his voice. He understood Singh's thinking. His head, today, was already heavy. He had grown weary of Singh's instinct for internal feuding.
"I served in the army for over a decade. Prasad was once my superior. His influence is in the Northern Command. The other commands do not buy his account."
"Is that so?" Kahan asked, listless. He wanted to retire and rest. If Singh wanted to reorganise the upper ranks of the army, surely it could wait a few days.
"Prime Minister, for years General Prasad has run the northern defensive line by his own logic. His ten mountain divisions are a bottomless pit; they have absorbed the funding that should have gone to armour. Do you understand what this has produced?"
"What?"
"Half the world's mountain divisions are in India. It is honestly… it is simply… you know that when those divisions are at full strength they have several thousand mules and horses, and no tanks. They cannot be used for rapid offence. Only mountain attack and defence. What I need is a 21st-century army capable of beating an enemy."1
"Perhaps General Prasad, like you, has not forgotten 1962. I do not think his approach, though conservative, is so very wrong."
"He is a hidebound old fossil. All defence in his head. The army is at present moribund. Its combat capability is far inferior to the air force's. It cannot bring its proper weight to bear."
"Have we not already organised the new armoured forces?"
"It is not equipment. It is the thinking of the commanders."
"All right. Whom do you have in mind. Let me hear it." Kahan agreed reluctantly to listen.
"I want Lieutenant General Sipanga to relieve Prasad as Chief of Army Staff."
"Hm. I have not heard the name."
"He commands XXI Corps. When he was commanding the 31st Division, he had a nickname: the War God. He is our most accomplished armoured-warfare specialist."2
"A specialist? No. No. I cannot agree to relieve General Prasad. I remind you, my old friend, you must consider the politics. To replace senior generals at this moment, what will the world infer? Enough. I am tired. Leave your report with me. I will read it. I will have the Foreign Ministry arrange a time with Petrov."
Kahan stood. He had clearly lost the patience to hear any more. Singh could not press the matter and rose to take his leave. The Army Chief of Staff issue, he knew, would have to wait. It needed a longer game.
At Chaturbhuj, in central India, the 31st Infantry Division3 was assembling under a scorching sun, in a region full of farmland. Major General Manika stood on a low mound and watched, through binoculars, the T-90 tanks of the 83rd Armoured Regiment crawling through mud. In all his time as divisional commander, the unit had never moved during the harvest. Villagers crowded onto the dirt road, pointing at the tanks. Even the illiterate farmers here knew now that the White Tiger Division was being readied to deal with Pakistan.
Manika was deeply uneasy. He was unhappy with the division's pace and could see no way to fix it. Two days of troop trains had filled the rail network. New Delhi's requisition order had cleared thousands of civilians off the platforms, and yet armoured trains were piling up on the embankments. Loading was on, off, on, off, hampered by the rail traffic difficulties and the heat. Sappers were not building bridges fast enough either. The 12th Regiment was still stranded on the far side of the Yamuna with no way across. A 19th Regiment vanguard tank had toppled into a paddy in the night during a road march, and villagers had swarmed the wreck and stripped everything they could detach from its hull, including the large infrared searchlight, claiming it was compensation for the crops the army had crushed. Worst of all, even now, Sipanga, the corps commander, had not returned. With a major engagement imminent, the absence of the corps commander from his post was the gravest threat to the 31st Armoured Division and to XXI Corps as a whole. Sipanga was bold and decisive, the man many of the corps's officers trusted above any other.
The aggravating drone of aircraft engines was overhead, again and again. From Gwalior, fully bombed-up Mirage 2000s were taking off without pause and heading west. To the labouring soldiers of the White Tiger Division, the message was clear. They were drawing closer to war, or to death. The border was still 600 kilometres away. The army would not stand outside this war, and the 31st (White Tiger) Armoured Division would unquestionably be its spearhead.
"This damn weather. Word from the corps commander?" Manika asked the staff officer beside him.
"None yet. Brahmin funerals always run long. He could call up a corps helicopter at any hour if he wanted to come back."
"I hope he comes back soon and gets a grip on himself. He cannot afford to miss this war."
"Poor Sipanga. Even the strongest of men struggle to bear the death of a child in middle age." another officer said.
A Dhruv helicopter flew slowly overhead.4 Manika squinted up and recognised it as belonging to the corps headquarters' direct-reporting helicopter detachment.
"General, somebody on the corps net is calling for you." A signaller approached with the radio handset and passed it to him.
"Manika. Go ahead."
"What the hell are you up to? Your troop movement is a mess. How are you running this?"
"Corps Commander. Is that really you. I thought…"
"Thought what? I'm right above you. Look at your column. Does this look like a flagship corps to you? What is the engineer battalion doing? Damn it, I do not see a pontoon bridge across the Yamuna. If the bridging is not pushed in the next few days, you will not cross the Yamuna at all in May. You are an embarrassment. If the 12th is still on the east bank tomorrow, you will tell the engineer battalion commander to clear out."
"Understood, General. But the road here is too narrow for multiple columns and the heat is brutal."
"XXI Corps is not a bunch of women. We do not have monthlies. March your vehicles at night. Don't worry about flattening the damn crops. Men are dying at the front. We need to be there to wipe out those criminals to the last."
"Yes, sir."
"Move."
Manika turned back. His face had eased. He had just had the side of his head taken off by an airborne corps commander and yet the cloud over him had lifted. The backbone of XXI Corps was back. The Pakistanis were going to feel it now.
"All right. New approach. We move faster. First, more hands on the loading. Speed up the tank entrainment. Second, the infantry regiments march at night. Don't be afraid of cutting through the paddies. Get the engineer battalion on the line. They are dragging their feet like a pack of women."
Sipanga's helicopter landed near the temporary command post tens of kilometres away. He had just come back from his hometown of Murud. Twenty days earlier, his younger son had been killed in the Mumbai terrorist attack.5 He had spent the days since shut away in his remote village, attending to his son's funeral. Army headquarters had been all but unable to reach him. He was back now. He was ready to do serious damage.
1. Half the world's mountain divisions: An exaggerated form of a real and persistent observation about Indian Army force structure. The army has historically maintained an exceptionally large body of mountain infantry, oriented above all on the Sino-Indian frontier and on Kashmir, with each division at full strength relying on substantial pack-animal transport for the very high terrain along the Line of Actual Control. Singh's complaint, that the funding gravitates to mountain formations at the expense of armour, mirrors a long-running tension within the Indian defence establishment between Pakistan-facing and China-facing requirements. ↩
2. XXI Corps and the 31st Armoured Division: Both real units. XXI Corps (the "Sudarshan Chakra Corps") is one of the Indian Army's three "strike corps", formations designed for mobile offensive operations into Pakistan, and is headquartered at Bhopal. Its principal armoured formation is the 31st Armoured Division, based at Babina Cantonment in Uttar Pradesh. The "White Tiger" formation name and the 83rd Armoured Regiment as named in this chapter are at minimum plausible; the author has clearly anchored Sipanga's command in real Indian Army structure, in contrast to some of the more loosely-named PAF squadrons elsewhere. ↩
3. "31st Infantry Division" / 31st Armoured Division: The Chinese has 第31步兵师 (infantry division) at the start of this scene, then almost immediately and consistently refers to the same unit as 31装甲师 / 白虎师 (31st Armoured Division / White Tiger Division). Treat the opening reference as an authorial slip; the unit fielding T-90s and pushing across the Yamuna toward Punjab is unmistakably an armoured division. ↩
4. Dhruv helicopter: The Hindustan Aeronautics HAL Dhruv (ध्रुव, Sanskrit for "polestar") is a domestically produced light utility helicopter that entered Indian Army service in the 2000s and is widely used in liaison and command roles. The Chinese 北极星 (literally "North Star") is the author's literal rendering of the Sanskrit name. ↩
5. The Mumbai attack: A reference to the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen killed 174 people across multiple sites in the city. Within the novel's compressed timeline, the attack has occurred roughly three weeks earlier and is the proximate political cause of the war, the same event Singh has cited repeatedly in his cabinet correspondence and his private justifications to Kahan. The death of Sipanga's son in those attacks is a personal motive overlaid on the strategic one. ↩