By OUR STAFF REPORTER
Dehradun, 4 Oct: The seventh edition of the Military History Seminar will be held at the Welham Boys’ School, here, on 5-6 October.
The opening session will have Governor Lt General Gurmit Singh (Retd) as the Chief Guest, while the closing session will be presided over by the Governor of Arunachal Pradesh, Lt General Kaiwalya Trivikram Parnaik (Retd). The two governors are from the Assam Regiment and the Rajputana Rifles, respectively, and have inspiring track records of service to the nation.
Both the Chief Guests are governors of front-line states that border Tibet, occupied by China since 1951. Few are aware of the fact that Lt General Gurmit Singh is one of the foremost experts on China. He had retired as the Deputy Chief of Army Staff and had also been part of the talks between India and Pakistan on the vexing Siachen Glacier issue. The Governor had earlier not only commanded the 19 Infantry Division at Baramula, but had then served as the Corps Commander of the prestigious Chinar XV Corps that looks after the Kashmir Valley. His desire to further raise the level of education in the state is well known, and his presence at the seminal Military History Seminar will help the movement go from ‘strength to strength’, which incidentally is the motto of the Welham Boys’ School as well.
The ‘Welham Initiative’, a brainchild of Darshan Singh, Chairman, WBS, will see a record forty schools from across the country participating in the event this year. The MHS, as the seminar is popularly known, has grown over the years into a significant calendar event for educational institutions around the country. In addition to exposing, both, boys and girls of the next generation to significant events that have shaped our recent history, the Military History Seminar, which has gained enormous popularity in recent years, also introduces them to critical thinking, which will serve the student delegates well in the future.
The theme of this year’s seminar is ‘Stones of Silence: Myth & Reality’. The seminar shall consist of six main sessions spread over two days. The first session on 5 October, will focus on the importance of not allowing military history to be coloured by ideology and the need to focus and stay within available facts. The second session is a discussion on the division between the narrative of the epics and recorded history. This also allows us to look at lessons drawn from epics that help set the ethical standards for warfare, starting with the early empires like Magadh, the Mauryas, and the Guptas as well as the early Pallavas, Cholas, and Pandyas.
The third session, also on 5 October, will look at the Medieval Period, starting with the arrival of Islam, and the various Sultanates and finishing with the decline of the Mughals.
On the second day, 6 October, the fourth session will look at how colonialism impacted India, starting with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, and the French, plus other minor players such as the Danes and the Spanish. The one-and-a-half-hour session will look at various aspects, especially the inherent weaknesses that were exploited to the hilt by a ruthless Europe to subjugate an entire people. Session 5 will look at the post-independence scenario, especially the four major wars that shaped India.
Session 6 will culminate with the way forward… with additional emphasis on the Chinese threat on the Northern border. Lt General KT Parnaik was the Northern Army Commander in 2012 when the Chinese first invaded the Depsang Plains in Eastern Ladakh. The Indian response had been instantaneous with Indian troops occupying forward positions in the Chumar region. Recently, in the ongoing Asian Games being held at Hangzhou, athletes who were from Arunachal Pradesh and an integral part of the Indian Asian Games contingent were denied visas by the Chinese.
For the seventh year in succession, the Seminar is being put together by the acclaimed author, Shiv Kunal Verma, who along with Chairman Darshan Singh, had conceived the seminar in 2017.
