RAWALPINDI: Many Indian Generals in the war against Pakistan have lost battles, tanks and men. Maj.-Gen. Niranjan Prasad, GOC, 25th Indian Infantry Division, has lost something else too — his war diary. This was found in a hastily abandoned war tent in Lahore sector by the advancing Pakistan forces. The diary was shown today to Pressmen in Rawalpindi.

The diary comments on the Indian plan, prepared over two months ago, to attack Lahore. This plan did not commend itself to Maj.-Gen. Prasad. His straight opinion recorded in the diary is “it is unsound from A to Z”. He indicates that he reached this conclusion because there were no clear-cut directions regarding the operations. He deplores the fact that there is no deep thinking in the Indian Army and “there is a cheap attitude to under-estimate the enemy and to show off one’s own toughness to his own superiors”.

[Meanwhile, according to a recorded dispatch,] “If the Indians ever try to tell you that they have not bombed civilian targets inside Pakistan, you have my permission to tell them to go quietly to hell,” Mr Roy Meloni, Correspondent of American Broadcasting Corporation, said yesterday.

In the dispatch, also broadcast by Radio Pakistan, he said: “Some nights ago the Indians bombed Sialkot, about five miles from the Indo-Pakistan border and at least three miles from any military target and they killed about 20 people. A further 70 were injured. The bombs fell in the heart of the city … and I wept — yes I cried with the survivors because this is not war. This is deliberate terror.” [He also added] “I have been a journalist now for 20 years, and I want to go on record that I have never seen a more confident and victorious group of soldiers than those fighting for Pakistan right now.”

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015

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