Warrior-turned peacemaker General Indar Jit Rikhye passed away in the US on May 21, 2007. As a young boy, he was blessed, and instructed, by Mahatma Gandhi to join the army. Rabindranath Tagore offered him a scholarship to study at Shantiniketan. Zia-ul Haq (who later became one of Pakistan's military rulers) was his junior officer in the pre-independent Indian Army.Born in July 1920 in Lahore, now a city in Pakistan, Indar Jit Rikhye was the son of a former medical officer in the British Indian Army. After he graduated from the Indian Military Academy in 1939, he was commissioned by King George VI to serve in the 6th Duke of Connaught's Own Lancers, also known as the Bengal Lancers.
Later, as a young squadron commander, he led the first armoured elements to roll into the defence of Kashmir from the 'raiders' in 1947. In the 'middle innings' of his career, as he called it, he underwent a transformation from a war-fighter to a peacemaker, serving with the United Nations in Gaza, Congo and in other parts of world. It was during this time that he first began thinking about the futility and then the paradoxical inevitability of war.
This was the general I knew -- full of stories about legendary, near mythical, figure of stature; a man with an old school charm and a peculiar 'Eastern-Western' philosophy. I first met Major General Rikhye when I came to the United States in 2003 to get a graduate education. He was president of the Indian Veterans Organisation, IVOANA, and I was its youngest member- a former Indian army officer with just nine years of service.
In the beginning I was slightly sceptical of the general, a notion that comes easily to most soldiers. Blame it on my perspective, but most of the generals I had met, or served under, were not exactly visionary-leaders, though they were good bureaucratic-managers, receiving and passing on orders. Moreover, I was in my early 30s, and it seemed improbable that I could strike up a friendship with man of my grandfather's generation.
But General Rikhye was a special man, and over the last few years I had the pleasure to meet him a number of times, and to speak with him often. His formative and defining years read like a recounting of the historical events of a bygone era. He served during the Second World War in places that have assumed contemporary significance for altogether different reasons today -- Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, the Italian front. At the time of Partition/Independence, the general was posted in a unit that went to Pakistan, and he witnessed the dismemberment of the British Indian Army. Immediately afterwards, he led the first armoured squadron that was rushed to the defence of Kashmir from Pakistani raiders in 1947. Ironically, these raiders were being given logistical support from the same troops that General Rikhye was commanding as part of the undivided Indian Army.
Major General Indar Jit Rikhye, President of the International Peace Academy. General Rikhye was a former military advisor to UN Secretaries-General Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant, and Commander of the United Nations Emergency Force in Gaza. As military advisor, he was responsible for operations in the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, West Iran, Yemen, and Cyprus. Special assignments included advisor to the secretary-general during the Cuban Missile Crisis, chief of the UN observer mission to the Dominican Republic, and participant in the Spinelli-Rikhye Mission to Jordan and Israel in 1965. General Rikhye is the author of numerous publications including The Thin Blue Line: International Peacekeeping and its Future.
Tribute by Anit Mukherjee who is a PhD candidate at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.
Photographs: Courtesy the Rikhye family.
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