This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Most importantly, though, it gave us a new set of heroes—our soldiers, who did much to give hope to a bruised and shaken nation.

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  One of the moments from the Kargil War that remain fresh in my memory was the breakfast of eggs and toast—our first meal in days which went beyond glucose biscuits and tea—that I shared with the soldiers I had spent the long night in the bunker with on the eve of the assault on Tiger Hill.

  The soldiers shyly showed us photographs from back home, of brothers, sisters, friends and, of course, girls they had hoped to marry. More than one had broken off the engagement as soon as the war began. Martyrdom at the front line was not a wedding gift everyone was prepared to receive.

  We spoke and argued about death, about the brutality of war. It was here that I realized how flawed were the assumptions we civilians made about nationalism and war. Journalists, political pundits and in particular war-mongering jingoists could play cheerleaders to conflict from the comfort of their drawing rooms in the nation’s cities and towns. But to meet hundreds of young men at the battlefront and talk to them about the possibility of imminent death changed me—and my beliefs—fundamentally. It was entirely possible to be filled with overwhelming admiration for these men in uniform and through their eyes understand that the imperatives of war were different, and that it would always be shadowed by loss.

  Major Ajit, whose eyes seemed to wear the marks of a private torment, told me that a soldier’s motivation and readiness to die came first from the need to uphold the honour of his paltan, his platoon, his military unit, his regiment—everything else came next. As we were talking, the men who had saved our lives received their orders to move up the mountains and into the battlefield, as at that point the war was still far from over. On a whim I took off the single strand of beads strung around my neck and thrust it into the hands of the soldiers to whom we owed our lives. It was my way of saying good luck. In return, one of the soldiers insisted we keep his dog tag along with a single bullet.

  There was no more to be said, and if there was, we lacked the appropriate words. War reporting was conventionally assumed to be about ducking bullets, showcasing military hardware and celebrating courage. But in 1999 it also became about humanizing the narrative of bravery. Our war coverage was all about making Kargil less one-dimensional and to allow for a soldier’s portrait to be painted in the colours of both light and shadow.

  VII

  The Kargil conflict had exposed a woeful moment of underpreparedness—both in the intrusions going undetected for as long as they did and the damage that years of neglect and miles of red tape had done to India’s fighting power. And so in Kargil without snow shoes or proper high-altitude gear, Vishal and other first-time troops literally crawled their way up to peaks as high as 18,000 feet, where the temperature slipped to as much as ten degrees below zero to fight for the honour of their platoons and regiments.

  They didn’t even mutter a complaint when they had to stealthily make their way up the treacherous terrain under cover of darkness without the aid of basic night-vision goggles. Forget weapon locating radars (finally purchased four years after the conflict) there was an acute shortage of basic infantry weapons, bulletproof jackets, and even ammunition. Just three months earlier, General Malik had written to the defence minister with a sense of ominous foreboding, arguing that ‘by denying essential equipment, the armed forces would gradually lose their combat edge which would show adversely in a future conflict…’ Now, in the middle of the war he struggled to get the ban on the politically contentious Bofors Company lifted, so that guns and spares could be procured. India had to scramble to import 50,000 rounds of 155 mm shells for the Bofors gun from Israel. The bureaucratic red tape that stymied the war effort meant that the army could not engage the enemy as effectively as it wanted to. For example, the gunners wanted to shell the Pakistani military base at Skardu, 170 kilometres away—just across the LoC. But it was out of reach of the Bofors gun, and the only weapon that could have been brought to bear on the target, the Russian Smerch, a rocket launcher, would be held up for another five years. Finally, faced with initial shortages even in fuel containers and lubricants, General Malik declared, ‘We will fight with what we have.’

  In 2015, almost sixteen years after the Kargil War, a report by India’s audit watchdog, the Comptroller and Auditor General, made a startling revelation. India, it said, could not fight a war beyond fifteen to twenty days because of a crippling shortage in its ammunition reserves. The audit, which had been carried out in 2013, said that the stocking of 125 of the 170 different types of ammunition required was not even enough for twenty days of fighting or ‘minimum acceptable risk level requirements’. And in half of the categories of ammunition, supplies would last less then ten days.

  What this meant was that if there were another war, the cost would be borne, yet again, by men sent to fight a battle not of their making without being equipped for it. This is the tragedy—the cost of war is always unacceptable yet countries act as though it is not. More than 500 Indian soldiers died in Kargil; more than a thousand were wounded. The estimation of how many lives Pakistan lost has fluctuated dramatically from Musharraf’s 357 to Sharif’s 2,700. For the Pakistani soldiers, the greatest ignominy was to not even be acknowledged by their country; for over a decade, the Pakistani Army was simply not ready to officially accept that its troops were involved. It was only eleven years after the war that Pakistan officially recognized the men it had forced into a mindless conflict; its army website finally listed 453 soldiers killed in ‘Batalik Kargil’ sector; they were listed in the ‘Martyrs’ section.

  VIII

  The stunning beauty of Kargil—the majesty of the bare mountains, the luminous skies of enamelled blue—only served to heighten the wastefulness and tragedy of the war that had been fought there. No one understands this wastefulness more than a soldier who has seen combat. In 2009, ten years after my first exposure to a war zone, I returned to the mountains of Kargil with three men who had carried the painful weight of their own memories for over a decade—Vishal Thapa, whose thoughtful stoicism as a young captain gave context and meaning to the night I spent holed up in the bunker; Vishal Batra, the iconic Vikram Batra’s twin who hadn’t been able to bring himself to visit the place where his daredevil brother was killed; and Y. K. Joshi, whose leadership as a commander had inspired a spate of Hindi films.

  Joshi, now a brigadier with the army, had brought along his seventeen-year-old daughter, not even a teenager in 1999, so she could understand the brutality and horror of what he had seen. It wasn’t easy for a father to explain to a young girl why the code of war meant that ‘when you are up there your battalion is your family. You think about that; you think about the boys… You think about the (mountain) feature you’re going up to. You just don’t think about your family. It can’t come in between… If I think about that, I can’t do this. That’s how it has to be.’ It was difficult for him to confront his own recollections, none of which had faded with time. Wasn’t it just yesterday that he had turned around to talk to Ranbir, the soldier manning the rocket launcher right next to him, and seen a bullet go through his forehead, leaving a gaping hole in the skull.

  Vishal Batra, a private banker who had once contemplated becoming a soldier, was overwhelmed—like so many of us ‘civilians’ had first been—by the unvarnished beauty of the mountains. That a war had been fought here was unimaginable to him. As we sat on a rock under a high blue sky and stared out at Batra Top, named after Vikram, as a tribute to his courage, the wind dried our tears, allowing us to cry freely, with only the clouds as witness.

  ‘Yeh Dil Maange More’—Vikram’s spontaneous conversion of an ad punchline into a slogan of bravado had made him one of the most identifiable and revered heroes of the war. But when the headlines faded and the cameras retreated, a family was still left behind to cope with the tragedy of loss. That moment when Vikram’s pyre had to be lit was the moment Vishal remembers as the one wher
e Death ceased to be an ominous, fearful stranger. ‘You know, when we took him for his final rites, the body was taken from the coffin and the tricolour was handed over to Mom. I was holding his body in my hands; it was the first cremation of my life. It was painful. But at that very moment whatever fear I had of death went away.’

  In the shadow of the mountains where his brother had been killed, Vishal wrote Vikram a letter, wanting him to know that their shared childhood was what gave him the strength to keep going. He read it out aloud; then, standing in silent salute, left the single sheaf of paper there to be lifted to the skies along with the leaves and the dust.

  The quietest among the three men was Vishal Thapa—as reflective and contemplative as he had been ten years ago that night in the bunker. His lens on life had always been unusually clear-sighted. ‘(This might be regarded as) politically incorrect, but I would just say this much; I don’t think any soldier would want a war. It’s the developments and the situations, whatever. So basically everybody is just following orders… We kill because of our profession and not by choice, right? If we kill someone, one of ours will also die. So, it’s part of a job. Take it or leave it.’

  Thapa was now an instructor at the Indian Army’s high-altitude battle school. The first time he brought his students to Kargil he couldn’t sleep at night. The silent silhouette of the mountain peaks was an auditory shock; in his mind he could only hear the drum fire of bombs and the reverberations of rockets. But once those first impressions faded, he was once again in thrall to the mountains that rose up on every side. He said to me about his time at war: ‘I walked away loving the mountains. Mountains don’t see the difference in colour, caste, creed, no Pakistan, no India. They judge everybody the same way. They are pure. It’s we human beings who mess things up.’

  Three

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  TERROR IN OUR TIME

  I

  ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT in 2001, at least four people in the United States were in no mood to celebrate. The memory of carols, tinsel, turkey and cranberry sauce had long faded in the face of the mounting anxiety about a possible nuclear war. From her holiday home in Norfolk, Virginia, Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, spent the evening on the phone with Colin Powell (then US secretary of state), Jack Straw and David Manning, foreign secretary and head of national security of the UK respectively. In the White House, President George W. Bush was waiting for an update on reports that India had moved short-range ballistic missiles with nuclear capability to the border with Pakistan. The Pentagon and the CIA had submitted contradictory assessments; the CIA, which Rice believed was ‘heavily reliant on Pakistani sources’, argued that India was ready to strike; the Pentagon believed the military build-up should be read more as signalling resolve than a call to action. They decided to work the phones to India to buy time and try to stave off the crisis.

  In Delhi, the normally unflappable Brajesh Mishra was too agitated to listen to the Americans. Operation Parakram (Valour) was already underway; the holding formations near the international border had been mobilized; the army’s strike corps were under orders to move out from peacetime stations in central India to frontal attack positions all along the perimeter with Pakistan in both Punjab and Rajasthan.

  The largest deployment of India’s armed forces since the 1971 war with Pakistan—more than 50,000 soldiers would eventually line the border—was in response to the most audacious terror attack India had witnessed on her soil this far, one that came within a whisker of taking out virtually the entire political leadership of the nation.

  At about 11.30 in the morning of 13 December 2001, India’s Parliament was adjourned almost as soon as its members had assembled. Ironically, it was the corruption in the procurement of coffins during the Kargil War—a scandal that had been dubbed ‘Coffingate’—that was the subject of raucous, disorderly debate that morning. With no legislative work possible, Members of Parliament retreated to the more informal Central Hall where they did not have to pretend to hate each other. Suddenly the sound of gunshots rang through the air and brought the chatter to a halt. A white Ambassador car, which had escaped scrutiny at the security post on the outer perimeter of Parliament (because of a forged Home Ministry identity sticker plastered across its windshield), was the cause of all the commotion. Inside the car were five men armed with pistols, grenades, spare ammunition, automatic assault rifles and electronic detonators; in the boot of the car was a bomb made from an enormous quantity of ammonium nitrate. The Ambassador was headed straight for the main entrance of Parliament when its path was blocked by the convoy of Vice President Krishen Kant. It was this ‘fortuitous circumstance’—as the Supreme Court would later call it in the course of its enquiry into the attack—that stopped the terrorists from getting ‘free and easy access’ to the Parliament building. Forced to brake, the car crashed into the cavalcade, prompting Kant’s driver, Shekhar, to jump out. The men in the Ambassador opened fire and battle was joined. Before all five terrorists were shot dead, they had killed eight security personnel and a gardener.

  In its findings, the Supreme Court said the ‘firepower was awesome enough to engage a battalion and had the attack succeeded the entire building with all inside would have perished’.

  Given the gravity of the attack, India’s response to the aggressors was intended to be punitive in the extreme. ‘We were within striking distance,’ Brajesh Mishra told me, during the long interview that I have cited in the previous chapter. ‘The mobilization of troops was to let Pakistan know that we [India] were serious and we were ready to cross the Line of Control.’ Mishra understood that such an eventuality—troops entering Pakistani territory—had to contend with the very real risk of Pakistan using nuclear weapons. But ‘to not have done what we did would have been to have gone against the public mood,’ he told me, looking back at one of his most controversial and much-debated decisions. Nevertheless, he said with satisfaction that Lisa Curtis, a prominent foreign policy analyst had said to him at the time that Pakistan was ‘shitting in its pants’.

  It fell to Richard Armitage, the US Deputy Secretary of State, to do most of the heavy lifting to defuse the crisis. Armitage, who looked and talked more like a bellicose bouncer than a diplomat, ‘pleaded with Vajpayee’, according to Mishra, to not take immediate military action. He told Mishra to give President Musharraf a day or two to address India’s concerns. ‘Don’t forget how many Americans there were in the region,’ Mishra said, referring to the US troops swarming Afghanistan and Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks earlier that year.

  On 11 January 2002, three weeks after the attack on Parliament, India’s army chief, General S. Padmanabhan, informed the world that mobilization was complete and that his troops were in position for a full-scale war. ‘If we have to go to war, jolly good,’ he said, ‘if we don’t, we will still manage.’ Asked about how India would respond were Pakistan to use nuclear weapons, he declared that ‘the perpetrator of that particular outrage shall be punished so severely that their continuation thereafter in any form of fray will be doubtful’. The next day, Pervez Musharraf, who had become president of Pakistan after deposing the civilian Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a military coup in October 1999, made his famous address promising to shut down terrorism and break the link between the Pakistani Army and Islamic extremists. There was an immediate de-escalation of tension but the Vajpayee administration did not pull back troops from the border. A few months later, when militants hit a residential army camp in Kaluchak in Jammu, killing women and children, Mishra asked the army to get ready for war again. The army chief was not convinced that it was the best time to go to war; he cited the imminent monsoons as one of the obstacles. Ultimately, despite Vajpayee’s vow of an ‘aar-paar ki ladai’—after a year-long military stand-off, several assurances from Musharraf and aggressive pressure on Islamabad by the Americans, the troops were asked to stand down. Mishra believed India had changed the rules of the game and made the Americans sit up and take notice only because of
the mobilization.

  But without even going to war, the human cost had been much higher than the Kargil conflict. In 2003, Defence Minister George Fernandes told Parliament that 798 soldiers had been killed in the course of Operation Parakram; many of the deaths occurred laying or removing the one million mines along the border.

  ■

  India—the land of Buddha, Mahavir, Ashoka and Gandhi—imagines itself to be a civilization rooted in non-violence. But the fact that these great apostles of peace belong to India only accentuates the terror that has blighted this land for centuries. Unfortunately, the history, geography, composition and reality of Indian society make terrorist violence almost inevitable. This would be true of any society with similar characteristics—a hugely diverse population that is riven with divisions and inequities. And it is our misfortune that we have rarely been blessed with a strong, non-partisan, non-sectarian leadership that can keep turbulence in check.

  In the course of the shaping of the modern Indian state, violence was sometimes used. In The Philosophy of the Bomb, Bhagat Singh, and his co-patriots wrote a counter to Gandhi. ‘Terrorism is a phase, a necessary, inevitable phase, in the revolution,’ they argued, ‘…it shatters the spell of the superiority of the ruling class and raises the status of the subject race in the eyes of the world, because it is the most convincing proof of a nation’s hunger for freedom. Here in India, as in other countries in the past, terrorism will develop into the revolution and the revolution into independence, social, political and economic.’ At the same time the revolutionaries of the freedom movement contested the use of the label ‘violent’ for them, locating their use of force within the larger theme of the pursuit of justice. ‘Violence is physical force applied for committing injustice, and that is certainly not what the revolutionaries stand for’, they argued. Little could they have imagined then, as they fought the British, how severely terrorism would come to hollow out India and her sense of security as a nation-state in years to come.