S.K. Sinha, a retired lieutenant-general and former Vice-Chief of Army Staff, in the Asian Age:
I had the privilege of serving under Sam Manekshaw in all the ranks that he held from Lt. Col. to Army Chief. He had a tremendous capacity for work and was a brilliant professional, contributing immensely in every appointment. He combined all this with a great sense of humour and ready wit. As a senior staff officer at Army Headquarters in 1971, I saw how meticulously he planned for the coming war during the nine months preparatory time he had managed to obtain. The resounding victory in that war was the crowning achievement of the foremost military leader of our Army.
I was functioning as adjutant-general, the Army’s chief of personnel, in January 1973 and had to work out his entitlements in his new rank. I went to his office to congratulate him and found him examining the badges of rank in cloth that had been prepared by Bastani Brothers, the tailor in South Block. Apparently Sam had been informed of his promotion a day or two earlier. To maintain secrecy, his personal staff told the tailor that a Nepalese field marshal was to come and his badge of rank had to be stitched. Sam told me that an investiture was to be held two days later at Rashtrapati Bhavan and I had to work out all the details with the government. I replied that it would be both an honour and a pleasure. However, I told him that the cloth badges of rank would be of no use, he would have to be in his ceremonial uniform for which he would need metal badges of rank. Moreover, the badges of rank made by the tailor were not correct. The Ashoka Lion at the top of the wreath had to be in miniature and touching the top of the two loops in one badge of rank. He asked me how I knew this. I replied that when Field Marshal Auchinleck used to visit the Operations Room in 1946, I used to closely watch his badges of rank and ribbons. He said he saw more of Auchinleck than me but was not sure what I said was correct. He wanted something authentic. I went back to my office and tried to find some written authority, but nothing was available. I rang up our military attaché in London. He told me that the War Office was closed for the Christmas holidays and he would not be able to send me anything for a week. I then thought of looking up the Encyclopedia Britannica. I was happy to find a colour picture of a field marshal’s badges of rank. That satisfied Sam. I said I would get them fabricated at the Army workshop in Delhi Cantonment. Working round the clock, our electrical engineers made a good job of it and completed the task within 24 hours. More:
In The Hinndu Literary Review, Sangeeta Barooah Pisharotya meets Arshad Sami Khan, Aide-de-Camp to three Pakistani Presidents — Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He is also the author of the recently-published book, Three Presidents and an Aide:
Full of stories of shikar, Arshad Sami Khan, sitting in the lobby of a New Delhi hotel, recounts a particularly hilarious incident about one such venture of Joseph Tito along with his Pakistani host, Ayub Khan. It was an early morning duck shoot in the lake of Mirpur Sakro. It so happened that along with the dead duck, Tito too had to be helped out of the waters! Not just that, “Three of the police toughies who struggled to get him on board, fell too as their boat tilted and flipped over.” Khan, full of giggles, talks about “a burly Tito walking with water sloshing out of his boots and jacket pockets!”
He says one such venture of Ayub Khan led to the discovery of Pakistan’s legendary singer Reshma. “Ayub Khan used to be hosted by the vaderas (the landlords) during shikars. Day time would pass in the shoots and the evenings had music sessions by local artistes. The President would be present in those soirees only for a while. The evening that Reshma sang, he sat through it. He also asked me to note her details. On reaching Islamabad, he called his broadcasting minister to give Reshma a chance on Radio Pakistan,” relates Khan. “Also, he told him to give a copy of her recording. Later, he would do his work listening to her songs. Every time the tape would end he would call me to rewind.”
[Sami Khan is singer Adnan Sami's father]
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In Himal Southasian, historian Ramchandra Guha traces South Asia’s tortured history of conflicts to ask if compromise and conciliation by concerned parties could have changed the course of our history.
Over the past few decades, the nation states of Southasia have been home to some of the most bitter and costly conflicts of the modern world. Subaltern classes have resisted the hegemony of the elite; areas on the periphery have protested exploitation by the centre. To class and geography have been added the fault lines of language, caste, religion and ethnicity.
No region of the world – not even the fabled Balkans – has witnessed a greater variety of conflicts. Southasians are an expressive people, and so they have expressed their various resentments in an appropriate diversity of ways: through electing legislators of their choosing; through court petitions and other legal mechanisms; through marches, gheraos, dharnas, hunger strikes and other forms of non-violent protest; through the torching of government buildings; and through outright armed rebellion. The record of our nation states in dealing with these conflicts is decidedly mixed. Some conflicts, which once threatened to tear a nation apart, have been, in the end, resolved. Other conflicts have persisted for decades, with the animosities between the contending parties deepening with every passing year.
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