RAJESH RAMACHANDRAN returns to the spot where he got injured in shelling while covering the war
IT WAS here that I learnt to be scared of death. Kargil, for me, meant misery and pain, until I revisited the spot where a splinter of a Pakistani artillery shell pierced the left part of the body and miraculously travelled down to be lodged somewhere between the pancreas and the kidney. It is still there.
A decade later, the old Drass brigade headquarters on National Highway 1D from Srinagar to Leh has a makeshift bamboo celebratory arch; a temple for all religions; boarded up buildings that have withstood relentless Pakistani bombarding; and men laying fresh bitumen on a battered road inviting visitors new and old.
Beautiful yellow and violet flowers sprout on the wayside where endless convoys of military trucks once stood. Though the untamed Suru still gushes down the Himalayas with heavenly dust and dirt, gone are the tents and the huge camps on its banks. The landscape once dotted with Bofors guns is again a trekker’s paradise and artillery batteries are neatly tucked away in the mountain folds.
The Border Roads Organisation signboard on the Kargil- Kharboo road reading “ You are now under the enemy observation” is all that is left to remind a traveller of the war.
A shelled out village of a few burnt shops is now a town transformed. Black soot and the military green have been replaced by a riot of colours of everything new — houses, hotels, shops, a brand new Shia mosque that proudly proclaims the victory of the idea of India. After pushing back the intruders who occupied the Kargil heights in the name of Islam, the military has helped local Muslims build a magnificent mosque, right next to the old headquarters.
Kargil, a district in Ladakh, is predominantly Muslim and the Drass block is even more so. Every man here had suffered, every family was sent away to safety when Pakistani guns hurled shells of destruction into their houses, reducing them to rubble. The Army was occupying houses and Hill View, the lone hotel in Drass, and artillery pieces were pounding Tiger Hill from barley and paddy fields.
The first televised Indian war also saw a lot of young journalists driving up and down the Kargil- Drass stretch of the highway, hunting for the elusive story. The war was being fought on mountain tops.
Indian soldiers climbed impossible rock faces where even a boulder rolled down by intruders could kill four or five. Yet, they climbed like ants and captured bunker after bunker, often by hand- to- hand combats and finally took each post away from the Pakistanis.
But all this was away from the camera. So, all that was being reported was what was being seen from the ground. An extraordinary event that I witnessed was the staging of the assault on the Tiger Hill. After the prayers, Colonel Khushal Thakur of the 18 Grenadiers calmly led his men on to the top of the mountain on June 3 from an abandoned house at a village in Drass.
When the Grenadiers and the Sikh Regiment began climbing the Tiger Hill, it started raining shells from across the LOC. I was returning from the artillery position towards the HQ. At the gate, camera crews were filming the firing of a multi- barrelled rocket launcher. The photographer and I, along with a camera crew that had sought a lift in our car, ran into the HQ when Pakistani guns spat death and doom on Drass.
A soldier guided us towards a bunker and they all slid down into it. In the melee, three of us were left behind, the man who showed us the bunker, the camera crew’s factotum and me. We found no space inside and squatted on the floor leaning on the wall of a small oneroom structure which we thought would give us cover.
I lit up sitting in the middle, chatting with the soldier. Then it happened. I was lifted up into the air by the shrapnel with a searing pain under the left armpit. The other two dragged me into the bunker which suddenly seemed to have enough room for all of us. I lay on a colleague’s lap, prepared to die.
After the initial round of fire was over, I was dragged out and taken to another bunker, where a man on the table had his chest ripped open. He died, with the doctor looking on. He was taken away and I was made to lie down on that table. The doctor probed and found I was hit. He pumped in morphine and called the next patient.
The medical inspection room is now in disuse. In fact, a new one has been built further away, towards the War Memorial on the way to Kargil. But the one- room structure is intact. It houses Military Engineering Service personnel.
As I hadn’t lost a limb or wasn’t dying yet, I had to wait for the 34 km bumpy ride to the base surgical camp at Gumri. A visiting brigadier from the directorate general of military operations was kind enough to drop me off, telling me all the while that I would live. The doctors at Gumri cleaned the wound and stitched it up: a bad job that burdened me with a painful and uncertain stay for a month in hospital and another at home convalescing.
After 10 years, what remains is not just the ugly scar of the war, but peace and prosperity.
