It is also obvious that, when restraint, common sense and the art of introspection were being handed out, Indians missed the bus. How else can one explain our perennial recourse to obfuscation and prevarication when it comes to analysing any event with the aim of learning lessons?

The Kargil episode had many positive fallouts. The indisputable courage of our jawans, the leadership displayed by the officer corps, the innovative use of the Air Force, the exemplary tri-service cooperation, the deft handling of the issue abroad and the admirable restraint shown by the political leadership, despite the provocation and pressures within India, have all been highlighted in the media. It is equally necessary not to get carried away by the euphoria and gloss over the deficiencies inour defence set-up.

Kargil has underlined the glaring lack of modern equipment in the Indian Army. Many years ago, John Masters, the novelist who had served in India, was commissioned to write an appraisal of the Indian Army. His verdict: ``The Indian Army is a force with first-rate men, second-rate officers and third-rate equipment''. Much of Masters' assessment about the equipment remains true to this day. We saw no less a person than the Army Chief going on TV in the middle of the campaign and bemoaning the lack of modern equipment for his troops. He decided to fight ``with what we have''. Army jawans have had to fight their way up the steep slopes of Kargil without proper clothing, snow shoes, light bullet-proof vests and modern rifles. Add to this the lack of proper surveillance equipment, armed helicopters and artillery and you have the full picture of the odds against which the Army was required to evict the well-dug-in intruders.

As usual, fingers were pointed at the insensitive bureaucrat and thecallous politician for this sorry state of affairs. The truth lies much deeper and even the most helpful defence minister or a generous finance minister cannot help India's Army to modernise under the present circumstances.

Nearly 40 years ago, at the time of our clash with China, the strength of the Indian Army was barely 250,000. The steady increase in the strength since then has seen it cross the one million mark. Add to this our half-a-million- strong paramilitary forces. Our answer to any conflict or crisis is invariably to add more to this manpower. The Army can either have quality or quantity. We seem to prefer the latter. Indeed, even before the guns at Kargil had been silenced, the government had announced the raising of another 20 battalions of the Assam Rifles and 12 of the Rashtriya Rifles adding some 30,000 men to the paramilitary forces.

Today the Indian Army spends fully 85 per cent of its annual budget on paying and maintaining its existing force, leaving precious little for modernisation.With hardly Rs 4,000 crore available for new equipment each year, there is little hope that our enormous Army will see any perceptible modernisation in the near future.

There are just three ways by which the government can make available enough funds for modernisation: first, reduce the overall manpower of the Army and, thus, its overwhelming revenue expenditure; second, reduce the revenue expenditure by resorting to partial conscription; finally, increase the defence allocation to the Army and hence ultimately the defence budget. The first two are not acceptable to the Army while the third is a no-no to our financial managers, not to speak of the IMF and the World Bank.

It, therefore, appears that we are condemned to making noises about the Army's lack of modernisation, without doing anything about it. It is futile to blame the bureaucrat and the politician, while the service bloats and balloons, spending all its budget allocation on pay and allowances!

Kargil has also brought out the utter failure ofthe National Security Council to tackle a national emergency. The NSC did not play any major role in either forecasting the incursion or preparing the government for the conflict. The demands for the setting up of such a council have been made for the past three decades. Under one excuse or other, and sensing that the NSC was bound to clip their influence on the political leadership, powerful bureaucrats had prevented its formation, until the government redeemed an election promise and formed the council with much fanfare about a year ago.

Even here, bureaucratic one-upmanship was evident. By giving it a most unwieldy set-up, it has been ensured that the NSC, like so many other organisations in the country, is totally ineffective. The so-called National Security Advisory Board looks more like an employment opportunity for a whole brigade of retired service officers, foreign and civil service officials, intelligence have-beens and friends of the government hanging around in Delhi. How can such a huge anddisparate body be ever expected to produce anything worthwhile? Eventually, the National Security Advisor, who also happens to be the PM's secretary, ended up doing what he had been doing before the NSC's formation: advise the Cabinet and the PM without really consulting the Council. The NSC utterly failed its purpose in the first crisis to occur after its setting up.

Finally, the Kargil conflict has once and for all bared the utter failure of our policy of self-reliance. For years we have been crowing about the major strides we had made in achieving self-sufficiency in many areas of defence equipment. The public relations departments of our research organisations continuously fill up valuable newspaper space with such claims. Yet, at the first sign of a small border conflict, we had to import every form of equipment, from high-altitude clothing to snow shoes, from light bullet-proof vests to artillery spare parts.

Have we got our priorities wrong? Have we been so busy producing `prestige' products likethe Arjun tank and the LCA that we have bypassed more vital defence equipment? Perhaps there is no glory in producing snow shoes and bullet-proof vests. A little soul-searching may be good for the DRDO.

Thanks to its Army, India has won a famous victory in Kargil. Kargil gives us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes. Will we grab it or wallow in the euphoria of victory and the oncoming elections? If we refuse to learn its lessons, the next Kargil will surely lead to disaster.

The writer is a retired Chief of Naval Staff