Claude Arpi reveals how Wing Commander Jag Mohan Nath won a second Maha Vir Chakra in the 1965 War.
'...incarcerated in jails, ruining their entire families.' 'You would see that Dalits who displayed so much agitation over the Bhima-Koregaon issue are effectively silenced by the arrests of their activists by the police.' 'What can be a more pitiable state than this for a people who had just seen a ray of hope after darkness of millennia?'
'The experience so far is a shocking example of how critical scheme of national importance can be brought into disrepute by inefficient and badly designed implementation,' says Dr Madhav Godbole, the former Union home secretary.
'Their vote bank has shifted to the BJP; the Congress is yet to realise it.'
Anil Shastri, one of the late prime minister's six children, recounts memories of his father.
Why Dalit leaders cross over to the BJP
'As the IAF kicks off another round of myth-making -- launching a year-long commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1965 India-Pakistan war -- it is worth remembering how little there was to celebrate in those September days when the underdog PAF got the better of the IAF in raid after raid, dogfight after dogfight.'
Decorated with a Vir Chakra for leading an attack that destroyed four tanks, Risaldar Ayub Khan shared a name with the Pakistani president who ordered the invasion of India in 1965. India's Ayub came from a family of soldiers and made his country proud.
Pranab Mukherjee's book The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years takes the readers through the economic and social unrest of the period leading up to the emergency, rise and fall of leaders, many splits within the Congress, while promising to offer more in the next two volumes of the trilogy, says Nivedita Mookerji.
'Pakistan's recent utterances and tendency to use pinpricks to try our patience appear reminiscent of 1965. We are a strong nation, emerging stronger,' says Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain (retd).
'We don't know what the reasons were that we gave back the Haji Pir Pass which was strategically very important. Today the entire infiltration into Kashmir takes place from that area. If we had retained that post that we had captured, things could have been different.' 'A lesson we need to learn is if you start losing the gains of war at the negotiating table, they become a disincentive for future wars,' says Lieutenant General D B Shekatkar (retd), reviewing the lessons from the 1965 War.
'India was in no position to wage another war in 1965, having suffered a morale-shattering defeat in 1962. The three services were in the middle of a modernisation and expansion phase and therefore not fully trained or battle-ready.'
Fifty years ago, India and Pakistan fought a short but bloody war. The author finds out how Sainik Samachar, the defence ministry's journal, reported it.
'He was believed to finish his own work in an hour and spend the remainder of the time walking from one office to another, sitting down with the harried junior staff and helping them sort out the problems they were working on.'
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