After the 2020 Galwan Valley skirmish, India has put in place aggressive and passive measures that have made such a clash near impossible hereafter, according to Lt. Gen. A. Arun, General Officer Commanding, Dakshin Bharat Area.
“Consequent to what happened in the eastern Ladakh, a lot of measures have been put in place. Some of them are aggressive. Some of them are purely defensive. It requires a combination,” he said. Lt. Gen. Arun was delivering the keynote address at a seminar on the 1971 India-Pakistan War, ‘Liberating Bangladesh: India’s Finest Moment’, organised by The Peninsula Foundation and the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, University of Madras.
“Today, we are referring to it [the victory] as India’s finest moment. We can argue that many moments have happened since then, which can also be counted as India’s finest moments. But this remains probably the largest and one of our initial finest moments. It was a trendsetter. It made Indians believe in India and to that extent, it was probably the biggest nation-builder we could have had,” Lt. Gen. Arun said.
He said the 1971 war was a “just war” because India did not have any intent to annex any country’s territory, and 93,000 prisoners of war were returned. “We captured 15,100 sq. km. in Bangladesh. We returned it all,” he said.
S. Gowri, Vice-Chancellor, University of Madras, delivered the special address. Later, a panel discussion was held on ‘India’s Just War: Looking at Achievements and Lessons’. Lt. Gen. P.R. Shankar, former Director-General of Artillery; Commodore R.S. Vasan, former Regional Commander-Coast Guard Region East; and former Ambassador M. Ganapathy took part in the discussion. The session was moderated by Air Marshal (retired) M. Matheswaran, who is the president of The Peninsula Foundation.
