That evening in July 1999, the assault on Tiger Hill began from a Bofors gun position; individual guns had been ranged so as to directly fire at the three flanks of the mountain. An intricate fire plan prepared by the 41 Field Regiment provided covering fire to the soldiers of 8 Sikh and 18 Grenadiers who were stealthily moving up escarpments and sheer cliffs from three different directions. Usually, six guns were deployed to provide covering fire to every infantry unit. In Kargil this was increased to eighteen guns. Kargil has often been called a classic gunner’s war and the Bofors gun was its mainstay. The gun could fire three rounds in twelve seconds, and it had a range of thirty kilometres in high altitude terrain; 250 of them were deployed at the front line and 250,000 rounds were fired during the fifty-day war. During the Tiger Hill operation alone, 9,000 shells were used. The artillery points had become both the first tier of attack and defence in the war. Field gun positions were now veritable forward posts, inviting attack on themselves as soon as the Bofors gun fired the first round; 80 per cent of the casualties on both sides were from mortar fire.
Writing in Artillery: The Battle Winning Arm about the peak period of the war, when each artillery battery fired one round per minute for seventeen days continuously, senior military analyst Major General Jagjit Singh (who started his career in the Royal Indian Navy and saw anti-submarine action during World War II) said, ‘Such high rates of fire over long periods had not been witnessed anywhere since World War II… The men at the guns had blisters on their hands from carrying and loading shells and cartridges. Very few of them got more than a couple of hours of sleep in every 24-hour cycle.’
With the advantage of height, Pakistani observation posts had a clear line of vision on Indian gun points. So assault positions had to be shifted as soon as they became vulnerable to counter-attack. As they moved, so would we, jumping on to the back of a Jonga jeep or just darting across the smoke-saturated road, unsure of where it might be safe to halt even for a second, trying all the while to keep pace with the magnitude of what was unravelling before our camera’s gaze.
Two hours into what would end up being a thirteen-hour battle, an enemy artillery shell landed close to a 122 multi-barrelled ‘Grad’ rocket launcher right outside the headquarters of the 56 Mountain Brigade, which had just taken over the sector. With forty rockets stacked upon the back of a single carrier, the Grad was a fire-breathing dragon that spat flames into the sky. In Russian, its name meant ‘hailstorm’, a fitting appellation, as it hailed destruction down upon the intruders.
Suddenly an enemy shell landed within spitting distance of the launcher. It was time to move to a new vantage point; the commander of the Grad immediately halted the operation so that the MBRL could be shifted. Four soldiers had already been killed in a counter-attack on a gun position earlier and he wasn’t taking any chances. Over the next twenty minutes the battle escalated. The town of Drass was carpet-bombed by Pakistan. A curtain of grey closed over the highway as the final acts of the fight to take back Tiger Hill began.
‘Run, Run, Run, Now, Now, Now, Run,’ shouted out an anxious voice behind us, and so we did, our bodies bent over, our hands forming a useless protective cover over our heads, our camera shaking and jerky, but still switched on and filming, trying to get some of this across to the news centre, our hearts pumping with adrenalin—it offered a temporary antidote against paralysing fear. At this point in the battle I got separated from Ajmal Jami, my cameraman. As Pakistani shells began to pound the area right around the rocket launcher, I took shelter behind a broken wall, and frantically worked the satellite phone. Suddenly, a long arm lunged out and pulled me back, unfailingly polite even in that life and death moment. ‘Ma’am, you’re standing next to an ammunition dump,’ said the soldier. ‘If a shell hits the target, this place will explode and you will be finished.’ He waved me towards the shelter of his own underground bunker.
‘I need to call my office in Delhi,’ I insisted, ‘and I have lost my cameraman, I can’t go down leaving him out here.’
He offered to find Jami for me and urged me to hunker down immediately before I got injured in the shelling. I still had the call to make but there was no way the satellite phone would pick up any signal underground. I sat with my legs inside the dugout and the rest of me leaning out of it, holding the phone outwards. ‘I can’t talk long; I’m calling from a bunker,’ I said, ‘just tell everyone, the assault on Tiger Hill has begun.’ We would spend the next few hours here, trying to make sense of the latest war between India and Pakistan.
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‘I sincerely hope that they (relations between Indian and Pakistan) will be friendly and cordial. We have a great deal to do…and think that we can be of use to each other and the world.’
In August 1947, Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, declared that Partition had resolved the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims and India and Pakistan could now live in harmony. Mahatma Gandhi echoed the sentiment. Both ‘fathers’ of their respective nations turned out to be grievously wrong.
The partition of India was a bloody and cataclysmic upheaval and the largest forced mass migration of people in the world. Between 1 and 2 million people were killed and an estimated 17 million were uprooted from their homes. The violent rupture proved impossible to heal.
In both countries, many families put locks on their doors but left most of their possessions inside as if they were going on a brief journey from which they would be coming back home very soon. My own family was among them. My grandfather, Krishan Gopal Dutt, a freedom fighter who went on to become Punjab’s finance minister in independent India, used to live in a palatial kothi called Pillar Palace in Sialkot, famous for its manufacture of sporting goods. My father was a child of eight when the mob violence spread like a forest fire across both sides of the Punjab province. My grandfather reached out to his friend Chet Ram, the then governor of Jammu, for help in crossing over to the newly demarcated territory of India. A truck with armed guards was sent into Sialkot on the pretext that the governor had to retrieve money from the Imperial Bank (which later became the State Bank of India) in Sialkot. On this truck, my grandfather, dressed only in his dhoti-kurta, left with his family. When he arrived in Delhi, he was penniless and homeless like millions of other refugees.
Decades later, as a college student, I travelled with my father to our ancestral home in Pakistan; its fifty rooms were too expensive to maintain for the family that now owned it—they occupied only one of its residential wings. We had arrived at the house without warning the new owners. Yet, although we were complete strangers, they welcomed us without any questions or suspicions—and having heard our story—handed over the keys of the kothi to us. As we wandered through empty rooms, past bare walls—‘the piano was in this corner, your grandmother slept here, that’s the fountain made from marble’—I understood for the first time, the anguish that my father, and millions like him, had felt at being displaced in a manner that was so violent, unforgiving and permanent. It was one of only two times I’d seen my father cry (the other time was when his wife died) and it came home to me, in that instant, standing in the abandoned old house in Sialkot, just how deep a wound Partition had carved into the psyche of both countries.
~~This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines -by- Barkha Dutt
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