(Part 2)
The Caravan Magazine: General Naravane’s Unpublished Memoir.
Contemporary journalism increasingly borrows techniques from documentary drama. Sushant Singh’s article in The Caravan Magazine exemplifies this genre shift.
In part 1 of this article it was demonstrated that the failure to prove precedent and the omission of technical context undermines the argument of the article. But the omission was not accident of haste. They are consequences of method. Singh is not writing investigative journalism bound by evidentiary limits. He is writing documentary drama, where facts serve as anchors for narrative construction rather than as boundaries for claims.
What gives the article its substance is not the Naravane’s memoir itself, but Sushant Singh’s narrative scaffolding, which quietly envelops the memoir extracts and makes them feel far more extensive than they actually are.
The Quoted Material
The material quoted from Naravane’s memoir is vanishingly small. It consists largely of short sentences, fragments, or carefully chosen phrases. These are the only places where Naravane’s voice directly enters the text. Everything else (the atmosphere, the sequencing, the implied causality) is creative writing of Singh. This is the entire quoted material:
“To each and every one my question was, ‘What are my orders?’”
“Till cleared from the very top.”
“What are my orders?”
“Jo uchit samjho, woh karo.”
“I had been handed a hot potato.”
“With this carte blanche, the onus was now totally on me.”
“We were ready in all respects, but did I really want to start a war?”
“All was quiet save for the ticking of the wall clock.”
“We cannot be the first ones to fire.”
“Casus belli.”
“It was a game of bluff and the PLA blinked first.”
“Underprepared.”
“Mere blip on the radar screen.”
“Surreptitious build-up.”
“Aggressive behaviour on the part of the PLA.”
“An extremely unusual move.”
“This area had never been contested in the past.”
“Unprecedented as well as unwarranted.”
“In full combat gear.”
“A lack of information-sharing within the formation and attempts to underplay the situation.”
“Something.”
“Blessings right from the very top.”
“Still under review for more than a year now.”
“I would brief the CCS numerous times, though the last meeting that I attended in March 2022 was not so pleasant.”
“Purely a military decision.”
“We must hit back this time at least, and make them pay the price for their misadventure.” “A free-for-all.”
“It was one of the saddest days of my entire career … losing twenty men in a day was hard to bear.”
“Our men who were in Chinese hands had been subjected to a fresh round of beatings.”
“The sheer savagery of their response was in itself indicative of the losses they had suffered.”
“Na wahan koi hamari seema mein ghus gaya hai aur na hi koi ghusa hua hai, na hi hamari koi post kisi doosre ke kabze mein hai.”
“For the first time in over two decades, the PLA had suffered fatal casualties.”
“Took India and the Indian Army to show to the world that enough is enough and to challenge the neighbourhood bully.”
“Dissuasive deterrence.”
“Credible deterrence.”
“Such perfidy!”
“Protocol are fine, but if they are being violated, then they become null and void.”
“Human-wave tactics.”
“As a last resort.”
“Need-to-know.”
“Peace and tranquillity.”
This is all. End of Naravane’s memoir. These are 351 words from the memoir in a novella of 7340 words. What reads as memoir revelation is, in reality, Singh’s interpretive architecture built around a thin spine of quotations.
When less than five percent of the text is directly quoted, but the entire article is framed as “what the memoir reveals,” the reader is led, almost inevitably, to confuse interpretation with disclosure. This is why it is a non-fiction political–military novella. The genre is not investigative journalism; it is *literary political commentary wearing the clothes of reportage.
Psychological Attribution Is Doing Heavy Lifting
Singh repeatedly tells the reader what Naravane “must have felt,” what the government was “trying to avoid,” what Modi “abdicated,” what China “intended,” what time “favoured.” These are not claims anchored in quotation or document; they are interpretive overlays. They may be plausible, even persuasive, but they are not evidence. They are authorial judgment.
Singh writes that Modi “declined to make the call” and had “abdicated responsibility.” But Naravane only quotes Modi’s instruction. Everything about “declining” and “abdicating” is Singh’s interpretation, not Naravane’s description.
This doesn’t mean Singh is lying. It means he is writing with narrative intent, not evidentiary restraint. He is constructing meaning, tension, and moral consequence and he does so skillfully. But skill can obscure boundaries.
Yellow Journalism
Singh uses scene-setting techniques that are novelistic, not documentary. He mentions the operations room, the wall maps, the ticking clock, the imagined cascade of thoughts about COVID, supply chains, Pakistan, global support but none of this is quoted. It is inferred, reconstructed, or imagined. An ordinary reader subconsciously assumes this vivid description comes from the memoir because it is placed adjacent to quoted lines. It doesn’t. Once you train your eye to follow the quotation marks, the article reads very differently. The memoir becomes thin but potent and the analysis becomes dominant and subjective. The aura of “inside access” of author largely evaporates.
It explains why pieces like this feel persuasive while being methodologically hollow. Classical journalism rested on three visible constraints:
- verifiable fact,
- clear sourcing,
- separation between reporting and judgment.
Yellow journalism of the old kind broke the first two but was obvious about it. Sensation screamed from headlines; exaggeration was crude. Readers knew they were being worked.
The modern version is more sophisticated. It keeps:
- footnotes,
- institutional vocabulary,
- insider tone,
- and moral seriousness.
But it quietly abandons the constraint that matters most: epistemic humility. What you now get is creative reconstruction presented as proximity to truth. The writer does not say, “this is my inference”. He says, “the memoir reveals”, then proceeds to narrate scenes, mental states, motives, and historical meaning that the memoir itself never supplies.
This is why documentary drama is the right phrase. The technique is borrowed not from reporting but from Netflix war documentaries, long-form prestige podcasts, or similar to “based on true events” screenwriting. Facts become anchors, not limits.
An Example
Two statements coexist in the article:
- “Indian soldiers fired an illuminating round, a kind of warning shot.”
- Naravane had clear orders not to open fire “till cleared from the very top.”
The illuminating round example is textbook. A journalist bound by method would explain classification and rules of engagement. A dramatist wants the words like fire and warning shot to do emotional labour. The audience must feel that war has begun, even if technically nothing of the sort has happened. The first fire is actually a warning flare which emits strong light but it is fired from a real gun. But for a reader who skips or misinterprets ‘illumination’, jumps to conclusion that the war has begun.
For the record, in radio communications or fire orders, soldiers often just say “illum” (pronounced “ill-oom”). For civilian readers, ‘fire’ signals combat. Singh exploits this ambiguity, allowing dramatic inference where technical precision would limit interpretation.
Conclusion
What makes this reincarnation of yellow journalism especially dangerous is that it preserves the authority tone of journalism, while operating with the license of fiction. The memoir provides 351 words. Singh provides 6,989 words of scaffolding. Recognizing the difference is not optional. It is the difference between journalism and theater.
The reader believes they are receiving disclosure when they are receiving interpretation. The reader believes they are witnessing history when they are reading a dramatized reenactment of story divorced from facts.
Notes and References:
- Caravan Magazine article: https://caravanmagazine.in/security/navarane-memoir-ladakh-crisis (requires paid subscription)
- Illumination Round: In a fire mission call they would say “Fire one round illum, grid reference…”. In official documentation, the round would be designated by its full nomenclature, such as:
- “M485A2 Illuminating Projectile” (155mm artillery)
- “M301A3 Illuminating Cartridge” (81mm mortar)