`Operation Bluestar' left Gen Sundarji a changed man -- Wife

`Operation Bluestar' left Gen Sundarji a changed man -- Wife
PRESS TRUST OF INDIA

NEW DELHI, MARCH 5: `Operation Bluestar', launched to flush out Sikh militants from the historic Golden Temple in 1984, had left Gen Krishnaswamy Sundarji, who led it, a "changed" man, according to his wife Vani.

"After Operation Bluestar, he was a changed man. Sombre, his laughter all but gone," writes Vani Sundarji in the introductory chapter on the late general's book Of some consequence - A soldier remembers, released recently.

"I have been trained to fight an enemy, not to tackle our own kind," Vani quoted her husband as telling her when she expressed her concern.

Penning opinion about her husband `Sundar' in the chapter `A man called Sundarji', Vani Sundarji recalls, "He shrugged away my conern (post Bluestar), assuring me that `I will get over it'. But he never did.''

The book, otherwise collection of essays by the General, dwells on various aspects of his tenure in the Army. The late Army chief, however, could only complete a fraction of the chapters and breathed his last before starting on controversial topics like `Bluestar', `Operation Brasstacks' and the Bofors scandal.

Vani also recalls her husband telling her once that he would "write about Bluestar, and other matters, in good time".

"Khushwant Singh urged him to write about the Operation, so that the truth would be known for posterity," Vani writes, adding, "Sadly, that time never came.''

Vani recalls that the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi summoned Sundarji to New Delhi from Chandimandir (headquarters of Western Army Command) late at night on June 3, 1984.

"When he returned home, all he said to me was it is a tough one," she writes in an apparent reference to the start of the Operation.

Though the late General did not live to give his comments on `Operation Brasstacks', Asia's biggest ever combined armour, mechanised, artillery and air power war-game undertaken in February-March 1986, his wife sheds some light on his role in the exercise which almost brought India and Pakistan on the verge of a war.

Even 13 years later, "I am still asked questions about it," Vani writes. She says that in November 1999, the Pakistani defence attache in New Delhi, a Brigadier, asked her, "As Gen Sundarji's wife, you should know if Brasstacks was only an exercise or was there more to it".

She writes, "I told him it was merely an exercise, my friend.''

But she recalls that even at the height of Pakistan's suspicion during `Operation Brasstacks', "keenus and mangoes from Gen Zia (Zia-ul Haque)" did not stop coming.

"For years, ever since Sundar became Western Army commander, large baskets of these fruits were sent to us with a card in General's hand writing `General Sundarji, with warm regards'," she recalls.