October and November in India are known only for festivities: Dussehra and Diwali. However, these months in 1962 produced a national catastrophe that we all – the army, the veterans, the politicians, and above all, the citizens – conspire to hide.These are the days in 1962 when India and the Indian Army were smashed by the Chinese. The war lasted about a month, in October and November. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) destroyed the Indian 7th Brigade in just 3 hours. Its 2nd Rajput unit, deployed at Namka Chu, near the Bhutan border, saw 282 of its 500-odd men killed. Most of the others were wounded or captured.More disgrace was to follow. Though the war ended in November 62 and the area was back in Indian hands, the dead of 2 Rajput had to wait 27 years to be discovered and cremated. A patrol found them in 1989. There was no way to identify all the dead, but the dog tags on the bodies told a tale. They all had serial number 29, which announced that they were all from 2 Rajput.This pattern repeated throughout the war. Proud units of the Indian Army were routed in hours. Official Chinese state media claimed that the Indian forces fled or were terrified “merely by the twang of the bow” – a metaphorical way of saying the Indian army was poorly prepared and retreated at the mere sound or threat of Chinese advancement. Finally, China announced a unilateral ceasefire and walked back proudly. And this happened in a war between two countries whose armies were similar in many ways. Both were Asian countries, had large populations, enough strategic depth, and had become independent at about the same time. Yet such different results?If 1962 seems too old, look at what happened afterward. While reading ahead, keep in mind that while the India-China war was one between equals, the ones coming up ahead were between two countries where one was about five times larger. Expectations should be about five times higher.The auditIn 1965, India managed to ward off Pakistan, but nothing more. The same was the situation in the 1971 Western sector. The Eastern sector in 1971 was indeed a magnificent victory, but it was a war between a featherweight boxer and a heavyweight.In one corner was an army cut off from its source and troubled within by an angry local population, while in the other corner was a regular army able to move in from three directions, with full support of the largest civilian army the world had ever seen – the Mukti Bahini. Such unequal fights should not be used in sensible comparisons. General Manekshaw himself said, “But to say that it was something like what Rommel did would be ridiculous; it had to happen.”After that, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was an unmitigated disaster which the country and even the army have chosen to simply forget. The Kargil war was remembered for all the wrong reasons. Very cleverly, we talk only of Phase 2 of the war, in which the Indian Army managed to push back infiltrators, supported by the Pakistan Army but not the Pakistan Air Force and the Pakistan government. Like 1971, it was a fight between two unequal forces. Moreover, we never talk about Phase 1 of the war, in which something happened with no parallel in military history anywhere: a country losing thousands of kilometers of territory without the enemy having to fire even one shot!Then we have Operation Sindoor. The world believes that the war was halted by the Americans, and that smashes the idea of Indian sovereignty more than the hit the Indian Army took from the Chinese in 1962. If we accept that we brought about the ceasefire magnanimously, the question arises: why be magnanimous toward your enemy, and why halt operations after just four days? Aerial strikes can demolish buildings but not punish terrorists or neutralise their infrastructure. If it indeed did, how did the Red Fort Car Blast terror act take place just 6 months later on November 10, 2025, and why did India refuse to act against the perpetrators, as it had promised?A lot of questions, indeed, about the real effectiveness of the Indian Army, and a simple answer. All this happened because, institutionally, the Indian Army has set itself up not to learn from its failures.The only approach available for the study is to look into how did the other get better – the Americans after Vietnam, the Israeli Defence Forces after the Yom Kippur war and the British army after Falklands.It may be argued that since different armies operate in different environments, this becomes a study between two unequals. The argument is valid. But since we need some mirror, we must look at someone who looked quite like us in the past, but entirely different now. With this logic, I choose the British Army as the mirror.Institutionally, the Indian Army is a revamped British Indian Army. This describes living institutional reality, not a historical observation about origins. The regimental system, the officer-gentleman tradition, the understanding of military honour, the Sandhurst-to-IMA pipeline, the mess culture, the formation of professional identity around the regiment rather than the individual: all are direct inheritances. In 1947, the two armies that emerged from partition, Pakistan’s and India’s, were both British Indian Army formations with different flags. The British advisers who remained in both armies for the first years of independence trained their successors in the same doctrines, procedures and institutional culture they had always used.Britain’s reform and India’s silenceThe Franks Report of 1983 is the British government’s examination of the political failures that preceded the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. It has been described, in Parliament and by political commentators, as ‘a classic establishment job’: a document that, after 338 paragraphs of careful analysis, arrived at a conclusion exonerating the government in terms that critics found inadequate. James Callaghan said in Parliament that the report had ‘chucked a bucket of whitewash’ over its painstaking account. The criticism is not without justice.The Franks Report is publicly available. Parliament has debated it, academics have analysed it, and historians have incorporated it into the historiography of the Falklands conflict. Its inadequacies are on the public record, so they can be identified, criticised, and used to demand better accountability in future. An imperfect public inquiry is more useful to an institution that wants to learn than a comprehensive classified inquiry that no one can read. Britain’s ‘whitewash’ is more accountable than India’s Henderson Brooks.The Chilcot Inquiry of 2016, the seven-year examination of the Iraq War, went further than Franks in every dimension. Its 2.6 million words examined specific decision-makers and decisions and named failures by named individuals. It found that the Chief of the Defence Staff and the military hierarchy had failed to communicate the dangers of the Iraq operation adequately to their political masters, had failed to respond to the deteriorating situation in Basra, and had committed to a simultaneous campaign in Helmand in breach of defense planning guidelines. These are findings about military professional conduct, made publicly, about named individuals, in a freely available document that has been debated extensively.The Indian equivalent of the Chilcot Inquiry does not exist. The Kargil Review Committee, constituted thirty-six years after the Henderson Brooks Report, had a mandate explicitly limited to the events leading to the Pakistani intrusion, which could not reach the selection system or individual accountability, and produced recommendations that, by published accounts, the Naresh Chandra Task Force in 2011-12 found largely unimplemented twelve years later. The IPKF deployment produced no formal inquiry at all. Galwan has produced no formal accountability process. And asking for the lapses and strategic errors of Operation Sindoor is unimaginable in today’s India.Some citizens still tryBut some citizens still try. Mostly, they know what is wrong but need data to present what they intuitively know. For, that, the tool is Right to Information (RTI).This author filed several RTI applications with the Integrated Headquarters of the Ministry of Defence (Army), asking six specific questions about the Indian Army’s institutional learning mechanisms.The first question: Is strategic thinking taught anywhere in the Indian Army – in service life or at any training institution? If so, please share the block and detailed syllabus of the training plan. The second: Has any study been done on the efficacy or standards of leadership training in the Indian Army in the last twenty years? If so, please share details. The third: How does the Indian Army crystallise lessons learned from combat – in war and peace scenarios – on an ongoing, institutionalised basis? Which is the apex body dealing with this? Under whose charter of duties does it fall? What regular reports and returns does this body generate to keep a record of such studies, their dissemination, and the plan for implementation? The fourth: Does this apex body use the resources of the Army War College at Mhow, the Infantry School at Mhow, and the College of Defence Management at Secunderabad for these studies? If so, provide the tasks allotted to these three institutes in the last two years. Fifth – Please share just the Block syllabus of the NDA training (Foreign cadets have been trained there for decades now), Sixth – Please share the blank forms on which the ACRs (Annual Confidential Reports) of officers are to be initiated, so that the grounds on which they are assessed annually may be shown.The reply was a refusal on grounds of national interest. To all of them.The refusal is not a security decision. It is a defence against transparency: the transparency that might reveal that no such studies exist, that no apex body has generated regular reports, that the training institutions have not been tasked with any systematic learning function, and that strategic thinking is not being formally taught anywhere in the Army’s officer training architecture.The British Army publishes its Army Doctrine Publications, the formal documents defining how it thinks about operations, and subjects them to debate and critique in publicly accessible professional journals. The RUSI Journal, Wavell Room and the British Army’s own professional publications carry articles by serving officers that critique its doctrine, promotion system and institutional culture with a candour that would be unthinkable in Indian equivalents. British officers debate these questions in open professional journals. Indian officers cannot obtain answers to them through the legal right to information.It may be seen that what differs is what each of the two armies chooses to do with its failures: classify them or examine them; convert operational experience into institutional knowledge or suppress it; select officers who name failures and drive reform, or officers who manage impressions and protect careers; publish doctrine and subject it to debate, or treat institutional knowledge as a security secret.Institutional memory is not nostalgia, nor the preservation of regimental traditions, mess silver, or the dates of famous battles. It is the systematic conversion of operational experience, both success and failure, into the knowledge that guides future decisions. An institution with functional memory does not repeat avoidable errors or rediscover, at great cost in blood and treasure, what it once knew and then forgot. Nor does it send a second generation of soldiers into a problem the first already solved, for want of a mechanism to carry the solution forward.From all accounts, it seems that attempts to help the Indian Army improve – reduce casualties and be effective – are doomed to fail. The patient seems allergic to ambrosia.Alok Asthana is a retired colonel of the Indian Army.