74 THE WEEK • AUGUST 4, 2019
LAST WORD
BARKHA DUTT[email protected]was the decision by General Malik that the last
rites of Pakistani soldiers killed in action would be
performed by Indian soldiers. This was necessi-
tated by the fact that Pakistan initially refused to
take back the bodies of its men, because it was
unwilling to concede that they were regulars of its
military.
Recently, General Malik told me how, a few
months after the war was over, at the request
of the grandfather of one of the Pakistani sol-
diers killed, he even had the young man’s body
exhumed and handed over to his family with full
military honours. What made you do this, I asked
him, especially in that environment when Indians
were furious at how the Pakistanis had tortured
Captain Saurabh Kalia in custody. “This is our
tradition,” he said. “We know no
other way.”
We also know the extraordi-
nary story of Brigadier M.P.S.
Bajwa who spearheaded the
recapture of Tiger Hill, without
which the Kargil conflict could
not have been won by India.
As a brigade commander, he
was able to secure a Param Vir
Chakra, a Mahavir Chakra and
multiple other gallantry awards
for his troops. But he also made
sure that Captain Karnal Sher
Khan of Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry was
able to posthumously win his country’s highest
honour, the Nishan-e-Haider. Once the captain
was killed in action and Tiger Hill was taken back,
Brigadier Bajwa made sure he wrote a letter com-
mending the Pakistani captain for how bravely he
fought and placed the letter in his pocket, before
the body went across the border.
In an age when television anchors think they
are soldiers simply by shouting about nation-
alism and at a time when patriotism has been
reduced to a hashtag, this is what being brave is
truly about. To honour the code. And, to do it with
generosity and compassion.The Kargil masterclass
I
t is exactly 20 years since the Indian military
took back our territory in Kargil, pushing back
the Pakistan army’s soldiers, in one of the most
extraordinary, valiant demonstrations of moun-
tain warfare that the country has ever seen. As a
journalist who had the privilege of reporting the
Kargil conflict from the frontline, I can testify to
the raw courage of young men still in their twen-
ties, putting aside fear, vulnerability and a sense
of impending death, as they marched up jagged
rocks, in sub-zero temperatures, often without
snow boots or night-vision devices. “We will fight
with what we have,” said then Army chief General
V.P. Malik, and indeed they did.
Kargil is often called India’s first televised war,
even though not many know that we reported it
without the technology we take for
granted today. We neither had live
broadcast vans or satellite links,
nor did we have mobile phones.
Footage travelled back to our
newsrooms in the same helicop-
ters that ferried the body bags of
our soldiers. Several days could
pass between information from
the frontline actually making it
your television screen. Yet, despite
the archaic media infrastructure, it
was an inflection point in estab-
lishing an emotional connect
between the soldier and the civilian.
Two decades on, in this age of political nation-
alism, while we all say we revere our military, we
must ask ourselves: Did we really learn some of
the finer life lessons that the Kargil War taught us?
Apart from the breathtaking bravery of our
jawans and officers, and the swashbuckling charis-
ma of men like Captain Vikram Batra—who told
me “yeh dil maange more”, when I asked him if he
was scared—Kargil gave us an insight into a sol-
dier’s code. It taught us that a genuine nationalist
plays by the rules; he does not deny dignity even
to his adversary.
One of the finest illustrations of this higher code
ILLUSTRATION BHASKARAN