by Ruskin Bond
The basic equipment for every Indian soldier on the glacier costs 60,000 rupees—about eleven times what the average Indian can expect to earn in a year. An expert once calculated that every chapati eaten by a Pakistani soldier on the Siachen glacier bears a cost of about 450 rupees (roughly the average monthly wage for the country).
The Siachen glacier, a senior officer told me, costs India the equivalent of about 20 million US dollars per day: this adds up, in the course of a year, to about one billion dollars—about one-tenth of the country’s entire defense budget. Pakistan’s costs are much lower but still substantial. The total cost of the Siachen conflict is probably of the same order of magnitude as that of the nuclear programs of India and Pakistan combined. If the money spent on the glacier were to be divided up and handed out to the people of India and Pakistan, every household in both countries would be able to go out and buy a new cooking stove or a bicycle.
In 1992, there were signs that both countries had reached an agreement on a simultaneous disengagement from Siachen. It was India reportedly that torpedoed the agreement. The diplomats who had negotiated the settlement were told by top politicians: “A retreat from Siachen will look bad in an election year.” The election came and went, leaving the soldiers still at their posts.
We spent a night at a base close to the glacier. In the evening, in the mess, I said to a group of junior officers, “Do you think the glacier serves any purpose for either country?”
One of the officers laughed. “You know,” he said, “once, while climbing an ice face, I asked myself exactly the same thing.”
Another officer added quickly: “But of course we have to stay.”
“Why?”
“National prestige—this is where India, Pakistan and China meet. We have to hang on, at all costs.”
I was interested to note that Indian soldiers always spoke of their Pakistani counterparts with detachment and respect. Usually they referred to the other side collectively as “He”; sometimes they used the term dushman, “enemy.” I never once heard any soldier utter a denigratory epithet of any kind.
“Most of us here are from north India,” a bluntly spoken major said to me. “We have more in common with the Pakistanis, if you don’t mind my saying so, than we do with South Indians or Bengalis.”
One morning, in a Cheetah helicopter, I followed Fernandes through the gorges that lead up to the glacier. It was cloudy and the brilliant colors of the rock faces had the blurred quality of a water-washed print. There was a majesty to the landscape, the like of which I had never seen before.
We dipped and turned through a sand-braided river valley, trying to make our way up to a post on the glacier. The men at the post, the pilot said, were waiting eagerly for Fernandes. Before him, no defense minister had ever thought to pay the glacier a visit.
But the landing was not to be. The cloud cover was too thick. We headed toward the black, moraine-encrusted snout of the glacier.
Under an open hangar a burra khana had been arranged in Fernandes’s honor—a kind of feast. Fernandes left the officers’ table and began to serve the other ranks, taking the dishes out of the hands of the kitchen staff. The men were visibly moved and so was Fernandes. It was clear that in this job—arrived at fortuitously, late in his career—Fernandes had discovered some kind of vocation, a return perhaps to the remembered austerity and brotherhood of his days as a seminarian or his time as a trade unionist.
I was introduced to an officer who had just come off the glacier after a three-month tour of duty. He talked proudly of his men and all they had accomplished: injuries had been kept to a minimum, no one had gone mad, they had erected a number of tents and shelters.
He leaned closer. While on the glacier, he said, he’d thought of a plan for winning the war. He wanted to convey it to the defense minister. Could I help?
And the plan? I asked.
A nuclear explosion, he explained, inside the glacier, a mile deep. The whole thing would melt and the resulting flood would carry Pakistan away and also put an end to the glacier. “We can work wonders.”
He’d just come off the glacier, I reminded myself. This was just another kind of altitude sickness.
The next day, sitting in his plane, I talked to Fernandes about Pakistan.
“The soldiers are of the same stock on both sides,” he said. “We cannot win against them and they cannot win against us. Their strength may not be evenly matched against India but their motivation is much greater. This is the reality.”
“Isn’t it possible for both sides to disengage from the glacier?” I asked. “Can’t some sort of solution be worked out?”
“Does anyone really want a solution?” he said quietly. In his voice there was the same note of despair I’d heard before. “I don’t think anyone wants a solution. Things will just go on, like this.”
Not for the first time, I wondered why Fernandes had taken the risk of bringing me with him. Was it perhaps because he wanted the world to know of his despair and its causes, hoping perhaps that that knowledge would somehow help avert whatever it was that he feared most?
Later, in Pakistan, the defense-affairs specialist, Shirin Mazari, said to me: “The feeling about Siachen in Pakistan is that we’re bleeding India on that front. So let them stay up there for a while and bleed.”
“But Pakistan is bleeding too surely?”
“Not as much as India; they’re bleeding more.”
I came to be haunted by this metaphor, because of its undeniable appositeness—its evocation of the vendettas of peasant life along with its reference to the hemorrhaging of lives and resources on the glacier: how better to describe this conflict than through an image of two desperately poor protagonists, balancing upon a barren mountaintop, each with a pickax stuck in the other’s neck, each propping the other up while waiting for him to bleed to death?
To visit the Siachen glacier is to know that somewhere within the shared collective psyche of India and Pakistan, the torment of an unalterable proximity has given birth to a kind of death wish, an urge that is rising ever more insistently to the surface.
* * *
THE WRATH OF MANDAKINI*10
Hridayesh Joshi
[Having driven over perilous roads for hours] we reached Tilwara [a village just before Kedarnath] at about 1:30 p.m. But on arriving there, we felt our efforts had not been in vain. We could gather information about what lay ahead and got a better idea of the overall situation. Our biggest achievement was meeting a survivor of the Kedarnath flood, a priest named Ravindra Bhatt, who narrated what he had experienced that fateful day.
I am a pujari at the Kedarnath temple. It was raining since June 13. From the fifteenth, however, the downpour was continuous. On the sixteenth, [what felt like] a huge sheet of water gushed down from the upper reaches and the area around Kedarnath was flooded. People ran helter and skelter trying to save their lives but many got swept away. We were horrified and many of us gathered inside the temple. People were wailing and screaming. It was a very scary situation…
Bhaiji, we were face-to-face with death—it was as though Yamraj was actually in our midst. When the water receded, we tried to quiet the crowd down and asked them to remain calm. To those who were more agitated, we said, “Have courage…this dark night will end…it will be morning soon…We will survive this.” We slept that night thinking that the worst was over, that things would only get better the next day.
The next morning on June 17, just when we thought the nightmare was behind us, there was a loud crashing sound. Within minutes, Kedarnath was filled with water and dotted with huge boulders. I climbed up a three-story building but soon realized that it was shaking and could collapse at any moment. To save myself, I had to jump into the swirling waters below and was swept away. I was in the water for nearly fifteen minutes. And then, miraculously, the water deposited me on the side and I lay there for a lo
ng time. Later—the next day actually—rescue workers found me and brought me to safety.
We recorded this first eyewitness account of the Kedarnath tragedy. Up until now all the stories we had were either based on hearsay or of those who were stranded on the way, but Ravindra Bhatt gave us a peek into the horrors Kedarnath witnessed during the floods. Until now, everyone believed that the water from Vasuki Taal had flooded Kedarnath. But now, through Ravindra Bhatt’s narration, aired on national television, we told the world for the first time that Kedarnath was destroyed because Chaurabaari lake had breached the banks.
Guptkashi was still about eighty kilometers away. Our plan was to get there before the light faded, but in the current circumstances, it looked like we would not even make it there by late night. We knew that we had to get there to add facts to our reports and it was only from there that we could even consider the possibility of going to Gaurikund, Rambara, and Kedarnath.
“DON’T YOU HAVE ANY SHAME?”
A few kilometers ahead, near Mayali, many cars, buses, and jeeps could be seen coming downhill. They were ferrying pilgrims stranded in Kedarnath to Rudraprayag, Dehradun, and Haridwar. Barring a few government vehicles, most of them were privately owned. There were several people who had rushed here looking for loved ones who were stuck in Kedarnath.
When they spotted our mics and cameras, people realized we were from the media and they began cursing how ineffectual the government was. Some even abused the media. None of them had any idea of the challenges we had faced just to get there. They were angry—and understandably so. One of them said, “You people are coming here now…when everything is gone…don’t you have any shame?” There was no point talking to the overly agitated, because they would exaggerate what happened. Luckily for us, some people were still composed. Even in these extreme circumstances they kept their cool and we felt that they could give us some authentic information.
As Siddharth and I spoke to more and more people we were told that at least thirty thousand people were affected by the disaster—both by the floods and the subsequent landslides. But we had no way to verify these figures. People had suffered irreversible damage and most of them could not comprehend why they had to go through this trauma. Government support was either not there at all or was too little and too late. While we felt that their anger was completely justified, we felt that the number of casualties had been inflated. At any given point of time, it is not possible for more than fifteen to twenty thousand people to be present between Gaurikund and Kedarnath. However, the accounts left no doubt in our minds about the gravity of the situation.
The road ahead was broken and slushy, and hundreds of vehicles were trying to ply in both directions. There was a traffic jam that stretched to over five kilometers. We were in a hurry to move up the mountain, so we took it upon ourselves to act as traffic policemen and get the vehicles moving. We realized that there were not enough policemen to regulate the traffic on the roads. We saw some personnel from the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) but they all seemed raw and inexperienced. Some of them were just boys who had no idea about the specific rules with regard to driving in the hills. Some of the NDRF rescuers, going up to bring people back from Guptkashi, were actually driving on the wrong side of the road, adding to the chaos on the jam-packed highway. It took us about three hours to get out of the mess and in the process we even had an altercation with the naive NDRF boys. At about 6:00 a.m. we stopped at a village, Dadoli, just thirty kilometers short of Guptkashi. We filed our first major report of the day. Headline: THOUSANDS OF PILGRIMS STUCK IN KEDARNATH, HUNDREDS FEARED DEAD.
THE GENEROSITY OF THE ORDINARY
On the way to Kedarnath, the town of Agastyamuni serves as an important halt. From Dadoli itself we could see the scale of destruction in this critically located town. Standing atop the mountain, the villagers showed us how the Mandakini, in all its fury, had ravaged the town. Many shops and houses were completely destroyed. The entire market was gone and a huge chunk of the road was swept away. Just a kilometer ahead of Agastyamuni, the road splits into two—one goes to Ukhimath and the other to Guptkashi. Normally, this would have been our route to Kedarnath. From Tilwara, we would have come to Agastyamuni, but that day the road was almost completely destroyed. In some parts, kilometer-long stretches had simply vanished. Standing on the mountain, we could seen there was very little of Agastyamuni left.
If Agastyamuni was dealing with its issues, Dadoli had its own unique tale to tell. A heartening tale of generosity. Only two days previously, thousands of pilgrims had come down here from the upper reaches. There was a huge open ground in the middle of the village and all the pilgrims had collected there. They were in a terrible state—hungry, injured, and mentally and physically exhausted. Some had lost their belongings. Some had family—brother, sister, wife, husband, or children—still stuck somewhere. It wasn’t easy for the poor villagers to make arrangements for so many people: their food, stay, recuperation, and so on. The people of Dadoli erected a tent for the men. The women and children were sent to live in houses where the villagers took care of them. A village elder told us,
We didn’t have enough atta, rice, or dal. The roads were broken. We didn’t know when government aid would arrive. Nevertheless we all decided to feed these people on our own. We collected rice, atta, and dal from each household. Everyone contributed and for two full days we offered shelter and food to everyone who reached our village.
Many villagers also showed us videos and photographs of how these arrangements were made. At a time when ration supply lines were cut off and no one had any idea when help would arrive, the exceptional generosity of the people of Dadoli filled us with admiration and respect.
When we began to write this report for our prime-time show that night we had some horrifying stories to tell. As darkness fell, we met a Gujarati family returning from Kedarnath. They had to leave behind their son’s dead body somewhere between Kedarnath and Rambara. We heard of many others who had faced similar tragedies. To leave a loved one behind without being able to even perform the last rites…it’s difficult to even imagine how painful it would have been for them. We were to hear more unsettling stories over the next few days in Kedarnath. Many women had to leave without their husbands. Many children had returned without their parents, while many parents had no choice but to leave their dead children behind. We now realized that this was going to be one of our longest and most difficult assignments.
It was 9:30 p.m. We had not realized that we had not eaten all day, and suddenly we were famished. Satish Negi, an extremely generous and large-hearted resident of Dadoli, took us home and fed us. Not one or two, he took our entire team of ten people to his house. We bathed and were served warm food with utmost love and affection. If we hadn’t been offered a meal that night we would have been forced to go without food all day.
Guptkashi was still some thirty kilometers away. As soon as we finished eating, we set out in that direction. We were really tired. It was midnight when we finally reached Guptkashi, and a deathly silence welcomed us.
* * *
TIBETANS FROM PEKING*11
Dom Moraes
As usual I woke at five. I woke with a vague thought of hard-boiled eggs and liquor and a feeling that Julian and Del and Ved and I were going for a picnic along the Cherwell. Then I inhaled the fetid air of the bedroom and remembered. I went out on the terrace, shouted for a bucket of water, and splashed for a little. Day had come up over Kanchenjunga and there was a flavor of snow, woodsmoke and herbs in the sunlight. I dressed and sat on the terrace, drinking brandy, watching the bazaar waking up, and reading The Memoirs of Hadrian. I knew when Das got up because his typewriter started raiding away and there were sleepy shouts of protest. At seven thirty precisely he came out to me. He carried his cameras and typewriter, and, rather depressingly, his first-aid kit.
“Ready? Good. Let us go.”
The jeep
had arrived. There was a slight delay while we put in eight gallons of petrol from the shop across the street. Then we drove uphill to the post office, and Das sent his telegrams.
The expedition seemed to have begun. But a hundred yards up from the post office, where the road became steep, the jeep suddenly ceased to work. It rolled gently backward down the hill and stopped again exactly in front of the post office. The postmaster issued forth in some surprise.
“You want to file another message?”
“No,” said Das grimly, then to the driver, “Son of a donkey, what has happened to your jeep?”
“Sahib,” said the driver, shamefacedly, “now it will work.”
He started the engine and we climbed the hill again. At the top the jeep stalled conclusively. Once more we slid gently down to the post office. The postmaster had now been joined by his entire staff. They were laughing.
“Go back to the bazaar, O fatherless one!” Das said between his teeth.
But the engine had died completely. We coasted back under control of the law of gravity. Once in the bazaar, Das jumped out with murder in his eyes.
“Go to Chiranjilal’s shop,” he said. “I will settle with this bastard.”
Chiranjilal was all concern. “It is five past eight,” he said. “You will never get there in time for Chhibar.” He began telephoning various people to see if another jeep could be found. It was in vain. At eight-thirty Das returned in a fury.
“This driver has paid me back for the petrol,” he said, “and I got our old Landrover. But that driver wants five hundred rupees now.”
“I will talk to him,” Chiranjilal said.
So we all went out—Das, Chiranjilal, the two shop assistants, and myself, to where the driver straddled the front seat of the Landrover, grinning hugely. A small crowd had gathered, including the Tibetan mother and daughter. Chiranjilal, Das, and the shop assistants all shouted at the driver together.