While at school at the Central School for Tibetans in Mussoorie, my classmates and I used to sing a song that went, "Chocho mangmi la madro, haapen bholo yoki rae", which translates to "O brother don't go to the army, they will make you wear those loose half-pants". Although we sang this song in every grade, it was only years later that the true meaning of those words finally dawned on me. Each year as the seniors graduated, we would see trucks waiting at the school gate – Indian Army trucks, all set to cart many of the graduating students off to the barracks for training. At the time I was confused, and wondered why these new graduates were not simply going home.
It was only much later that I came to understand the involvement of Tibetans in the Indian Army. This is an issue that has still received scant attention, much less acknowledgement of the achievements of the Tibetan soldiers in the name of the Indian state. Indeed, to this day India has never officially recognised this debt, though Tibetans, around 10,000 of them, continue to serve in the Indian Army.
India's Tibetan troops have traditionally made up the vast majority of the Special Frontier Force, widely known as the SFF, which has been guarding Indian borders for 45 years. Following the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the SFF was created in Chakrata, around 100 km from Dehradun, a town with a large Tibetan refugee population. While a second force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), was also created in the same year, its mandate was border patrol, while the SFF focused on guerrilla warfare. Later on, all of the Tibetans with the ITBP were sent to Chakrata, and the ITBP remained Tibetan largely in name only.
Over the following decades, despite involvement in the 1971 War of Liberation in Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi's Operation Bluestar in Punjab, the 1999 conflict in Kargil, as well as a continued presence on the Siachen glacier, the full extent of the SFF's role has remained shrouded in mystery. Indeed, much of what there is to know about the SFF's actions over the past four and a half decades has remained with two people: former Indian intelligence chief R N Kao and S S Uban, the SFF's first inspector-general, both of whom have remained notoriously tight-lipped about the group.