Brig Amarjeet Singh Bedi, VSM

Brigadier Bedi answered me in voice messages, ten of them, recorded over several nights. He begins each one by saying which question he is on, and ends by telling me he will continue in the next. “I will continue in my next talk hereafter.” They are printed here in the order he made them.

He opens with a sentence I was not expecting. “I belong to a family which traces its lineage from Guru Nanak Dev Ji. We are direct descendants of Guru Nanak.” Then, in the same even tone: “I will send you my family tree separately.” He did. It is reproduced at the foot of this page, and it runs from 1469 to 2015.

The second recording is an inventory. His great-grandfather, Sir Baba Khem Singh, held forty-one villages, and estates besides in Rawalpindi, Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur. His grandfather held about twenty thousand acres. “We were the biggest landlords pre-partition in this part of the world, that is joint Punjab.” The great-grandfather had been knighted, had attended Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and had attended a coronation in London in 1905 — he is not certain which king, and says so, which I have left as he said it. He died in 1906. The estates lay in what is now the Montgomery, or Sahiwal, district of Pakistan.

Then one sentence does all the work: “The family was caught up with partition, thereafter migrated to India. We lost all our property and land after partition. We were compensated with a little land after partition, and we settled in the area of Fazilka.”

He does not dwell on it. The next thing he says is that his father and four brothers were all educated at an elite school in Pakistan, that three uncles became senior IAS officers and one a High Court judge, and that his own father stayed on the land. He describes him in six words — “a very decent, nice, humble man” — and then mentions, almost in passing, that he was a Member of the Legislative Assembly.

The third recording is his entire career, delivered in under two minutes. Boarding school at St George’s, Mussoorie, from 1950. The Rashtriya Indian Military College. The National Defence Academy. The Indian Military Academy. Commissioned into the Sindh Horse in 1965, “before the war.” And then this, said without a pause for effect:

Each of those is the first prize of its institution. He won all three, consecutively, and was then judged the best young officer of his course. He lists them the way another man might list the towns he has lived in, and moves straight on to the Staff College in Canada. Forty seconds later, in the same recording and the same tone:

“I worked very hard as a regimental soldier, and I enjoyed every bit of it, and I don’t mind repeating it in my second life if I have one. While posted at the staff college as a brigadier, it was discovered that I had a cancer problem during my annual medical examination. Within a week, I got my operation done to remove my kidney, and I applied for premature retirement.”

There is no sentence between the two. The career he would live again and the examination that ended it arrive in the same minute. He closes: “And that, in short, is my career and family profile.”

On the College he is warm and precise, and he takes longer over it than over either war. He had already been a boarder for seven years, so there was nothing to adjust to; two cousins were there ahead of him; the food was better than at St George’s and the routine better planned. In the middle of insisting he had no trouble settling in at all, he admits that he missed his parents. He was above average at sport and, he is firm about this, an average student.

By 1957 the British had gone. “Everything was quite Indian.” What he describes instead is the section system — a one-term senior assigned to each new boy, his bed and cabin box placed alongside the junior’s, chosen by the section NCOs for being the sort of boy who would do it properly. He remembers every teacher by name. He is candid about not having liked his first principal, and careful to add that he was otherwise a good man. And he says something about the PT instructors that I have thought about since: that they had nice little bungalows, that their accommodation was good, and that this is why they enjoyed the work.

He wanted the infantry. His parents prevailed, and a cousin already in the Sindh Horse settled it. He is unusually honest about how little of it was reasoned: “at that age, you have various thoughts in your mind. They are not very logical.”

In 1965 he had not finished his young officers’ course when the war began, and he is careful not to claim more than he did: “my duties weren’t really, you know, as a frontline soldier … basically, call it a messenger liaison officer.” His regiment was on the Grand Trunk axis, Amritsar to Lahore. They stopped at the Ichhogil Canal, on the outskirts of the city. They were ordered back two miles. They fought the rest of the war over those two miles and took them again before it ended. In 1971 he was a captain at an armoured brigade headquarters in the Samba sector, and he enjoyed it — “it was more like an exercise in the western sector … but with live firing.” The serious fighting was about to begin when Dhaka fell and the war was over.

I asked him whether it had ever sat oddly with him to spend a career in an army whose principal adversary holds the ground his family came from. That is one of three questions he has not yet answered, and I have not answered it for him here. What can be recorded is that both things are true, that he told me both himself, and that he drew no line between them.

Asked for the one incident that changed what he understood about soldiering, he declines the premise: “in the regiment, there is no one particular incident. There are many little small incidents that make up regimental life.” What he offers instead is the mess — “you are polished as a soldier in the mess” — and the troops, who “are very quick to judge the officer … you have to rub shoulders.”

On the army now he is both generous and unsparing. It is more competent, better educated, better able to think. It has lost physical fitness. Officers are less willing to call a spade a spade, and he blames career progression for it. The army has been downgraded by the civil administration, and the remedy he wants is from his own side: “we need our top brass to stand up, let a few heads roll.” On Agniveer he asks only for consistency — apply it to the police and the paramilitary too, “why only single out the Army?” And on the young, from a man who stood first at three institutions in a row: “Our young boys are absolutely outstanding, much, much better than what we were during our time.”

His last recording ends: “I have enjoyed my service life. I would join it again, given an opportunity. I have nothing more to add. I’ve had a lovely, wonderful life.”

The feature above is this archive’s reading of his recordings, not his own nomination. Three of the twelve questions are still open — whether Partition was spoken about at home, whether serving against the ground his family came from ever sat oddly with him, and what brigade command asked of him that unit command had not — and so is the closing request this archive is built around. Nothing here has been inferred on his behalf. Where his words and his family’s own records differ, both are printed and the difference is footnoted.