History of the Cease Fire Line in Kashmir | Lt Gen Satish Nambiar

Why the LoC Still Matters | Lt Gen Satish Nambiar, Padma Bhushan, PVSM, AVSM, Vir Chakra | Line of Control | Leadership & Ideas Archives | Brains Trust | The Peninsula Studios The Line of Control that divides Kashmir today traces back to a map drawn at a scale of one inch to four miles -- so imprecise that the line itself, drawn thick enough to see, could represent a couple of hundred yards of disputed ground on the actual terrain. Lt Gen Satish Nambiar argues that this original imprecision, more than any single war, explains why the LoC remains one of the world's most dangerous borders. Nambiar traces the line's history from the 1947-48 war and the UN-brokered 1949 Karachi ceasefire agreement, through India's decision -- which he calls 'retrograde' -- to take the Kashmir dispute to the United Nations rather than press a clear military advantage, to the 1972 Shimla Agreement, whose terms he still finds difficult to defend as a soldier who fought under Indira Gandhi's wartime leadership. He closes on the Siachen dispute's origins: a phrase in the original ceasefire agreement that simply reads 'thence northwards to the glaciers,' left deliberately vague because nobody had ever mapped the terrain beyond it -- an ambiguity that foreign mountaineering permits and Pakistani-backed expeditions later threatened to exploit, until Colonel Narendra 'Bull' Kumar's 1978 reconnaissance triggered India's own 1984 pre-emptive occupation of the Saltoro Ridge. Lt Gen Satish Nambiar Padma Bhushan, PVSM, AVSM, Vir Chakra was commissioned into the Indian Army in December 1957 and retired as Deputy Chief of the Army Staff in August 1994. He served as the first Force Commander and Head of Mission of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the former Yugoslavia from March 1992 to March 1993. Brains Trust records people who were present when history was made. It exists to save their testimony before it is lost. Watch next: Lt Gen Satish Nambiar -- "War Stories: Battle of Jamalpur, Bangladesh War 1971" -- back to the same officer's own frontline experience of the 1971 war that produced the LoC's most recent chapter.    • The Officer Who Took Jamalpur's Surrender ...   Related playlist:    • The Borders India Didn't Choose: India's F...   Visit our website: https://www.thepeninsulastudios.com/b... Subscribe to Brains Trust for more firsthand accounts of history. Curated and Directed by Subroto Chattopadhyay, author of Bangladesh: Humiliation, Carnage, Liberation, Chaos. Zahid Khan — Head of Production & Post-Production. Narinder Tawakley — Head of Logistics. Produced by The Peninsula Studios. Copyright © The Peninsula Publications and Studio Private Limited, New Delhi. All Rights Reserved. Produced by The Peninsula Studios. #BrainsTrust #LineOfControl #Kashmir #LineControl #ThePeninsulaStudios