The nation today paid tribute to General Krishnaswamy Sundarji, former Chief of Army staff on his 22
nd death anniversary. General K Sundarji, from 1986 to 1988, served as Chief of the Indian Army Staff. He was the last former officer of the British Indian Army to lead the Indian Army.
Born in 1928, Sundarji graduated from Madras Christian College and, two years before Independence, joined the British-Indian army in 1945. A year later, he was commissioned into the prestigious Mahar infantry regiment and sent to the NWFP (now in Pakistan) to permanently suppress insurgents Pathan tribesmen at war with the colonial government.
The whisky-sipping Sundarji, known as the thinking general, also raised the mechanised infantry regiment and was credited for reorganizing the working and cumbersome procurement policies of the army.
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In the last quarter of 1986, while Pakistan was busy in its internal affairs, Islamabad received intelligence reports suggesting a war-level military exercise was taking place adjacent to the country’s border in Rajasthan.
About 600,000 Indian troops had been mobilized in the western sector by New Delhi, under ‘Operation Brasstacks’, the aim of which, according to India, was to “test and experiment the new concepts in warfare”.
Led by General Krishnaswamy Sundarji, who was in charge of an infantry division in the 1971 war, these exercises combined the might of the Indian Army, Air Force, and the Navy, and were described as being “bigger than any NATO exercise and the biggest since World War II.”