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The Indian attempt to hold the McMahon Line by sitting on it, an unrealistic deployment in an impossible time-frame, was being insisted upon by Army HQ. This was in spite of the protests of Brig. J.P. Dalvi, the Commander 7 Infantry Brigade, those of the GOC 4 Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Niranjan Prasad, and those of the former corps commander responsible, i.e., GOC 33 Corps, Lt. Gen. Umrao Singh. Army HQ was also insisting on an even more impossible task: that of evicting the Chinese already dug-in on the Thagla Ridge. This was most probably on the advice of Lt. Gen. Kaul himself, who till his arrival in person in NEFA, had been acting as the unofficial military adviser to the Prime Minister.
Lt. Gen. Kaul as Corps Commander had virtually taken over personal command of 7 Infantry Brigade, dictating the locations of deployment of the companies, making the Brigade Commander and the Divisional Commander redundant, and dictating terms to the Commanding Officers of the battalions, tolerating no objections even to utterly impractical tactical movements, to implement his theoretical ‘positional warfare’. Brig Dalvi states:
Kaul was in personal command of 7 Infantry Brigade. We now had one General , two Lt. Gens. , one Maj. Gen. and one Brigadier to preside over the activities of this ill-starred formation.
All that these generals were doing was to improvidently hound, harry and hustle this one formation to achieve the unattainable.
Brig. Dalvi, who had become almost a hapless spectator as
command of his own brigade was taken-over by the new Corps
Commander, tellingly comments:
At that stage Ground, Relative Strengths and Administration were not matters of bickering they were overwhelmingly decisive.
They could not be ignored at the risk of certain disaster. If Gen. Kaul intended to take a calculated risk in ignoring these time honoured principles than there is little point in shifting the blame of the subsequent failure to the Army as a whole. He tried to do what others opined could not be done. He replaced Umrao who believed in ‘bickering’ when his professional conscience told him to do so. Why was Umrao sacked?
To be continued....