BOOK REVIEW : THE MAN WE ALL FORGOT

                 

         NOWHERE  MAN

         AUTHOR- SHIVALIK BAKSHI              

         216 PAGES

        PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN VEER 2023  [Available on Amazon}

  This is a book about courage, betrayal and hope. It is a book about someone we all- the Army, the governments of the time, society, the media- forgot. All, that is, except his family, especially his two sisters, and this book is an attempt to keep his memory, and the silence surrounding his disappearance, alive. Captain Kamal Bakshi, a 25 year old officer of the 5 Sikh Battalion , was last seen on the 6th of December, 1971 at his command post 303 in the Chhamb sector on the border with Pakistan, surrounded by an enemy battalion, tanks bearing down on his post, his platoon decimated. Company Havildar Ajit Singh, who had been ordered by Bakshi to retreat back to HQ, turned round for one last look and saw the Captain leap out of his trench and rush towards the enemy, firing all the time with his Sten machine gun. Since then he has disappeared into the maws of officialdom, declared dead, or missing, or a POW at different times. All efforts by his family to uncover the truth about him- indeed, even if he is still alive at the age of 77- have petered out into the arid desert of bureaucratic indifference, stoic silence and impotent diplomacy. For officialdom he is just a faceless number on some file buried deep in an army cabinet. This book (by his nephew) is an attempt to reveal the face behind this number, the introverted boy who grew up in an army family, the young man who wanted to do his family and his country proud, a soldier who loved books and nature.

  Kamal Bakshi was born in Rawalpindi in undivided Punjab in 1946, studied in Dagshai and Sherwood College, Nainital, joined the NDA (National Defence Academy) and was commissioned into the Indian army in 1966. The author has given us a glimpse- it was a short life of just 25 years that he was dealing with, after all- of Kamal's life by interviewing his family, school friends, course mates, colleagues and superior officers. The picture we get is of a young man with extraordinary- sometimes contradictory-  traits: studious, fond of reading. a nature lover, adventurous (he once walked from Chandigarh to Shimla), a fitness freak with a spartan lifestyle, a man who loved challenges and would never give up. generous and giving to a fault- travelling on a train one bitterly cold night, he just gave away his sleeping bag to a shivering co- passenger who had none. Born into an army family (his father was a Colonel) he was always destined for the defence forces, his first choice was the Air Force but poor eyesight did not allow that. 

  Kamal Bakshi was initially declared killed in action and was also posthumously awarded a "mention in despatches", but subsequently, partly due to the unceasing efforts of his father, was categorised as "missing in action". In 1978, during the course of a statement in Parliament, the Minister of State for External Affairs admitted that he was secretly being held in captivity by Pakistan. The latter, of course, does not admit it, but the author speculates that Pakistan had probably held back the names of six or seven Indian POWs from the International Red Cross in 1972-74 when the exchange of prisoners took place. It apparently did so as an insurance against India (which had captured 90000 POWs in Bangladesh) acceding to the Bangladesh demand to hand over about a hundred Pakistani soldiers and officers to stand trial for atrocities committed. Ultimately, of course, this demand was dropped on the condition that Pakistan recognize this new country, which it did. But Pakistan has never accepted that it had given an incomplete list of POWs, or that some still remain in its jails. India's frosty relations with the country do not make it easy to negotiate a solution to this vexed issue.

  But the issue of the missing Indian POWs, including Captain Bakshi, in Pakistani jails continues to haunt their families. Anecdotal evidence continues to surface from time to time of their presence in Pakistani jails. These include notes and letters smuggled out by some POW; one such letter by a Major Suri to his father from a jail in Karachi mentions that there are a total of twenty Indian POWs in that jail. An ordinary Indian criminal who had spent ten years in a Pakistani jail, told Indian officials when he was repatriated in June 1978 that he had met an Indian army officer named Kamal Bakshi in jail. There are even reports and eye witness accounts that Pakistan had sent some Indian POWs to Oman, but  neither the Indian nor the Oman governments have ever confirmed this. 

  Kamal's parents have since passed away, waiting for their only son to somehow, miraculously, come walking down the driveway of their house in remote Mcluskieganj in Bihar. His sisters, Kiki and Niki, continue to pursue efforts to find out the truth about the soldier his country forgot, to attain that closure which has eluded them for the last 55 years. Successive Indian governments seem to have given up on our missing POWs even as they vigorously pursue extraditions of criminals and hunt anti-nationals abroad; even if a fraction of these resources and energy were to be spent on tracing out our missing soldiers it would provide comfort to their grieving families. A soldier, if alive, has the right to be acknowledged and protected by his nation, and if dead, the right to an honourable grave in his own country. This is all the closure that his sisters and friends want. They somehow hold on to the assurance given by the Buddha:

"Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."