Book Review: Flowers on a Kargil Cliff

Vikram Jit Singh Flowers on a Kargil Cliff The Browser / Fauji Days, an imprint of JGS Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., Chandigarh, 2024. Pb. Pp. 240 Rs 495

"At 15,700 feet, I was clinging for dear life. Like a lizard's belly I had pressed my body tight into a cliff of the Kargil War. There was no safety rope around my waist to secure my passage along the cliff wall, which was near-perpendicular in stretches. My hands and feet had the barest of holds and pressing against the cliff wall was the only safeguard against the forces of gravity that would send me plummeting thousands of feet below into the Gragario nallah."

Posted with The Indian Express in Kashmir and later, during the Kargil War, Vikram Jit Singh is that rare breed of war correspondents who took grave risks to their lives in the line of duty. Embedded with Army's seek-and-destroy columns, he climbed Safapora mountains at night to hunt down killers of 23 Wandhama Pandits.

Incorporating unpublished photographs of Point 5353 in Drass taken by Pakistani intrusive patrols in Oct 1998 during the Kargil build-up, Flowers on a Kargil Cliff establishes how 5353 and Bajrang Post were captured. Photos reveal Gen P. Musharraf and his entourage of generals across LoC in March '99.

Vikram Jit Singh is a correspondent of the proverbial trenches. And, a diehard romantic who sent alpine flowers from Kashmir & Kargil battlefields in letters to his anxious fiancée.

Singh was embedded with the Indian Army's riflemen and sepoys in the innermost cordons of Kashmir counter-terrorist operations. He was then stationed at Srinagar for The Indian Express since October 1997. When the Kargil War broke out, his experiences of facing bullets with ground soldiers during day-and-night Kashmir operations stood him in good stead. He was the only media person permitted twice to climb to the enemy bunkers at the Kargil high-altitudes with the assault troops, while navigating treacherous cliff faces, ducking Pakistani air-burst shelling and staying the night under small arms and artillery fire at 15,700 feet. As a combat journalist, Singh filed first-hand battle accounts with unique datelines: 'Safapora Heights' and 'Point 4812'. It led the Siachen legend, Lt. Gen. Sanjay Kulkarni (retd.), to inscribe on the book: "Vikram has been baptised under fire as a war correspondent, and has operated less as a correspondent and more as a soldier in Kashmir...Truthful reporting is his forte...An inspirational journalist."

Singh was invited to write an eyewitness account of shelling duels from his vantage points in the towering heights for the book, With Honour and Glory --- Five Great Artillery Battles, published in 2021 by the United Service Institution of India under the aegis of the Directorate of Artillery, Army HQs, New Delhi.

A journalist of 33 years standing, Singh reported for India TV while stationed at Srinagar in 2004, the second of his two stints in the troubled vale. He has been an investigative journalist for Tehelka and The Indian Express, and his stories include the expose of the judges in the 2002 Punjab Public Service Commission 'Ravi Sidhu' scam, the $ 1 billion International Financial Consortium fraud, the petrol pumps allotment scam and the serial poaching escapades of Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna awardee & international trap shooter, Manavjit Singh Sandhu.

Singh has featured in several podcasts and national / regional TV interviews relating to wildlife conservation, defence, security, regional geopolitics, Kashmir and the Kargil War. Singh has been a four-time speaker at the Military Literature Festival, Chandigarh, and he has been invited to speak on his memoir at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2025.

Singh is also a naturalist who was groomed in his formative years by the birdman, Dr. Salim Ali. He writes columns on wildlife / environment for The Times of India and Hindustan Times newspapers in Chandigarh and his articles on wildlife conservation have been published in Sanctuary Asia magazine. He was nominated as a Member (Expert) to the Chandigarh State Wildlife Advisory Board and has been a consultant to the Governments of Punjab and Chandigarh UT on conservation issues.

Vikram Jit Singh’s writing style is very precise, clear, and calm despite all that he documents in Flowers on a Kargil Cliff.  His accounts are clearcut and as descriptive as his writing hero Hemingway whom he invokes in the quote to the extract given below. Singh’s articles about the conflict in Kargil and subsequent pieces on the military are worth reading.

The following book excerpt has been taken with permission from the publishers.

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The Hunting of Armed Men

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Ernest Hemingway.

The irrigation channels servicing the paddy fields of Kashmir’s Gund Rahman village were quite unlike the shallow ones of the Punjab. As children, we would peer into the gurgling waters surging from tubewells into the shallow channels and take delight in spotting a bullfrog or a non-venomous water snake. Sometimes, the harmless snake would be bludgeoned by the burly Punjab farmer, much to the excitement of the children. The Kashmir channels were four to five feet deep and fed off the snow-melts brooks. They ran like trenches across the agrarian tracts and were as wide as a man’s shoulders.

It was the end of January 1999, and I had long given up my passion for hunting defenceless wild birds and animals. I was in Kashmir’s Gund Rahman village, on a hunt of armed men, those who could hit back very hard and enjoyed the advantage of surprise. They were more dangerous than the worst of the man- eating tigers. The Army was hunting for them by searching each room of this sprawling village. The initiative lay with the holed-up fugitives. They would open fire first. In those initial bursts of fire from assault rifles and Pika General Machine Guns, the Army usually suffered the bulk of its casualties. After that, the terrorist was as good as dead because he had given away his location by opening fire. If he opened fire in the darkness, the muzzle flash of his rifle barrel would give away his hideout.

The Army’s 56 Mountain Brigade had laid siege over Gund Rahman village of Ganderbal tehsil outside Srinagar. It had been tipped off by an intelligence source that a group of Hizbul Mujahideen and Al-Badr terrorists had taken refuge in this village since the night of 31 January 1999 and were being sheltered by a section of its inhabitants. Three infantry battalions operating under the command of HQ 56 Mountain Brigade had cordoned off the village that night to ensure the terrorists could not escape. The first gunfire contact that night with the terrorists was made by troops of the 15 Assam, but the Army could not secure a kill in the darkness. The stage was set for a systematic search of the village from the dawn of 1 February till the last light of 3 February. I was granted permission by HQ 8 Mountain Division to report the operation ‘live’, and I reached Gund Rahman on the morning of 1 February after a 40-minute drive from Srinagar. All the villagers had been herded into a huge group. I saw the troops systematically check their identity cards to ensure no terrorist dumped his weapon and slipped the Army dragnet by posing as a villager. Gund Rahman was described by the Army officers as a ‘difficult’ village, for it would offer the ‘mujahids’ the hospitality of food and a warm bed. Not a single tongue would wag before the Army and betray the terrorists’ presence and hideout locations.
in Kashmir’s Gund Rahman village, on a hunt of armed men, those who could hit back very hard and enjoyed the advantage of surprise. They were more dangerous than the worst of the man- eating tigers. The Army was hunting for them by searching each room of this sprawling village. The initiative lay with the holed-up fugitives. They would open fire first. In those initial bursts of fire from assault rifles and Pika General Machine Guns, the Army usually suffered the bulk of its casualties. After that, the terrorist was as good as dead because he had given away his location by opening fire. If he opened fire in the darkness, the muzzle flash of his rifle barrel would give away his hideout.

The Army’s 56 Mountain Brigade had laid siege over Gund Rahman village of Ganderbal tehsil outside Srinagar. It had been tipped off by an intelligence source that a group of Hizbul Mujahideen and Al-Badr terrorists had taken refuge in this village since the night of 31 January 1999 and were being sheltered by a section of its inhabitants. Three infantry battalions operating under the command of HQ 56 Mountain Brigade had cordoned off the village that night to ensure the terrorists could not escape. The first gunfire contact that night with the terrorists was made by troops of the 15 Assam, but the Army could not secure a kill in the darkness. The stage was set for a systematic search of the village from the dawn of 1 February till the last light of 3 February. I was granted permission by HQ 8 Mountain Division to report the operation ‘live’, and I reached Gund Rahman on the morning of 1 February after a 40-minute drive from Srinagar. All the villagers had been herded into a huge group. I saw the troops systematically check their identity cards to ensure no terrorist dumped his weapon and slipped the Army dragnet by posing as a villager. Gund Rahman was described by the Army officers as a ‘difficult’ village, for it would offer the ‘mujahids’ the hospitality of food and a warm bed. Not a single tongue would wag before the Army and betray the terrorists’ presence and hideout locations.

The Army officers had sensed from the villagers’ glib denials that a long and hard search of each of the 200 houses of Gund Rahman lay before them.

The Army operation required that the villagers be moved out of their homes so that the terrorists would be isolated like fish gasping for breath out of water. Also, the cordon-and-search operation would be severely hampered if villagers were roving around as troops went about their arduous tasks. The troops would move from house to house, haystack to haystack, woodpile to woodpile, cow shelter to cow shelter, and closet to closet. If villagers were present during the search, they would form crowds and obstruct the troops, shield the terrorists and even suffer collateral damage in the crossfire. So, when the troops went in for the search operation, it was only them in uniform and a specially picked search party of villagers, who came to be infamously known as ‘human shields’. Once all the villagers had been removed following announcements from the mosque, the logic was that it left only terrorists inside the village and presented a clear, unambiguous target for the Army’s search teams. The troops were searching ready with a hair-trigger response, and there would be no time to verify a target before opening fire. The one who fired first won the round in the close- quarter battles conducted in the built-up areas of Kashmir.

On the first day of the operation at Gund Rahman, I was met by the Brigade Commander, Brigadier Amar Nath Aul, UYSM (who later retired as a Lieutenant General). None of us knew that in just three months, his brigade would be moved overnight to Drass to fight the epic battles of Kargil. Brigadier Aul was a man given to circumspection when it came to the media. He was not enthused by the idea of my going into the inner cordon where the troops were in contact with the terrorists. He had never seen this kind of reportage in his career. He had positioned himself on the fringes of the outer-most of the three cordons the troops had placed around Gund Rahman. The posse of Kashmir media persons, mostly photojournalists working with the Srinagar dailies, were being briefed by him outside the cordons. He expected me to join their company, but I politely told him that my purpose was to be with the frontline troops. He eventually had to assent to my entry into the inner cordon of the battle zone as I had the clearance from the HQs of 15 Corps and 8 Mountain Division. He summoned a bulletproof jacket for me. I was handed a black scarf to place under the bulletproof patka helmet. I bid him adieu and reached the search parties, moving from house to house.

I had been with the troops searching the Gund Rahman houses fruitlessly for about 90 minutes. There was no sign of the terrorists. An eerie, uneasy silence hung over the village. Not a rooster crowed, or a cow mooed. I could not even spot an inquisitive village dog. And, then I saw Brigadier Aul stride into the village. Under the operational safety protocols, the Brigade Commander normally does not enter the inner cordon as he leaves the hazardous task to the battalion officers and troops. The Commander’s task is to conduct the battle from a safe vantage point and exercise command and control keeping in mind the operation’s larger picture. The battle situation can change and evolve rapidly.

Yet, Brigadier Aul had been unable to contain himself after seeing me off into battle. He strode into the village surrounded by his security detail comprising 20 troops of the 18 Grenadiers (the battalion that won Kargil’s Tiger Hill in July 1999 along with 8 Sikh). He joined me, and after a brief exchange on how the operation was proceeding, we went down the narrow streets of Gund Rahman. The morale of the troops rose as their Commander was with them, keeping an eye on the operation from ground zero and leading from the front. It was a gamble, and a hazardous one, that Brigadier Aul had taken by entering the operation.

As we entered a street that had the village mosque on the right side, we immediately came under fire from assault rifles. The terrorist/terrorists had cunningly hidden in the religious shrine to exploit its sanctity. We pressed ourselves close to the walls on the left side of the street and opposite the mosque. The volleys of fire missed us and struck the walls above us. The troops retaliated immediately with bursts from their automatic rifles. There was a locked barber’s shop right next to where Brigadier Aul and I had taken cover. We were ringed by the burly Grenadiers in a semi- circle. But we were still in the open, and the Brigade Commander’s life was a very important one. The Grenadiers acted swiftly. They broke the lock of the barber’s shop with their rifle butts and pushed us both inside into a dank, dark room where we could barely make out the outlines of the shop’s interiors. Some of the Grenadiers also came inside the shop with us. It was an eerie room of mirrors as the firing went on outside. The door was banged hard on us by the rest of the Grenadiers, who took up position outside the barber’s shop. By firing at us, the terrorist/terrorists had given away his/their positions. He/they fled the mosque soon after as he/they wanted to escape the increasing retaliatory fire and tightening cordon. After 15–20 minutes in the barber’s shop, we came outside after the Grenadiers gave the signal that all was clear.

Brigadier Aul’s security detail escorted us to a safer location in the village outskirts and, within 20 minutes, came up with tea for both of us, served in dainty white cups on a tray! They also served us apple slices in another tray. From where they had quickly conjured these goodies in the middle of the battlefield defied comprehension. Brigadier Aul savoured the tea and apples without batting an eyelid and left the village. I went back to the troops who were searching the houses.

Bursts of assault rifle fire again broke Gund Rahman’s deceptive silence. The troops had nailed the first of the terrorists. He was a young, bearded man who had slithered into an irrigation channel running through the houses on the periphery. He had taken position by lying flat on his back with his AK assault rifle on his chest. He was shot in that very position by alert troops before he could initiate the exchange of fire. I saw him lying there with his rifle at rest across his chest, blood oozing like fresh, gurgling springs from multiple bullet hole entry marks on his upper body. He looked strangely peaceful in death, like a tired peasant from a Van Gogh pastoral painting who had settled for a nap in the channel to avoid the searing sun. The first of the man-eating tigers of Gund Rahman was down.

The irrigation channels coursed through the rice fields and ran along the village periphery.

Armed men could lie flat on their backs inside the channels that virtually served as trenches in such encounters. They were effectively sheltered from ground-level fire. Anyone who poked his unwary head into the channels was in danger of being shot by an armed man lurking inside.

During the Gund Rahman encounter, blood flowed in the channels, not water. The channels traditionally irrigated tonnes of rice to service the staple Kashmiri food of goshtaba (minced mutton balls). But in a vale torn asunder by conflict since 1989, the channels would periodically transform into the trenches of a proxy war.

Nearing dusk, the same day, a section of troops of the 1 Naga led by a subedar extended the search to the outhouses in the fields of Gund Rahman. I was with them. A small hut loomed in sight at a distance from the village. The troops sensed it was worth a search because, throughout the entire day, they had managed to shoot only one terrorist from a group of six. Where were the other five? Proceeding in a tactical approach, we were about 35–40 yards away from the hut. The search party that I was accompanying did not have a civilian search party or ‘human shields’ to search the hut before the troops entered. I was with the subedar, and we were inching towards the house in fading light, taking cover of whatever tree or ground contour was available. A window opened halfway in the hut. Kashmiri houses and huts have multiple windows, and a terrorist commands the advantage of a first-fire initiative from any of the windows that he determines will lend him a tactical advantage. This terrorist was not the standard one equipped with an AK assault rifle.

All of a sudden, the air around us was cut into ribbons. The clear, decisive sounds of Pika (a belt-fed general machine gun) fire from the window exploded like firecrackers. The air around me buzzed with flying projectiles like angry hornets going ‘whizz, whizz’. The further one is from the point of discharge of a bullet, the less one hears the explosion of gunpowder that releases projectiles down the rifle/machine-gun barrels. The target hears only the whine of projectiles whizzing by. If he hears them, it is good! Even though I was wearing a heavy bulletproof jacket and patka, there were too many parts of my body that were vulnerable to the Pika fire from such a range. The legs, neck, face, arms, shoulder and a part of the forehead were not protected by bulletproof gear.

‘Saheb, dive into the ditches (irrigation channels). The terrorist has opened fire at us with a Pika,’ the subedar shouted at me.

I needed no prodding. We were in the open and exposed to a high rate of fire. Contrary to popular notions and filmy depictions, when fired upon in a surprise attack, troops do not stand up and bare their chests. They scamper for the nearest cover to save their lives and choose the right moment later to retaliate. Or lie low till the danger has passed. The Pika can strike at ranges beyond 1,000 m. Most of the well-equipped terrorist modules operating in Kashmir had a Pika in their armoury. The Pika was also an infantry battalion weapon for the Pakistan Army and was deployed to deadly effect from the machine-gun slits of bunkers dominating the Kargil heights in the summer of 1999.

I ducked and sprinted in as low a crouching posture as my spine could manage to the very inviting channel 15 yards away to our right. We dived headlong into the channel and were soon bunched together, keeping our heads well down. Luckily, we did not suffer a casualty in the opening Pika bursts because the channel was close at hand, and the terrorist’s hand was not that steady on the Pika. Firing automatic weapons accurately and avoiding needlessly long bursts is a professional art. The terrorist continued to fire but stopped, realising his quarry was safe in the ‘trench’. If he wanted to survive, then he had to flee that outhouse at the earliest, as he had exposed himself by opening fire with the Pika. He knew the army was out there in great strength.

It was nearing darkness, and we stayed put in the channel. The Naga troops were alert to the contingency of terrorists advancing towards the channel and firing bursts down at us. But the Pika- wielding terrorist did not seem inclined towards prolonging the encounter with us. The subedar then ordered the troops to start inching their way towards safety. He was a seasoned man and realised that if his troops attempted an encirclement of the outhouse that night, there would be casualties in the darkness. We crawled in the channel for a few hundred yards, came out, and made our way cautiously to the safety of the Army’s outer cordon placed around Gund Rahman in the agricultural fields. The outer cordon was manned by troops of the 15 Assam, a battalion that had recently de-inducted from its tenure in the Siachen Glacier and had been placed under the command of 56 Mountain Brigade in the valley. It would soon leave the valley and move to a peacetime cantonment for a well-deserved rest and refit. I drove back to Srinagar in my Maruti 800 that night to return before dawn the next day when the troops would again commence searches of the houses. At night, the Army’s search parties withdrew from the village, and troops placed a tight cordon around it so that the holed-up terrorists could not escape under the cover of darkness. Through the night, the troops of 15 Assam would fire speculative, probing bursts of LMGs into the village at the slightest sign of movement so as to keep the terrorists pinned down in the village and pre-empt an escape.

The narrow escape from the Pika terrorist in the outhouse that evening had underlined the criticality of civilian search parties for Army operations. I was forbidden from taking a camera into the Kashmir operations as there were sensitive aspects to the Army’s on-ground methods of dealing with terrorists embedded within hostile populations. The vexed issue of ‘human shields’ was one of them. Their use in warfare attracted trenchant criticism from the Kashmir media and human rights organisations. The Army’s logic was that a holed-up terrorist would not shoot a civilian searching the house. The ‘human shields’ would exit each house and reveal to the Army where precisely the terrorist was hiding. If they were to lie to the Army, they faced terrible consequences. There have been deaths of these ‘human shields’ in encounters, attributed later to ‘civilians caught in crossfire’. Some civilians searching houses at the Army’s behest have been caught in the fire unleashed by the terrorists on troops. On occasion, the Army even described them as ‘volunteers’ in the operations, but certainly, that was stretching it too far. The work of ‘human shields’ searching houses as a precursor to the troops’ entry was hazardous in the extreme. If we had a search party or ‘human shields’ accompanying us that evening, the fate of the terrorist could have been very different. The 1 Naga troops would have stood at a safe distance and sent the civilians into the hut first.

I reached Gund Rahman the next day, much before dawn. The fallow fields, aching with the pain of winter, bore a layer of ice. I joined the troops and officers of 15 Assam. I was waiting for the troops of 1 Naga and 25 Rajput to enter the village once the light got better. As the officers of 15 Assam recounted tales of their tenure in the Siachen Glacier to me, the troops were firing LMGs continuously into the village. I left the 15 Assam outer cordon and joined the search parties. But that day—2 February 1999—went without a fire contact with the hiding terrorists. Not a bullet was exchanged in back-breaking searches throughout the day. Would such an effort find mention in the media, ever? What to say of the media, the Army itself has based its CI-Ops system of awards and promotions on the number of terrorist kills and weapons recovered.

I repeated my routine the next day, 3 February, reaching Gund Rahman from Srinagar before dawn. By mid-day, the troops located another terrorist and search parties of the 1 Naga and 25 Rajput encircled the house in which the terrorist was hiding. A barely visible black AK rifle barrel peeped out of a window and opened fire at the rate of 60 rounds a minute. The bullets sent soldiers and officers standing a mere 15 yards away, diving and pushing for cover as hell broke loose. Troops from all directions opened fire on the house. Frantic orders and yells from officers and JCOs for control punctuated the firing as soldiers next to the house were in real danger of being shot in the crossfire. No one knows who is firing and from where in such situations. The enemy’s bullets can pop out of the proverbial closet while the troops are on a hair-trigger response. This is a complication encountered frequently in close-quarters combat in built-up areas where a density of troops under different commands has been tasked to target a handful of armed desperados who could be hiding just about anywhere.

Along with troops of the 1 Naga, I rushed into a house which shared a common wall with the one in which the terrorist had taken position. We climbed the staircase and entered the loft of the house. We lay flat and slithered across the wooden floor to peer down into the adjoining house from the triangular openings in the loft. I saw the terrorist right opposite in the other house looking up at us through a window. He opened fire at us, and the assault rifle bullets went screaming through the low, sloping roof of the loft. In the first few moments under fire, one hardly realises where the bullets are striking. The wooden loft got chipped with the bullets. The troops retaliated with seven or eight Naga soldiers discharging bursts from their assault rifles at the window from where the terrorist was firing. The terrorist ducked and retreated into the depths of the house, and we could no longer see him.

Around those two Gund Rahman houses, there was an uproar. There was shouting, firing, and abuses directed at the terrorist. We, in that loft facing the terrorist’s direct fire, soon came under fire from the left flank of the house. It was from troops of the 25 Rajput or what is called ‘friendly fire’. Casualties to troops from ‘friendly fire’ are not that rare in such encounters. There were such mishaps in the Kargil War, too, when Indian Artillery shells and IAF bombs fell in the wrong spots on the steep, narrow ridges and nullahs and struck their own troops. The 1 Naga troops with me used all the lung power at their disposal and interspersed it with some choice army regulation abuses: ‘O bhaiyon, stop the firing! It is us in the house. You will kill us!’

The sheepish Rajput troops stopped firing in our direction. They had not seen who was firing and from where. It was a perfect melee. The Rajput troops had assumed that the firing in the general area of the loft was from the terrorist, and they had pressed their triggers in that direction. It was a close call, caught as we were in the crossfire of the terrorist and the troops of the 25 Rajput. In close-quarter combat, no one resorts to the ‘doctrine of no first use’!

Once the troops of 25 Rajput were clear as to the specific house in which the terrorist was hiding, the crossfire stopped, and a measure of control was restored. The target was left literally doddering on its foundations with troops opening fire on it with infantry battalion support weapons in the guise of the 84-mm Carl Gustav rocket launcher (meant for knocking out tanks in conventional warfare) and the Automatic Grenade Launcher (AGL). The civilian search party or ‘human shields’ were sent into the house after that to locate the terrorist’s body among the rubble and smouldering ruins. We waited outside the house, waiting for news of a sure kill. After about 30 minutes, the civilians came out running, ashen-faced. There was no body or wounded terrorist in the ruins. Incredibly, the terrorist had survived the heavy pounding and had jumped into the next house and then the next one like a monkey skipping across gardens. Terrorists were known to be nimble in built-up Kashmir areas. Their lives were dependent upon it. Surrounded by regular infantry troops, outgunned and outnumbered, their only chance of escape lay in luck and a Houdini-like agility to escape when under fire.

Their quarry had, once again, escaped. It was the third day of the search, and the Army had only one kill to show for the Brigade- level operation. With a sense of apprehension, the soldiers turned to search the haystacks dotting the courtyards of houses. They had to remove every bale in case the terrorist had burrowed deep into them. No army officer wanted the terrorist to escape by hiding in the haystacks, but no one wanted a repeat of the incident of November 1998 when a Pakistani terrorist had jumped out of a haystack and shot two soldiers. The lofts in the houses, stacked with firewood and cattle feed, had to be painstakingly dismantled and dislodged from the roof. The memory of the disaster in a Budgam village was fresh when a terrorist burrowed deep in the firewood stacked in a loft had opened fire, killing an army jawan and two civilians searching the loft.

It was late afternoon of 3 February. The troops had been in a constant operational mode, either searching for the elusive ‘needles’ or manning the three cordons around Gund Rahman. Fatigue had set in, and troops were of the view that the rest of the six terrorists had somehow escaped. And then, there was a dramatic finale to the flagging search operation.

Motivated by their officers and inspired by the presence of Brigadier Aul in the periphery of the operational zone that afternoon, the troops renewed their searches with vigour. It was the last shot at finding the elusive ‘man-eaters’ of Gund Rahman.

Search parties went through an isolated and inky dark hut. They were searching for a long-haired Pakistani terrorist who had been glimpsed in the village, engaging in ‘shoot and scoot’ guerilla warfare tactics. They reckoned that by now, he must have run out of ammunition. But they missed him. The troops hurried on, for they had another 50 houses to search before sundown on 3 February. Burrowed neck-deep in bukhari coal in that inky-dark hut with another sack to conceal his head was Idris Khan, code Saifullah, an IED bomber armed with an AK-47 rifle, four full magazines, grenades, and an automatic pistol.

Luck finally ran out on Saifullah. A civilian searcher sent back into the same inky dark hut ran his hand over the coal stack. The hand encountered a bunch of shaggy hair. He ran out to alert the troops. Within no time, more than 150 troops threw a noose around the house before bombarding it with an automatic grenade launcher. A daring CRPF1 officer deployed with his contingent at Gund Rahman had joined the search. He volunteered to deliver the coup de grâce.

The Army troops carry IEDs with them in search operations like the one at Gund Rahman. These are wrapped in innocuous-looking white cloth. The CRPF officer sprinted to the window of the hut and chucked in the IED. The blast was volcanic. The hut’s tin roof was hurled high into the air and, on its descent, settled on the top of a poplar tree next door. It was an unforgettable spectacle—the oddity of a rusty tin roof wobbling on the top of a tall tree bearing faintly-lime leaves. It symbolised what violence had done to the quaint and idyllic pastoral life of Kashmir—how green was my valley once. The body of Saifullah was pulled out of the rubble at 5.45 p.m., 3 February 1999. Following this, the Gund Rahman operation was terminated as darkness set in that day.

Two terrorists had been killed, and the rest had escaped. Rounds running into the thousands had been  expended. The army had been supported in the outer cordons by the police, CRPF, and the BSF.2 A logistical exercise that ran into lakhs of rupees for the skins of two desperadoes trained cheaply by Pakistan to engage and bog down a formidable conventional formation.

None of the Gund Rahman villagers had tipped off the Army on the hiding places of the terrorists and had lied consistently to the last man, woman, and child. ‘We have not seen any mujahid,’ was the standard refrain. Yet, two bodies lay at their doorsteps, which they could not account for.

In a different search operation in Yangoora village in March 1998, some villagers had gone a step further. Some women had locked the house from outside and told the soldiers it was empty. A cynical Lieutenant SK Singh of the 3 Kumaon (Rifles) had broken open the door to be greeted with a hail of fire from four terrorists inside. He was lucky. He got away with three bullets in the shoulder. It took him years of convalescence to recover from those wounds inflicted by the deception of the locals.