Military Affairs

Riti S, Team PB7 Dwarhat though a non-descript small town along the serpentine road, amidst cedar and pine trees, is a heart-captivating destination in the Kumaon hills with numerous ancient temples and mind blowing sightseeing tourist destinations to explore, relax and rejuvenate and the newly constructed Kumaon Public School for the service personnel’s children. It is also the recruiting ground ...

|By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)| We have had three five star Marshals- late Field Marshal KM Cariappa known as an  Officer and a Gentleman, late  Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw famous for  soldiering with dignity and Arjan Singh  the first and the only officer to have been elevated to Marshal of the Indian Air Force who died on Saturday, 16 September 2017. I have had no interaction with the ...

[By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)] At 3pm on 23 August 2015, my neighbour Brig IS Lamba, veteran ASC Officer, and I, like many others took the Metro to reach Jantar Mantar and take part in the OROP rally and the Candle March up to Amar Jawan Jyoti, India Gate, to pay homage to the martyrs of 1965 Indo-Pak War. Even ...

[By Adfar Shah] Tripura’s Manik Sarkar government’s decision on revoking AFSPA recently was much hailed in public and intellectual circles. However, the ripple effect as expected was the fresh revival of the incessant demand for revocation of AF(JK)SPA in Jammu and Kashmir. It is being said that the controversial law in Tripura was revoked through consistent efforts by the State ...

Upset over the delay in the implementation of the ‘One Rank, One Pension’ policy, hundreds of retired military personnel on Sunday staged demonstrations at 55 locations around India, including Delhi, demanding immediate implementation of one rank, one pension (OROP). [By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)] The military veterans of the Indian Armed Forces have been fighting over the issue of ‘One Rank, ...

[By Col NN Bhatia | A Preface] The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of the man. – Anonymous The Regimental Centre Officers’ Mess in Ranikhet provides the most grandeur view of the eternally majestic snow capped Himalayan peaks that inspired a young mountaineer Capt (later Col) Narinder Kumar of 3 KUMAON (Rifles) to ...

[By Adfar Shah] “In yet another fratricidal incident, a trooper shot dead his five colleagues before shooting himself with his service weapon in an Army camp in Safapora area of central Kashmir’s Ganderbal district on the intervening night of February 26 and 27”. (Srinagar, Zulfikar Majid, Feb 27, 2014, DHNS). 1,383 Indian soldiers lost their lives between the year 2001 ...

|By Brigadier Mehboob Qadir (R)| It was mid 1972. We had just arrived in Ranchi from Agra, badly shaken and bruised, after a fateful train journey, during which we lost a fellow officer, killed by an armed escort needlessly, and another missing. We were prepared for the expected hardships; not that it would have been unusual, but in the business of ...

There is a Prisoner Of War (POW) story of my course mate Joe I would like to tell. He passed away in 2011 in Pune of brain haemorrhage. My story below is what I recollect of it from what he told me about it in 1973-74. Afterwards he never talked about it despite my repeated urging him to write an auto ...

|By Col NN Bhatia (Retd)| Capturing prisoners of war (POW) is as old as man kind and warfare.  In the earliest history, men captured used to be either slaughtered or made slaves. The captured women and children were more likely to be spared but many times the purpose to capture women as concubines for sex, sexual abuse and pleasure. The ...