M.K. Bhadrakumar
In the Jean-Jacques Annaud film based on William Craig’s 1973 nonfiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, Nikita Khrushchev, immediately after arriving in Stalingrad front as the new principal commissar, deputed by Joseph Stalin to boost Soviet morale after the defeat in the Second Battle of Kharkov at the hands of the Sixth Army of the Wehrmacht during the German summer offensive of 1942, took a meeting of the commanders of the Red Army formations comprising the 62nd, 63rd, and 64th Armies to apprise them of Stalin’s famous Order No 227 dated July 2 instructing the defence of Stalingrad at all costs.
The English actor and film director Bob Hoskins in the role of Khrushchev threatened the commanders, per the film, that Stalingradwas not like any other city in the USSR, for, it bore ‘the name of the boss’. The Southwestern Command of the Indian Army headquartered in Jaipur will not face such a predicament, as Sir Creek, the 96-km estuary flowing into the Arabian Sea and the westernmost point in Gujarat bordering Pakistan which is witnessing tensions lately, is named after an obscure British representative of the colonial era.
However, it is crucial to know as a tidal wave of ‘cultural nationalism’ is sweeping India that the original name of Sir Creek was Banganga in Sanskrit. Legend says Vaishno Devi created the tributary with an arrow and bathed in it, washing her hair, hence the river is also known as Bal Ganga — bal meaning ‘hair’ in Hindi.
Over the period between 1970s to 1990s when I handled Pakistan affairs in the MEA in different capacities during my three assignments at headquarters, the greatest pleasure was always in the access they gave to the fabulous archival materials that have never seen the light of day (and probably never will) stored in the vaults of South Block, which would punctuate the largely unproductive, frustrating and unremittingly tense routine in the IPA Division. I was always intrigued by the Sir Creek issue, which fitted the description of a low-hanging fruit in the deeply troubled India-Pakistan relationship, forever ripe for plucking but forever left untouched for some mystical reasons that was impossible to fathom at my level.
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