ON Aug 1, 2025, a Facebook post showed Ajay Bisaria, former Indian envoy to Pakistan, alongside a video of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh reading in parliament from the diplomat’s book about difficult relations with the neighbour. Last week, however, the defence minister was taking an opposite stance about quoting from books and published articles in parliament. He took umbrage at the opposition seeking to cite the memoirs of former army chief Gen Manoj Mukund Naravane. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi aimed to show with the help of the extracts how the Modi government’s macho image of itself was in fact pretentious and hollow when it came to confronting China.
The defence minister insisted, wrongly, that it was against parliament’s rules to quote from the printed but as yet unpublished book. Rajnath Singh was livid because Gandhi cited some troubling passages showing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a shirker when it came to confronting China. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla ad-libbed to tell an unsurprised Gandhi that he could neither quote from the book nor from an article about the book. And he wouldn’t be permitted to even describe its contents.
The impugned book — Four Stars of Destiny — was written by the former army chief over a year ago, and has been ready for release for months. But its publication stands withheld without clearance from the defence minister’s office. The ministry has not responded to reminders from the publishers as to why it was not being cleared. The answer may lie elsewhere.
On Jan 31, ace defence analyst Sushant Singh published excerpts from Naravane’s book in Caravan magazine. Some passages from the book do something unusually courageous. They unintentionally challenge Modi’s self-cultivated image as a tough nationalist who brooks no nonsense from India’s neighbours, chiefly Pakistan but also China, albeit in a muffled way. Naravane was alarmed, in Sushant’s version of a passage, when the chief of the Northern Command reported that Chinese tanks were moving speedily towards an Indian post on the disputed Himalayan border. The chief woke up everyone from the national security adviser to the foreign minister and the defence minister, but got no response. Hours later, the defence minister called to tell him pithily, according to the book, that Modi’s instructions were to deal with the situation as Naravane deemed fit. In other words, as Naravane writes, he was handed a hot potato.
Rahul Gandhi cited some troubling passages from an as yet unpublished book showing Modi as a shirker when it came to China.
According to Sushant’s reading of the book, Lt-Gen Yogesh Joshi, the chief of the Indian Army’s Northern Command, received a phone call at 8.15 pm on Aug 31, 2020. The information he received alarmed him. Four Chinese tanks, supported by infantry, had begun moving up a steep mountain track towards Rechin La in eastern Ladakh. Joshi reported the movement to Gen Naravane who immediately grasped the severity of the situation. The tanks were within a few hundred metres of Indian positions on the Kailash Range, the strategic high ground that Indian forces had seized, hours earlier, in a dangerous race with China’s People’s Liberation Army. “In this terrain on the disputed Line of Actual Control — the de facto border between the two countries — every metre of elevation translates to strategic dominance,” says Sushant Singh.
The Indian soldiers fired an illuminating round, a kind of warning shot. It had no effect. The Chinese kept advancing. Naravane began making frantic calls to the leaders of India’s political and military establishment, including Rajnath Singh, the defence minister, Ajit Doval, the national security adviser, Gen Bipin Rawat, the chief of defence staff and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar. “To each and every one my question was, ‘What are my orders?’” Naravane writes.
The situation was deteriorating dramatically and demanded clarity. There was an existing protocol. Naravane had clear orders not to open fire “till cleared from the very top”. His superiors did not give any clear directive. Minutes ticked by. At 9.10 pm, Joshi called again. The Chinese tanks continued to advance and were now less than a kilometre from the pass. At 9.25 pm, Naravane called Rajnath again, asking “for clear directions”. None came.
“My position was critical.” Naravane was caught between “the Command who wanted to open fire with all possible means” and a government committee “which had yet to give me clear-cut executive orders”.
To cut the story short, Rajnath Singh called back at 10.30 pm. He had spoken to the prime minister, whose instructions consisted of a single sentence: “Jo uchit samjho, woh karo” — do whatever you deem appropriate. This was to be “purely a military decision”. Modi had been consulted. He had been briefed. But he had declined to make the call. “I had been handed a hot potato,” Naravane writes.
In the Indian system, the decision to wage war belongs to the prime minister at the head of the cabinet committee on security. The military chiefs then decide on how best to carry out the orders. Did Modi abdicate his responsibility of dealing with what was shaping up like a military threat with the potential to lead to a hot war with China? There are other unflattering references to the government’s handling of border ties with China, which were not allowed to be discussed in the world’s largest democracy.
Ajay Bisaria’s book on the other hand was deemed kosher to be quoted since it made the BJP government look better against the Congress to his followers. The excerpt in the video clip showed the defence minister claiming that in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008, Congress foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee ignored the advice of his foreign secretary to respond with a missile attack on an alleged terror hub in Pakistan. Mukherjee folded the meeting without any further follow-up. Fortunately so, speaking from hindsight of Operation Sindoor.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2026
