General Brasstacks

In 1986, Indian and Chinese troops faced off at Sumdorong Chu in Arunachal Pradesh. An Indian general airlifted a brigade onto the dominating heights and put the Chinese below under pressure, forcing them to back down. The audacious officer was General Krishnaswamy Sundarji. The following year, as army chief, he planned Operation Brasstacks, one of the largest military exercises since World War II. It threatened Pakistan's nuclear ambitions and unnerved General Zia-ul-Haq, who then sought rapprochement.

The 1980s were a decade of dramatic turns, including the events behind the assassinations of two Indian prime ministers, political upheaval and military crises. Sundarji oversaw two of the most controversial operations in independent India: Operation Blue Star against Sikh militants inside the Golden Temple, and Operation Pawan against Tamil militants in Sri Lanka. He was also drawn into the Bofors acquisition and the scandal that followed, which helped bring down a government.

Probal DasGupta's biography asks who Sundarji really was and how his taste for bold, sometimes brash decisions took shape. Was he too ambitious? Was he ahead of his time in pushing technology-driven warfare, or behind it, as insurgencies called for a more improvised approach?

The book follows the life and times of one of India's most charismatic yet largely forgotten army chiefs. His career mirrored the journey of a young nation and often echoed its political choices and contradictions. In an 820-day tenure, he saw the army through modernization, crises, controversies and change, and he shaped both military and political thinking in India's democracy.