NEW DELHI, July 27 — As India marks the 26th anniversary of the Kargil War, a former senior Army officer who commanded troops during the conflict has approached the Supreme Court seeking a fresh probe into the events of 1999 and corrections in the official war records.
Brigadier (Retd) Surinder Singh, who once led the Kargil Brigade but was removed mid-conflict and later dismissed from service, filed a public interest litigation (PIL) on May 24. In it, he called for a de novo inquiry — a fresh investigation from the beginning — led either by a sitting Supreme Court judge or a group of Union ministers.
“The truth remains buried under layers of bureaucratic silence and doctored reports,” Singh stated in his petition. He alleged that top commanders at the time not only reshuffled key appointments but also ignored ground-level assessments, withheld resources, and suppressed frontline realities, leading to a conflict that he claims could have been avoided.
Singh’s removal from command came during the height of the war, and he was later discharged from service for alleged mishandling of classified documents — charges he says were part of an effort to deflect attention from institutional failures.
The petition casts doubt on the credibility of the Kargil Review Committee (KRC), constituted by the government after the war, stating that its findings were based on incomplete data. “The KRC failed to examine direct eyewitness accounts from frontline commanders and troops. It lacked the scope and methodology to uncover key operational facts,” Singh argued.
He further cited a remark made in August 2006 by former Air Chief Marshal AY Tipnis, who led the Indian Air Force during the conflict. Tipnis had said that Army generals deliberately kept the government in the dark about the intrusions until mid-May 1999. “Whatever be the situation, don’t keep it to yourself,” Tipnis had remarked, a lesson he said the Kargil Committee failed to highlight.
Singh maintained that the war could have been prevented if appropriate defensive measures, repeatedly requested by him before the conflict, had been implemented. “A highly avoidable war was thrust upon the nation to recover its own territory across a 227-km stretch along the Line of Control,” he said.
The former officer’s plea, coming on the anniversary of the conflict, reopens questions about the preparedness and decision-making at the highest levels of military command during one of India’s most significant post-independence military engagements.
