By Karan Thapar

It’s a long time since I was called ‘boy’. If I had been younger the term would have made me bristle. But last saturday it left me with a warm, happy feeling. For to be ‘boy’ to someone twice your age is to be spoken to with affection. Of course, the speaker was one of the grand old men of our times. That made it really special.

I was interviewing Field Marshal Manekshaw. He told me it was the first ever television interview he has given about himself. He has an avuncular and friendly manner, he tells enchanting stories and when he does his eyes twinkle with laughter and mischief. This man is made for the box, I said to myself, yet why is it that we hardly know him? This man is made for television chat shows so why have they ignored him? This man is an icon of post-independence India so how is it that we have forgotten him?

The fault lies in ourselves. We have no interest in history, no curiosity about the past and we are too brash, too narrow, perhaps even too young to respect, leave aside admire, the charm, manners and style of an age now over and fading out fast. We are prisoners of the present and limited and confined by it.

So, this sunday morning, as we read about other generals, their armies and its battles, let me tell you about a man we should never have forgotten.

“Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw. That’s a mouthful of a name. How did you get so many?” I asked.

“Simple” the FM replied, his eyes lighting up with glee. “I gave them to myself. When I was a Gentleman Cadet at Dehra Dun my instructor was a certain G.F.S. McClaren. I decided then and there that I had to have as many initials as he did.

So I took S from my name, H from my father, F from his father and J from his father and I became S.H.F.J. Manekshaw.”

Manekshaw is a Parsi born in Amritsar in 1914. His father was briefly a doctor in the Army Medical Corp. He studied in the city’s Hindu Sabha College. But what was a Parsi family doing in the Punjab before the First World War?

“My father wasn’t doing very well in Bombay so they told him to go to the Punjab. The Punjab? Where is that?” the Field Marshal began. “So my parents got into a train. In those days there was an intermediate class for Parsis and Anglo-Indians. My mother was only 18. When the train pulled into Amritsar station my father pushed up the shutter and my poor mother saw the first sikh in her life. She started howling when she saw his long hair and long beard. She thought she was in a zoo!”

Manekshaw ran away from home to join the army, got commissioned in 1934 and was badly injured in Burma where he won the Military Cross. In the 1960s he was almost cashiered. Krishna Menon took against him and ordered a commission of enquiry. Fortunately he was exonerated and went on to become Chief. In 1971 he led the Indian Army to victory in Bangladesh.

At the height of that war when India’s advance on Hilli was effectively stopped by a daring young Pakistani captain Manekshaw found time to congratulate him.

“He fought gallantly and I sent him a letter to say so. Later, when I visited Pakistan after the war, I told their Chief he should get an award.”

Off camera I asked him a further question. “Doesn’t it stick in the throat to compliment the enemy?”

“Nonsense boy” he replied. “It’s those damned dhotiwallahs that divide us. They have them too, you know, except their’s is a very funny sort of dhoti. No, a soldier must respect his enemy and never be scared or shy of praising him. If my enemy’s good and I still beat him then I must be better.”

Now 85 Manekshaw lives in Coonoor.

“I have a happy life. Children, grandchildren and a wife who looks after me – or at least pretends to” he joked.

Earlier this year the Manekshaws celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.

“The girls insisted I give Mummy a diamond” he told me. “It’s damned expensive I said but they would have none of it. So I gave her one.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said thank you” and then after a laugh he added “but that’s all I got for the diamond. It did nothing for me.”

The old FM tells wonderful stories and if, like me, you want to hear more then look out for the next time I write about him. It will be to tell you when and where the interview is to be shown.

Worse than unknown, the forgotten soldier

We are a strange lot. I know I have said that before but surely this time the example I offer will clinch my point. Last week as we fought a ‘war’ on the Kargill heights we understandably made a lot of the intrusion, the infiltration, the shooting down of the planes and even the time of day and the way it happened. It was all spellbinding if horribly, horribly sad. But what about the pilots? They should have been our first concern but initially they were barely mentioned and then they were virtually ignored.

For 24 hours the government was strangely silent about the pilots. We claimed they were missing. Pakistan claimed it had one in its captivity and the other was dead. Yet for a full day we did not call upon Pakistan to treat Nachiketa with care or to hand over Ahuja’s body. But that was not all. In the days that followed not one politician had a thing to say about either of them. Not a word in praise, not a gesture of appreciation, no not even a visit to their families. And when Ahuja was cremated it was left to the military to show him the honour he deserves. But where were our politicians?

In contrast when three American pilots were captured in Kosovo American politicians fell over each other to express their concern. There are even occasions when Clinton has flown to Frankfurt to welcome home-coming soldiers. Such gestures are normal. They are also expected. And they make sense for politicians to perform. The opposite – the deafening silence and the absence of visible concern which has characterised the Indian response – is unnatural. It’s also downright wrong.

However, it’s not just the dhoti-kurtawallahs that I am angry with or the civil servants in beige safari suits who sit at their right hand. With the exception of The Indian Express even newspapers and television forgot about the pilots. That’s worse than forgetting about human beings. They forgot about the human-interest story attached to them.

To understand what the press could have done – but didn’t – imagine how American newspapers and TV would have reacted. They would have carried magnum-size pictures of the two airmen, splashed the story of their careers all over the screen and front pages, interviewed their families and comrades whilst no doubt, the tabloids, would have started a collection for the loved ones they leave behind. We, however, did none of this. In fact, we barely mentioned their names.

These men are already heroes but the recognition they deserve has been denied to them. That’s what our government and our papers and television have done. That’s the lapse, the folly, the short-sighted miserableness they are guilty of.

Our soldiers are great – and I don’t say that because I am the son of one. They are far greater than many, if not most, of us. After all, would I serve in Siachin? Would you opt to die in Kargill? Would we even want a spell in Srinagar? No, no, no. Yet these soldiers live their lives in these inhospitable territories and they do so without demur. And what’s our response? We take it for granted. We accept it as their duty, as their contribution to our country.

Of course it is. But I have two questions to ask. Don’t we still owe them a thank you? And don’t we owe it to them that we fulfil our own duty – whatever it may be – with similar commitment and selflessness?

Whatever be your own personal answer to these questions let us not forget those who died to keep us in the comfort we still enjoy today.