Sam Manekshaw

• 1. Introduction

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  Sam Manekshaw, the officer who became independent India's first field marshal, once told a surgeon in Burma that he had been "kicked by a mule." The surgeon had simply asked what happened to him.

  That dry humor ran through a military career of nearly four decades, from the Second World War to the India-Pakistan war of 1971. Along the way he collected a Military Cross, a nickname that meant Sam the Brave, and a long list of arguments with ministers.

  Three questions run through this story. How did a doctor's son who wanted to study medicine in London end up in the very first class of a new military academy? What did a treason accusation do to a man who later commanded an army? And why did a general credited with a decisive victory receive so little official ceremony when he died?

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• 2. The First Class

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  In 1903, a Parsi doctor named Hormizd and his wife Hilla left Mumbai for Lahore, where he planned to practise medicine. Their train stopped at Amritsar, and Hilla's advanced pregnancy made it impossible to go on. After she recovered, the couple stayed, and Hormizd opened a clinic and a pharmacy.

  Sam was born in Amritsar on the 3rd of April 1914. He was the fifth of six children and the third of four sons. His brothers were Fali, Jan and Jami, and his sisters were Cilla and Sheru.

  He spent eight years at Sherwood College in Nainital and passed his senior examinations with distinction in 1931. Sam then asked to be sent to London to study medicine. His father refused, partly because the boy was too young and partly because he was already paying for Sam's older brothers to study engineering there. Sam enrolled at the Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar and graduated in April 1932.

  That same year, a notice went out for entrance examinations to the newly created Indian Military Academy. Manekshaw applied as an act of rebellion against his father and sat the papers in Delhi. On the 1st of October 1932 he was selected, placed sixth in the order of merit.

  His cohort was called The Pioneers. It included Smith Dun and Muhammad Musa Khan, who would later lead the armies of Burma and Pakistan. The academy was formally inaugurated on the 10th of December 1932, though training had begun in October. Of 40 cadets inducted, only 22 finished, and they were commissioned as second lieutenants on the 1st of February 1935.

  Other classmates included Mohan Singh, who founded the Indian National Army, and Melville de Mellow, who became a well-known radio presenter. Many were captured by Japan during the war and joined that army. Manekshaw himself nearly got suspended when he went on holiday to Mussoorie with Kumar Jit Singh, the Maharaja of Kapurthala, and Haji Iftikhar Ahmed. The trio failed to return for morning drills, under Brigadier Lionel Peter Collins, the commandant.

  A cadet five years his junior, Tikka Khan, was Manekshaw's boxing partner. That sparring partner would one day sit across a negotiating table from him over the line dividing Kashmir.

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• 3. Burma and the Sittang

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  On commissioning, Indian officers were normally sent first to a British regiment, so Manekshaw joined the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Scots at Lahore. He then moved to the 4th Battalion, 6th Frontier Force Regiment, stationed in Burma. On the 1st of May 1938 he became his company's quartermaster. He already spoke Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, English and his native Gujarati, and in October 1938 he qualified as a Higher Standard army interpreter in Pashto.

  When the war began, the army was short of trained officers, and promotions came faster than the rules allowed. For the first two years he held temporary ranks as captain and major. He became a substantive captain on the 4th of February 1942.

  That year, in the Sittang River campaign, his battalion faced the invading Imperial Japanese Army. Pagoda Hill, a key position on the left of the Sittang bridgehead, had fallen to the enemy. Manekshaw led his company in a counter-attack. It took 30% casualties and still won the hill, helped by the company of Captain John Niel Randle.

  After the hill was taken, a burst of light machine gun fire struck him in the stomach. Major General David Tennant Cowan, who commanded the 17th Infantry Division, saw the wounded captain and awarded him the Military Cross on the spot. The London Gazette later printed the citation, which praised his leadership and bearing and noted that he was wounded only after the position was secured.

  His orderly, Sher Singh, carried him from the field to an Australian surgeon. The surgeon first declined, judging the wounds too severe. Sher Singh pressed him to try. Manekshaw's reply when he woke amused the surgeon enough to go ahead. The operation removed bullets from his lungs, liver and kidneys, and most of his intestines were also taken out. He survived.

  Between the 23rd of August and the 22nd of December 1943 he attended the eighth staff course at the Command and Staff College in Quetta. He then became brigade major of the Razmak Brigade until the 22nd of October 1944. He afterwards joined the 9th Battalion, 12th Frontier Force Regiment, in the 14th Army under General William Slim. By the war's end he was a staff officer to Major General Douglas Gracey of the 20th Indian Infantry Division.

  At the Japanese surrender, Manekshaw supervised the disarmament of more than 10,000 Japanese prisoners. The camp he ran reported no discipline problems and no escape attempts. He then gave lectures in Australia for six months. In 1945 and 1946 he served on the staff of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, alongside Yahya Khan, the future president of Pakistan.

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• 4. The Battalion He Never Led

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  The Partition of India in 1947 split Manekshaw's own regiment. His battalion, the 4th of the 12th Frontier Force Regiment, went to the Pakistan army, and he was reassigned to the 8th Gorkha Rifles. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, reportedly asked him to join the Pakistani army. Manekshaw said no.

  In October 1947 he was due to take command of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Gorkha Rifles. Then, on the 22nd of October, Pakistani forces infiltrated Kashmir and captured Domel and Muzaffarabad. The next day Maharaja Hari Singh appealed to India for help.

  On the 25th of October, Manekshaw flew to Srinagar with V. P. Menon and surveyed the situation from the air. They returned to Delhi the same day and briefed Lord Mountbatten and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. On the morning of the 27th, Indian troops were sent to defend Srinagar, where Pakistani forces had reached the outskirts. His battalion command was cancelled, and he was posted to the Military Operations Directorate.

  The Kashmir dispute and the annexation of Hyderabad, where he briefed Sardar Patel, meant he never led an infantry battalion. He rose instead to colonel, brigadier and Director of Military Operations. In 1949 he was one of three army officers at the Karachi Conference, alongside Lieutenant General S. M. Shrinagesh and Major General K. S. Thimayya. Two civilians, Vishnu Sahay and H. M. Patel, joined them. The Karachi Agreement and a ceasefire line came out of it, and that line later evolved into the Line of Control.

  He became a colonel on the 4th of February 1952 and commanded the 167 Infantry Brigade at Firozpur. On the 9th of April 1954 he became director of military training at Army Headquarters. On the 14th of January 1955 he took charge of the Infantry School at Mhow, also serving as colonel of the 8th Gorkha Rifles and the 61st Cavalry. He found the training manuals out of date and helped rewrite them to fit the tactics the Indian Army actually used.

  In 1957 he went to the Imperial Defence College in London for a year-long higher command course. A general's rank was waiting on his return, and so was the most dangerous controversy of his career.

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• 5. The Treason Inquiry

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  On the 20th of December 1957, Manekshaw took command of the 26th Infantry Division as an acting major general. General Thimayya was then army chief and Krishna Menon was defence minister. On a visit, Menon asked Manekshaw what he thought of Thimayya. Manekshaw said it was improper to judge his superior and told the minister not to ask anyone else.

  Menon, annoyed, said he could remove Thimayya if he liked. Manekshaw answered: "You can get rid of him. But then I will get another."

  On the 1st of October 1959 he became commandant of the Defence Services Staff College at Wellington. By then trouble was gathering. In May 1961 Thimayya resigned after Menon had promoted Major General Brij Mohan Kaul over his objection. General Pran Nath Thapar replaced him. Kaul, who became chief of general staff, grew close to Nehru and Menon and more powerful than the army chief himself.

  Manekshaw and other senior officers objected to political interference in the army, and he was branded anti-national. Kaul sent informers to watch him. Manekshaw was charged with sedition and put before a court of inquiry. The accusation was that he was more loyal to the Queen than to India, because portraits of the Queen and of British officers still hung in the college and his office.

  Lieutenant General Daulet Singh presided and found no evidence against him. Before the formal ruling that there was no case to answer, the Sino-Indian War of 1962 broke out. Manekshaw, still under proceedings, could not fight in it. India lost, and Kaul and Menon were held chiefly responsible and sacked.

  In November 1962, Nehru asked Manekshaw to command IV Corps. Manekshaw told him the case had been a conspiracy and that his promotion was already almost eighteen months overdue. Nehru apologised. On the 2nd of December 1962 Manekshaw became an acting lieutenant general at Tezpur.

  He concluded that poor leadership had hurt the corps against China, and that morale was the first problem. Troops had been ordered to withdraw in panic without being allowed to fight. He ruled that no unit could retreat without his written permission. He also tackled shortages of equipment, accommodation and clothing across the North-East Frontier Agency. The analyst Srinath Raghavan noted that he and the new army chief delayed moving into the region until late 1963, to avoid provoking another Chinese offensive.

  On the 5th of December 1963 he took Western Command. After Nehru's death, reports of Western Command troops moving from Punjab to Delhi were read by some as the start of a coup. The army said they were there to handle funeral crowds. On the 16th of November 1964 he was transferred to Eastern Command in Calcutta, where insurgencies awaited him.

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• 6. Mountains and Insurgents

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  In 1966, Mizoram was in revolt, and Manekshaw ordered small villages merged into larger ones, a policy called spatialisation. The aim was to stop insurgents from hiding in thinly populated settlements. It also left them operating from empty country, cut off from food and supplies, while the army patrolled a smaller area and avoided costly urban fighting. His work on the insurgencies in Nagaland and Mizoram earned him the Padma Bhushan in 1968.

  In 1967, five years after the war with China, Chinese forces moved to seize four posts in Sikkim: Nathu La, Jelep La, Sebu La and Cho La. The posts overlooked the Chicken's Neck, the narrow strip that gives access to Northeast India. Major General Sagat Singh chose not to fall back, and Manekshaw backed him. He remarked: "I am afraid they are enacting Hamlet without the Prince. I will now tell you how I intend to deal with this." The clashes ended with Chinese withdrawal.

  General P. P. Kumaramangalam retired in June 1969, and on the 8th of June Manekshaw became chief of the army staff. He soon killed a plan to reserve army places for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Though a Parsi, and so a member of a small minority, he believed such quotas would damage the army's ethos and that everyone deserved an equal chance.

  In July 1969 he visited a battalion of the 8th Gorkha Rifles. He asked an orderly whether he knew the name of his chief. The man answered "Sam Bahadur," meaning Sam the Brave, and the name stuck.

  Around then, suspicion grew that the general might seize power. Indira Gandhi asked him directly, and he denied it. At a gathering attended by Kenneth Keating, the American ambassador, a US diplomat asked when the coup would come. Manekshaw reportedly replied: "As soon as General Westmoreland takes over your country."

  His sarcasm with civilians was about to meet its sternest test in a cabinet room in the spring of 1971.

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• 7. Twelve Days

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  In March 1971, the Pakistani armed forces began a fierce campaign against East Pakistani secessionists. The East Pakistanis were a majority of the population but lacked a fair share of power. Thousands died, and nearly ten million refugees crossed into the Indian state of West Bengal. In April, India decided to intervene.

  Towards the end of April, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked Manekshaw at a cabinet meeting whether he was ready for war. He told her that most of his armoured and infantry divisions were elsewhere and that only twelve tanks were fit to fight. Those tanks would also have to compete with the grain harvest for railway carriages. The monsoon was near, and the Himalayan passes would soon open amid heavy flooding.

  After the ministers left, he offered to resign. Gandhi declined and asked for his advice. He promised victory if he could fight on his own terms and choose the start date. She agreed.

  Preparations began in East Pakistan. India trained and armed the Mukti Bahini, a Bengali nationalist militia. About three brigades of regular Bangladeshi troops and 75,000 guerrillas were prepared to harass the Pakistani Army before open war.

  On the 3rd of December 1971, Pakistani aircraft bombed Indian Air Force bases in western India, and the war began. Army Headquarters had already sketched the plan. II Corps under Lieutenant General Tapishwar Narain Raina would enter from the west. IV Corps under Lieutenant General Sagat Singh would enter from the east, and XXXIII Corps under Lieutenant General Mohan L. Thapan from the north. Major General Gurbax Singh's 101 Communication Zone Area would support from the northeast, all under Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora of Eastern Command. The navy and air force joined in full the next day.

  At the United Nations on the 7th of December, the Security Council weighed an American resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. The USSR vetoed it twice, while Britain and France abstained over the atrocities in Bengal. On the 8th of December an American C141 cargo plane was seen unloading at Karachi. Manekshaw summoned the US military attache and had the deliveries stopped.

  He also used the radio. On the 9th, 11th and the 15th of December he addressed the Pakistani troops directly. "Why waste lives?" he asked, and promised soldierly treatment to anyone who laid down arms. The last two broadcasts answered messages from the Pakistani commanders Major General Rao Farman Ali and Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi. They sapped morale.

  On the 11th of December, Farman Ali asked the United Nations for a ceasefire, but President Yahya Khan had not authorised it. Yahya Khan later chose to stop the fighting to spare further losses. Niazi made the decision to surrender on the 15th of December, passing word through the American Consul General in Dhaka and Washington. Manekshaw demanded surrender by 9 AM on the 16th. At Niazi's request he moved the deadline to 3 PM, and Niazi signed the instrument that day.

  Gandhi wanted Manekshaw to accept the surrender in Dhaka. He declined, saying the honour belonged to Aurora. Fearing indiscipline, he forbade looting and rape. Addressing his men, he reportedly said: "When you see a Begum (Muslim woman), keep your hands in your pockets, and think of Sam."

  The war lasted 12 days. Some 93,000 Pakistani soldiers were taken prisoner, and Pakistan suffered about 6,000 casualties to India's 2,000. Manekshaw ensured the prisoners were well treated. Cabinet members complained he was treating them like sons-in-law. He sometimes spoke to them privately over tea, and allowed copies of the Quran, festivals, letters and parcels. He would not release them before a peace agreement, since they amounted to about four divisions. They stayed in captivity for several years as leverage for Pakistan's recognition of Bangladesh.

  On the 28th of November 1972, he led India's side in talks to mark the Line of Control, facing General Tikka Khan. The first round collapsed over parts of Thako Chak, Kaiyan, Chhamb and Tortuk. A second round from the 5th to the 7th of December settled them.

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• 8. Marshal and Memory

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  On the 1st of January 1973, Manekshaw became a field marshal, "in recognition of outstanding services to the Armed Forces and the nation." Indira Gandhi had first wanted to make him chief of defence staff as well. Navy and air force commanders objected, fearing that their smaller services would be neglected, and bureaucrats worried about losing influence. The post was dropped. His retirement, due in June 1972, was instead pushed back six months. A ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan on the 3rd of January conferred the rank. He retired on the 15th of January 1973, a date now celebrated as Army Day.

  In 1972, President V. V. Giri had awarded him the Padma Vibhushan. Nepal made him an honorary general that year, and in 1977 King Birendra gave him the Order of Tri Shakti Patta First Class. He settled in Coonoor and served on the boards of Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, Britannia Industries and Escorts Limited.

  In 2007, President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam met him in Wellington and presented a cheque covering more than thirty years of pay arrears he had never received in full. That same year, Gohar Ayub, son of Pakistani Field Marshal Ayub Khan, alleged he had sold army secrets for 20,000 rupees in 1965. India's defence establishment dismissed the claim.

  His jibes at politicians remained famous. He once wondered aloud whether the political masters in charge of defence could tell "a mortar from a motor; a gun from a howitzer; a guerrilla from a gorilla." Admiral Arun Prakash observed that his willingness to argue for better strategies than civilians offered is rare among today's brass.

  Analysts have weighed his record in several ways. He persuaded the government to let the Third Pay Commission cover the military, setting pay proportionate to service conditions, and the practice continues. He pushed for a domestic defence industry and criticised dependence on Soviet and later Russian equipment, though he could not secure lasting procurement reform. After Brigadier Bhawani Singh convinced him of the value of special operations, he approved the Chachro Raid, which took 13000 km2 of Pakistani territory up to Umerkot in Sindh.

  Some analysts see the 1971 plan as a forerunner of the Indian Cold Start doctrine. Robert M. Citino praised the speed but called mobilisation slow and logistics crude. General André Beaufre judged the eastern operations maneuver warfare, but the Shakargarh bulge too slow.

  Manekshaw had married Silloo Bode in Bombay on the 22nd of April 1939, and they had two daughters. He died of pneumonia complications at the Military Hospital in Wellington at 12:30 a.m. on the 27th of June 2008, aged 94. His reported last words were "I'm okay!" He was buried with military honours in the Parsi cemetery in Udhagamandalam, beside his wife.

  No government representative attended the funeral, and no national day of mourning was declared. Media commentators blamed the civilian establishment's wariness of a popular military. Bangladesh paid tribute to him.

  Vijay Diwas on the 16th of December honours the 1971 victory. In 2008 President Pratibha Patil released a stamp bearing his portrait, the Manekshaw Centre in Delhi Cantonment opened in 2010, and a granite statue went up at Wellington in 2014. Vicky Kaushal played him in the 2023 film Sam Bahadur, and Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children features him in a chapter titled "Sam and the Tiger."

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