The All-Weather Hotline

IT WAS COLD at Wagah, a town on the Pakistani side of the border, on Christmas Eve in 2013 when the then Indian Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), on the invitation of his counterpart in the neighbouring country went to meet him, amidst a rising chill in relations between the two countries. The situation along the Line of Control (LoC) was getting worse. The meeting went on from 9AM till after lunch, hosted by the Pakistani side. What was on the table was the unsavoury number of ceasefire violations along the LoC and killings of seven Indian soldiers.

“The meeting was cordial, constructive and we ensured a ceasefire,” says Lt General Vinod Bhatia, the Indian DGMO then, recalling that day. It had been decided at the political level that the DGMOs should meet, following a meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in Septem­ber that year. Bhatia got a call on the hotline, the lifeline for com­munication between DGMOs, from his Pakistani counterpart Aamer Riaz. Once the brass tacks were dealt with amicably at the meeting, with both committing to maintain a ceasefire on the LoC, there was some room for the run-of-the-mill, as they broke bread together. In the course of their conversation, as they disclosed their antecedents, it turned out that Bhatia was originally from Multan, in Punjab in Pakistan, while Pakistan’s DGMO Aamer Riaz belonged to Kapurthala, in Punjab on the Indian side. Riaz told Bhatia that had he known this before he would have got him some Multani halwa (Sohan halwa). In a couple of days, through the defence attaché, he sent across the sweet dish.

This was the first face-to-face meeting between the DGMOs of India and Pakistan in 14 years, and the last to date. The last time they had met was in 1999 following the Kargil conflict. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had called General VP Malik, the Indian Army chief, to his residence and told him that Pakistan had agreed to withdraw its forces on the LoC. A day later, Paki­stani DGMO Lt General Tauqir Zia called his Indian counterpart Nirmal Chander Vij, who later went on to become the chief of Army Staff. Islamabad suggested a one-on-one meeting between the DGMOs to work out the details which the Army chief wel­comed, but refused to send Vij to the Pakistani side. It was agreed that the meeting would be held at the Border Security Forces’ (BSF) premises in Attari on the Indian side of the border. “At the end of the discussion, our DGMO displayed the marked Pakistani maps and several original identification documents of Pakistani soldiers. The Pakistani DGMO cursed the “ahmak” (fool) who had marked interformation boundaries on his map. A folder con­taining the incriminating material was given to his staff officer,” writes Malik in his book Kargil: From Surprise to Victory.

Generally, the communication between DGMOs is through hotlines, as it has been recently between India’s Lt General Rajiv Ghai and Pakistan’s Major General Kashif Abdullah, on de-escalating what was turning out to be the fiercest conflict between India and Pakistan since 1971. The Pakistan DGMO initiated the move on May 10, calling his Indian counterpart for stopping the action. The specific date, time and wording of the understanding were worked out between the DGMOs on their phone call on May 10 commencing at 15:35 hours, according to Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal.

After the DGMOs spoke, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri announced at a media briefing that both sides would stop all firing and military action on land, air and sea. Within hours, however, violations were witnessed in border areas, following which a ho­tline message was sent to the Pakistani DGMO warning of “fierce and punitive” Indian response if they were repeated. The violations halted. The DGMOs spoke again two days later when they agreed that both sides would consider immediate measures to ensure troop reduction from the borders and forward areas. Hours before he was to talk to his Pakistani counterpart, Ghai, a highly decorated officer with three decades of military service, addressing the media, used cricket analogies to underline the invincibility of India’s air defence systems. He cited the 1970s Australian line “from Ashes to Ashes, from dust to dust, if Thommo don’t get ya, then Lillee surely must,” referring to the formidable bowlers Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee, and said “if you see the layers, you will understand what I am trying to say. Even if you crossed all the layers, one of the layers of this grid system will hit you.” This, he said, ensured that incoming missiles or drones would run into one or other countermeasure. At his first briefing after de-escalation, Ghai, who has a range of operational experience, including serving in a counter-insurgency division in Jammu & Kashmir, said the understanding between the DGMOs on May 10 was cessation of cross-border firing and air intrusions by either side from 5PM.

The 24×7 hotline between the DGMOs has survived wars, con­flicts and hostilities. Their weekly call, scheduled for Tuesdays at 10AM, has been a ritual that remains inviolate through upsurges in tensions. While big decisions on escalation or de-escalation are taken at top political levels, the task of the DGMOs, chosen from among officers of the highest ranks within the military—usu­ally a lieutenant general—gains significance in times of height­ened tensions. A principal staff officer in the pecking order, the DGMO’s role entails planning and executing military operations, going beyond functioning as an interlocutor, ensuring communi­cation with counterparts in neighbouring countries, coordinating with other services and security agencies within the country, and briefing the army chief. With their office in New Delhi’s South Block, DGMOs have often seen the incumbent prime minister walk in for a briefing.

“The direct communication between the DGMOs of Pakistan and India is a robust system, not defined in books, but effective in practice,” says Lt General (retd) Anil K Bhatt, who was DGMO during the Doklam face-off with the Chinese in 2017. He describes the period of the Doklam crisis as the high point of his military career. The Chinese structure of communication between the two forces being different, there is no equivalent of the DGMO, besides which an interpreter is needed for communication at any level. Communication is through the hotline between local com­manders, flag meetings and Border Personnel Meetings. Soon after Bhatt took charge, the Chinese Western Theatre Commander visited India and held meetings with the vice chief of Army Staff and Bhatt. Although the talks were through interpreters, Bhatt says it gave him a sense of his thinking, preparing him for what happened later.

“The challenge before me was to ensure that Chinese troops did not build the road to the Jhampheri ridge and that this face-off did not build up to a local conflagration or take the nation to war, while ascertaining that we were prepared if it came to that. Eventually, we called the Chinese bluff… My experience is that there was total clarity in directions from the political leadership. There was no ambiguity then, and I can see the same approach now,” says Bhatt.

A former senior officer, who was in the Military Operations Di­rectorate, says most Army chiefs have had a stint in the directorate which works 24×7. This includes Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw who moved from the Frontier Force Regiment under the British to the Gorkha Rifles after independence.

Malik says in his book that during the Kargil hostilities, the practice of the DGMOs speaking over the hotline every Tuesday continued and if a particular Tuesday happened to be a public holiday on either side, they would speak the following day. “The conversations over the hotline often provided an illuminating insight into the Pakistani thought process and perceptions. Such exchanges proved even more useful later when the Pakistani army sought withdrawal from our territory and a fair amount of coordination had to be achieved for this purpose.”

The DGMOs’ role, at times, stretches beyond military opera­tions into the humane domain, as it did after the Kargil War, when Zia, who asked about missing personnel and dead bodies, was in­formed that the dead Pakistani soldiers had been buried locally with full military honours and religious rites. Vij told him that photo­graphs, papers and other items found on them could be sent across. Malik says in his book that details of prisoners of war (PoWs) in In­dian custody were conveyed to the Pakistani DGMO who, in turn, confirmed that there were no Indian prisoners in their custody.

“The communication between DGMOs is a constructive engagement between two professionals. Their perspective has to be known to us and ours to them,” says Bhatia, as the role of the DGMOs comes into the spotlight again following this month’s conflict between India and Pakistan.

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