This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  By 1999, India and Pakistan were both nuclear-armed nations. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s chief of army staff at the time, proceeded with his audacious misadventure in Kargil assuming that India would not engage in a full-scale war because there was always the possibility that it could escalate into nuclear conflict. This was the so-called nuclear deterrence theory. Senior Pakistani journalist Altaf Gohar, who was an adviser to Field Marshal Ayub Khan, has confirmed that a plan to launch a major operation inside Kargil had been on the table at the Pakistani Army headquarters since 1987. But, wary of what the Indian response might be, two Pakistani chiefs of army staff—General Jehangir Karamat and General Mirza Aslam Beg—were not in favour of implementing it. Musharraf, however, calculated that his troops might be able to quickly redraw the LoC, following which global powers like the US and China could be prevailed upon to intervene and prevent the incursion from escalating into a major conflagration. Pakistani infiltrators began sneaking into India between December 1998 and March 1999, bitterly cold winter months when key forward posts had been vacated by Indian troops. By the last week of April, Pakistani troops had crossed over the LoC and consolidated themselves all along the Kargil sector, ten to twelve kilometres inside India. The Kargil battlefield was now a 200-kilometre-long front at heights between 10,000 and 18,000 feet.

  III

  ‘Careful, buddy, you are walking on wire. That’s taar there; Duck, Duck, Duck.’

  ‘Oye, company line dena jaldi se.’

  ‘Line toot gayee hai; STD connect kar sakte ho?’

  ‘Sir, one chap injured, sir.’

  ‘Serious, or?’

  ‘He’s fine, sir, he’s got it on his thigh.’

  ‘That’s fine, thigh is okay.’

  ‘Barkha, have you got the phone?’

  ‘Now, they’ll start firing helter skelter…idhar udhar sab jagah maarenge.’

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  ‘Paani kuchh bacha hai (Do we have any water left)?’

  From that night in the bunker, scraps of disjointed conversation remain preserved in my memory like voices from a past life—raw, tactile and relentlessly haunting. Inside the bunker, Jami reached out and put some glucose powder on my parched lips. We were on our last bottle of shared water and had to make it last since it was not safe for anybody to leave the bunker and look for more.

  The sound of artillery fire had grown a little more distant. The war had moved from the highway to the dark slopes of the mountains where battles at close quarters would determine the final outcome.

  As I sat in the bunker and tried to collect my thoughts in order to attain some clarity, I tried to block out the sounds and smells of the war—the sight of a soldier’s arm stretched out in despair as his bare, bandaged body was lifted by four people onto a chopper; the unending growl and scream of artillery fire and the smell of death mingling with the chill of an exceptionally cold summer night. The music from the tape recorder began to filter in and I felt afresh the incongruity of hearing music inside the bunker, just when it felt like there would never be music in my life again.

  In my coverage of Kargil, beyond the politics of the conflict, what I was really trying to understand was the complex relationship between valour and vulnerability in times of war. These young men—boys-who-would-be-men really—were among the bravest people I would ever meet.

  Vishal—the young captain with the gentle eyes—was telling me how a soldier standing on the precipice of death dealt with the fear of the likely fall. He knew that when the night turned to day, it would be his unit’s turn to march up into the mountains where men fought and died. He said that he knew his life was destined to be fleeting when he signed up to be a soldier. ‘Right now, I can see my entire life race through my head like a short film,’ he said, in his characteristic flat tone, as I fought back my tears. ‘You see your childhood, your adulthood; you remember your parents, your loves and your fears. And for a fraction of a second you say no. But then, you tell yourself, I have got to overcome it. This is our purpose in life; this is what we were trained for. How can we fail?’

  ‘Aren’t you thinking of your home, right now?’ asked Vishal, throwing a question I had asked him right back at me. ‘That should answer your question.’ I had been trying to find out from him whether soldiers in combat had a sense of being undervalued by their countrymen. ‘We are not doing this for appreciation. It’s the call of duty. We are here, because we have to be here; it’s the uniform. And if we do not perform here, it cannot be justified,’ he said.

  ■

  The heroism that Vishal and other soldiers who fought in Kargil displayed was perhaps most famously brought into the living rooms of their fellow Indians by Vikram Batra, a soldier with 13 Jammu and Kashmir Rifles. I met him at the base camp in Ghumri in the early days of the war. His was my first major interview with a soldier on the front line. His would also be the first obituary I would write. His men and he had just returned from a successful operation and were trading tales around a shared dog-eared copy of Cosmopolitan in a faded white tent that looked like a tiny snowdrop against the green and brown expanse of the mountains. His smiling eyes framed by a thick beard, Vikram was rather appropriately code-named ‘Sher Shah’—after the sixteenth-century ‘Lion King’ eulogized in medieval Indian history. As he casually flipped through the pages of the magazine, which seemed oddly out of place in this setting, he recounted the details of his latest operation with the enthusiasm and bravado of a teenager. As he and his soldiers moved up the eastern flank of Point 5140, the highest mountain peak dominating the town of Drass (thus allowing the Pakistanis direct observation of Indian targets) they came under fierce artillery and small arms fire. The enemy troops were constantly firing illumination rounds to break the cover of darkness under which Vikram’s team was moving up. ‘If we had stopped at any point,’ Vikram told me, ‘we would have become the target. There was no looking back.’ At one point the Pakistanis intercepted the radio frequency being used by the Indians and addressed him by his military code name. They said: ‘Sher Shah, don’t try and come up; you will have a tough time.’ The challenge boomeranged on the Pakistanis and made Vikram even more determined to rout them. The peak was reclaimed without any fatalities. Indian helicopters were finally able to fly freely over Drass. It was a critical turning point in the war. All of twenty-five, Vikram wore his courage lightly, throwing back his head in uproarious laughter when I questioned him on fear and vulnerability. ‘Yeh Dil Maange More,’ he told me with a toothy grin—borrowing from the lines of what was till then only a popular cola jingle. In that instant, Vikram Batra became the face of India’s self-worth. His contagious optimism immortalized him as the face of Kargil just days before he would die, trying to save a fellow soldier who had come under enemy fire. Much later, his ageing parents would share his last words as he left for the front. Vikram had told them that he would either unfurl the Indian flag to mark victory or come back home draped in one.

  ■

  As the hours went by, the growl of the Bofors gun seemed to drown out the fire from the enemy lines. A couple of cigarettes and some nervous chatter had given way to wordless waiting. We did not know then that on the icy heights of Tiger Hill, as soldiers from the Ghatak (assault) commando platoon slipped on some stones, the Pakistanis spotted them and came charging down. What happened next has passed into army lore. The Indians went at the enemy with the sort of ferocity and courage that go beyond the script of conventional battle. To take just one example at random of the numerous instances of astounding valour that played out during the final skirmishes on Tiger Hill, one soldier played dead after he took fifteen bullets. He did not go down. Instead, he tried to wrench off his fractured arm so he could roll down the slope faster and warn his comrades that an attack on the Medium Machine Gun base, just 500 metres below, was imminent.

  On the morning of 4 July we gingerly stepped out from the shelter of the mud and earth we had taken refuge in over that endless night. We saw what seemed to be the sm
oke of a dying fire dancing over Tiger Hill peak. It was 5 a.m., nearly twelve hours after we had gone underground; the sun hadn’t risen yet and the guns had fallen silent. ‘We’ve got it now; there’s nothing left on top,’ said one of the soldiers, ‘it should be just a matter of a couple of hours more.’

  By 8 a.m., the Indian flag was touching the sky over Tiger Hill. Someone pulled out a tiny silver hip flask and passed it around so we could each take a swig. We stared up at the clouds and took in the warmth of the sun. We all knew that had this battle gone any other way, the outcome of the war could have been very different. Gin for breakfast didn’t seem especially outlandish in the circumstances.

  IV

  As the Indian soldiers began to throw out the enemy from the snow and rock of Kargil and the war entered the final days, they weren’t aware that the furious diplomatic activity would also play a part in ending the campaign. In Washington, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was to meet US President Bill Clinton on 4 July. As the then Indian Army Chief General V. P. Malik would chronicle many years later, ‘About 10 to 15 hours before their meeting we made sure that the whole world came to know about the re-capture of Tiger Hill, and thus the likely outcome of the war.’ In Delhi, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government hoped international pressure would be a force multiplier. The critical meeting between Clinton and Sharif would take place after several weeks of diplomatic manoeuvring.

  ■

  Kargil is widely acknowledged as an unprovoked battle that had been thrust on India, one that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif would later insist his army chief, Pervez Musharraf, had plotted unilaterally. The conventional wisdom has been that nuclear weapons restrained India’s military response and eliminated the option of crossing the LoC. I decided to try and get at the truth by talking to the one man who would be able to confirm or deny various theories that had been aired about the conflict. Brajesh Mishra was the most powerful man in Vajpayee’s government after the prime minister. Mishra was the PM’s principal secretary and also doubled up as the national security adviser. Mishra, a foreign service officer who had joined the BJP in the 1990s, enjoyed the complete confidence of Vajpayee much to the irritation of Home Minister L. K. Advani who thought it eroded his own authority and influence. In 1998, Vajpayee had entrusted Mishra with the job of containing global criticism of India’s nuclear tests; in 1999, it was Mishra who was tasked with bringing international pressure to bear on Pakistan.

  ‘In the eyes of the world, we were the good boys; no one had supported Pakistan, except China,’ Brajesh Mishra told me in a long conversation in 2012 just a few weeks before he died. ‘Crossing the LoC would have changed that and there would have been immediate calls from the UN for a ceasefire,’ he said. Our interview took place at his South Delhi residence where he was living a semi-retired life, although droves of visitors wanting his advice continued to descend on him (occasionally he would even receive a phone call from the Congress prime minister, Manmohan Singh).

  As Mishra remembered it, when the Cabinet Committee on Security—which included L. K. Advani, George Fernandes, the defence minister, and Jaswant Singh, a former army man and the Minister for External Affairs who would take over the defence portfolio from Fernandes a couple of years later—met for the first time during the early days of the war in May, the option of going across the LoC came up for discussion and was unanimously rejected by the political establishment. Not just that. Even the army’s request for air power, first made on 8 May, did not get the go-ahead from Jaswant Singh who was concerned that it would escalate and ‘internationalize’ the situation.

  Air support would become an area of a serious disagreement between the army chief and the air force chief. Air Chief Marshal A.Y. Tipnis turned down several proposals from army headquarters to send armed choppers into the operations arena—insisting on political authorization first. The army was of the view that the use of choppers was an ‘in-house’ decision. But the air chief wouldn’t relent, leading to several volatile and heated arguments between him and the army chief who finally said that he would have to take their differences to the prime minister and the Cabinet. Writing many years later in Force magazine about Operation Safed Sagar—the air force code name for its part of the operation—Tipnis was candid about the stormy disagreements between him and the army chief. His main worry about deploying Mi-17 helicopters, he explained, was how vulnerable to attack they would be. He wrote: ‘As the helicopters would have to approach enemy locations on the LoC ridge-line from the Kargil Valley, they would not be able to mask their approach and will be visibly picked-up by the enemy well before they come into firing range.’

  On 25 May 1999—eighteen days after air power had first been asked for—when the Cabinet Committee on Security met again, the army chief made it clear that his infantry urgently needed the backup of helicopter gunships to soften mountain targets and weaken supply routes to the Pakistani infiltrators. Prime Minister Vajpayee finally acceded. But things were tricky; the permission was conditional on military operations continuing to respect the sanctity of the LoC. A concerned air chief tried to explain that his jets would need to fly from south to north, giving them a turning circuit so small that crossing the LoC would become inevitable. But he was told that the fighters would have to fly from east to west and find a way to remain confined to the Indian side. Describing the circumstances in which Vajpayee finally gave his assent for air power Tipnis wrote, ‘In his characteristically laconic manner, he said, “Theek hai, kal subah se shuru karo (All right, start tomorrow morning).” I asked for permission to cross the LoC while attacking targets on our side of the LoC. The PM straightened up in his chair and said firmly, “Please don’t cross the LoC. No, no crossing the LoC.”’ And so began the precision attacks and ammunition drops from the air in an unprecedented use of the air force at 18,000 feet.

  The battle on the ground and in the air may have escalated but on 26 May 1999—a day after India gave the thumbs up to air power—General Pervez Musharraf was feeling quite chuffed with how his Machiavellian plan had gone thus far. ‘First class,’ was his comment when he was briefed on the phone by his trusted chief of general staff, Lieutenant General Mohammad Aziz Khan from Rawalpindi. Musharraf was on an official trip to Beijing and probably thought his hotel phone line was completely secure; this was China after all, a trusted ally of his country. Then again, his indiscretion may have been typical of his garrulous and grandiose personality. On two different occasions—that day, and three days later, on 29 May, his conversations from Room Number 83315 were intercepted by spooks of RAW. The thinking behind his Kargil folly—to use the threat of nuclear conflict and make Kashmir an issue the world would meddle in—was now caught on tape. ‘Today for the last two hours the BBC has been continuously reporting on the air strikes by India. Keep using this...let them keep dropping bombs. As far as internationalization is concerned, this is the fastest this has happened. You may have seen in the press about UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s appeal that both countries should sit and talk,’ Aziz told his boss. ‘This is very good,’ said Musharraf. ‘Yes, this is very good,’ agreed Aziz. The tapes revealed how ‘mujahideen’ had been used as a cloak for the involvement of the regular troops of the Pakistan Army, offering deniability when needed. The tapes exposed two incontrovertible truths. The operation in Kargil had the full involvement of the Pakistani military and its responsibility could not be transferred to non-state actors. And Nawaz Sharif was clearly being briefed only selectively, and the import and implications of the conflict were being withheld from him by his own army chief.

  It was the single most important and audacious coup by India’s intelligence agencies since the country had gained independence over fifty years ago. By 1 June, the top leadership of the government had heard the tapes. By 4 June, R. K. Mishra, the journalist turned negotiator with the Reliance-funded Observer Research Foundation and Vivek Katju, a senior diplomat in the foreign ministry, were o
n a plane to Pakistan for a secret meeting with Nawaz Sharif.

  The tapes were played for Sharif to hear; India believed that presented with this evidence, Pakistan would have to back out of the war zone. Sharif listened to the audio recordings in ‘astonished silence’, one man familiar with the conversation confided to me. Sharif had always maintained that Musharraf plotted Kargil without his knowledge and the tapes brought home to him how he was being manipulated. Later, his father, Mian Muhammad Sharif, told him that to inflict deceit on India and provoke a war was a ‘grave betrayal’ of Vajpayee’s historic trip to Lahore barely three months earlier. Sharif was disturbed by the parental admonition and by the embarrassing truths on the tapes.

  V

  In May and June, as the war showed no signs of letting up, the Indian military leadership began to draw up secret contingency plans to expand the theatre of the war beyond Jammu and Kashmir. In other words, India’s retaliation for the intrusions would most likely not be along the LoC—which had never been officially accepted as permanent by either country—but along the actual, undisputed international border. The states of Punjab and Rajasthan were to be readied as launch pads for a counter-attack. In the army’s assessment, if the Kargil peaks were not entirely back in Indian control before the monsoon’s torrents drenched the northern plains, any counter-attack would have to wait till after the rains.