by Shiv Aroor
1
‘Killed, Maybe, but Never Caught’
Major Mohit Sharma
Undisclosed location near Shopian, Jammu and Kashmir
March 2004
‘Something’s not right,’ Abu Torara whispered to the man slouched on a cot next to him. A pair of early summer evening sunbeams streamed into the room from a half-open window in their small hideout not far from Shopian, just over 50 km south of Srinagar.
Abu Sabzar drew deeply on a cigarette, exhaled through his nostrils, roughly scratched his beard and turned to look at Torara, who was on his feet, leaning against the wall. A pair of AK-47 assault rifles lay at the foot of the cot. Torara was looking straight ahead of him at the tiny doorway that led to the next room—a small balcony-cum-kitchen that opened out into the woods. Emanating from that direction was the sound of boiling water, the aroma of kahwa, the frothy pour of liquid into glass tumblers and their clink as they were placed on a tray.
‘You want to talk to him some more?’ Sabzar asked, stubbing out his cigarette on the windowsill next to him. Torara said nothing. A few seconds later, bearing a steel plate with glasses of tea, Iftikhar Bhatt stepped through the tiny doorway and into the room.
Six feet two inches tall, with hair down to his shoulders and most of his face covered with a bushy beard that flowed down his neck, Bhatt wore a stony expression as he stepped forward to offer the other two terrorists their tea. His own rifle was slung from his neck, resting at his side. After they had picked up their glasses, Bhatt picked up his own and sat down at the edge of the cot, silent, staring straight ahead.
Minutes passed as the three men sipped from their steaming glasses. Then, Torara stepped forward and spoke.
‘Iftikhar, I’m going to ask you only once,’ Torara said, still sipping his tea, placing the other hand on Bhatt’s knee. ‘Who are you?’
Bhatt said nothing, his face rigid, unmoved, his hand still bringing the tea up to his lips. He had met the two terrorists two weeks earlier in a village near Shopian. They had never seen him before and he said very little apart from telling them the village he was from. A few days later, he opened up a little more, speaking about how his brother had been killed in an encounter three years ago. Another young man, they thought, looking for revenge, looking for work with a militant outfit, both for a livelihood as well as for closure. At the end of a full week, he spoke his first full sentences, telling them he wanted their help with an attack on an Army checkpoint. He showed them hand-drawn maps depicting the movement of Army patrols along a little-known hill trail, research that suggested this young, bearded man of few words had already begun reconnaissance, the most crucial groundwork for a successful attack on security forces.
Torara and Sabzar were moderately impressed. Bhatt, clearly in his twenties, though the beard hid much of his youthfulness, had demonstrated the motivation to take matters into his own hands—half the battle in the process of radicalization. Tall and well-built, there was no doubt he could be useful in the rough, dark life of a militant in Kashmir. Over the following week, the two Hizbul men questioned Bhatt, presenting him with situations and asking him what he would do. Bhatt’s answer would remain the same, ‘I need your support, I want to learn.’
Torara and Sabzar were no ordinary terrorists. Both had gained a reputation for leading a highly effective recruitment campaign in south Kashmir. If Bhatt wanted to pick up a gun and get started, these were the men to get in touch with. The men weren’t surprised that Bhatt knew who they were.
At the end of two weeks, Torara and Sabzar told Bhatt that they would help with his proposed attack on the Army’s foot patrol north of Shopian, but that they needed to disappear for a few days, coordinate the logistics and finer points. Bhatt said he would not return to his village without completing his mission, with or without them. So they took him along to their hideout, where they now sat sipping hot tea.
The attack plan had been detailed and fleshed out. A consignment of grenades would arrive that night. Bhatt would be joined by three Hizbul men, who had been summoned from another village and would show up the following morning. They would then proceed in the evening to launch the attack, with the intention of killing as many of the soldiers as possible as they trudged through a short trough in the trail.
But Torara was having second thoughts. Something didn’t seem to fit. Squatting before Bhatt, he asked again.
‘Who are you?’
Bhatt, who had been circumspect and soft-spoken thus far, placed his tumbler down on the ground with a splash. Rising to his feet, he took the rifle from around his neck and dropped it on the ground with a clatter. Then, looking from Torara to Sabzar, he spoke, his voice quivering. ‘If you have any doubts about me, kill me,’ he said, his voice raised to its highest. ‘You cannot do this if you don’t trust me. So you have no choice but to kill me now.’
Torara rose to his feet, looking at Bhatt closely. And then, just as he turned to Sabzar, perhaps to ask what to do next, Bhatt pulled out a concealed 9-mm pistol and shot both the terrorists in the head. Sabzar slouched back into the cot. Torara was thrown against the wall, blood splattering against the white as he crumpled to the ground. Bhatt fired two more bullets, to be sure.
As the swirl of gun smoke cleared, Bhatt sat down on the cot, picked up the tumbler he had set down earlier and drained the tea. Then he waited for the sun to set before he could walk, in the darkness, back to where he had come from. And when he reached there, he would, for the first time in a fortnight, be able to use his real name: Maj. Mohit Sharma, of the Army’s 1 Para Special Forces.
* * *
Back at his field base before dawn the following day, another officer in the unit would quip at breakfast, ‘You know, Mohit, with that look you’ve got there, you’ll probably end up getting captured or killed by the Army itself while you’re on your next covert mission.’
Mohit had replied, ‘Killed, maybe. But I’ll never get caught.’
Two months later, the twenty-six-year-old officer took leave, his first in over a year since he had joined the elite Special Forces unit, to visit his parents in the sprawling Delhi suburb of Ghaziabad. His brother, Madhur, was at the railway station to receive him, but when the train pulled in, the Major was nowhere to be seen. Perplexed, his brother searched the compartments, wondering if Mohit had missed his train or got off at the wrong station. It was then that he realized that Mohit was standing right in front of him, just a few feet away, silent and completely unrecognizable. He was wearing a Kashmiri phiran, and his long hair and beard now covered everything but his eyes. He had simply stood there, wondering if his brother would recognize him. Madhur was clueless till Mohit finally shouted his name, the beard parting to reveal a toothy grin.
The young officer had just finished twelve months of living his greatest dream—to be a commando in the Special Forces. At the dining table that evening, his mother, Sushila, a Delhi Jal Board employee, anxiously pressed him to describe what his work was like in Kashmir. Maj. Mohit smiled mischievously and said that he had made the right decision to reject the path his parents had chosen for him.
Nine years earlier, in 1995, fresh out of Delhi Public School, Ghaziabad, Mohit had been persuaded by his parents to pursue an engineering degree. Older than Mohit by a year, Madhur had already been admitted to an engineering college. Like many middle-class families, their parents hoped that engineering degrees would allow both to start a manufacturing business of some kind to take care of the family and settle into a ‘stable’ life near the national capital.
Strangely, though, for a family that couldn’t have had less to do with the armed forces, both their sons wanted to join the military. Very eager to become a fighter pilot, Madhur had made three failed attempts at cracking the Services Selection Board examination, finally giving up and deciding to stick with his engineering course. Mohit, who was now at a crossroads, agreed to go with his parents’ wishes. As he said goodbye to them and hugged his brother, he whispered something into Madhur�
�s ear.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll serve for both of us.’
Then the seventeen-year-old hopped on to a train that took him to Amravati in Maharashtra, and then on a bus to Shegaon, where he joined the Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj College of Engineering.
‘He took admission, but from the start, it was clear he did not plan to stay,’ says Madhur. ‘He had taken the NDA (National Defence Academy) entrance exam before leaving. When the results came, my parents tried to hide them from him, hoping he would just continue with engineering. But Mohit got suspicious and called the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) himself to find out if his name was on the list. Without telling any of us, he left his hostel keys with his friends and got on a train from Amravati to Bhopal, which was his centre. There, he took the final test, cleared it and was summoned to Delhi for his medical. That’s when he called our parents, announcing that he was coming back home, bag and baggage, and that he would not be returning to his college.’
Unnerved by the sudden turn of events, Sushila was comforted by Mohit’s father, Rajender Sharma. They decided they would persuade Mohit to see sense, return to college and finish his degree—to forget about the military and focus on his studies instead. What they hadn’t accounted for was just how energized and focused the successful crossing of the first few entrance hurdles had made their younger son. When he arrived home, he would respectfully raise his hand and tell his parents to save their breath if they intended to try changing his mind. The Sharmas had never seen their son this way. It worried them, but they quickly realized that any attempt to talk him out of his chosen path was futile.
With a month left for his medical tests, Mohit marshalled his mother’s help to surmount a difficult immediate hurdle—he was 6 kg underweight to make the cut. A diet that included litres of milk, high protein foods and a dozen bananas a day was employed to help Mohit pack on a hefty 8 kg in just four weeks.
Clean-shaven and wiry compared to the hairy, hulking man he would become a few years later, Mohit entered the hallowed portals of the NDA in Pune, quickly proving how committed he was to his journey into the Army. Emerging as one of the best all-round cadets with trophies for excellence in boxing, swimming and horse-riding, Mohit finished his three years at the NDA and then graduated from the Indian Military Academy (IMA) in Dehradun in 1999.
While he was at the IMA, India would fight the Kargil War with Pakistan, an intense fifty-day skirmish that put the two countries on edge. Mohit, along with every other cadet at the Academy, would crowd into common rooms to watch the evening news bulletins carrying reports from TV journalists in Kargil and Dras. These reports would shock, depress, but ultimately galvanize the entire batch of cadets, infusing in them an even greater urgency to get out into the field and serve.
Years earlier, when Madhur had asked him which arm of the military he wanted to join, Mohit had fired back without a pause, ‘Infantry. What else is there?’
Watching dispatches containing interviews of soldiers and young officers in Kargil, Mohit found the strongest affirmation yet that the path he had chosen was a worthy one, even if it had meant disobeying his parents. Electrified and angry at Pakistan, like each one of his course mates at the time, the young cadet from Ghaziabad awaited his turn.
On 11 December 1999, Lieutenant Mohit Sharma was commissioned into the 5th Battalion of the Madras Regiment, one of the Army’s oldest infantry regiments, which dated back to the eighteenth century and which had the famous war cry ‘Veera Madrasi, adi kollu, adi kollu (Brave Madrasi, hit and kill, hit and kill)!’
That war cry couldn’t have been more appropriate. During celebrations and revelry on the night of his commissioning, when Mohit was asked by a course mate where he was hoping to be sent, he replied, ‘Anywhere I can hit and kill terrorists.’
‘Get yourself into the Special Forces, then,’ his course mate said. ‘If that’s what you’re looking for, that’s the knife-edge.’
Mohit clinked glasses with him and said, ‘That’s the plan. I’ll get there.’
He would need to wait only five months. In mid-2000, Mohit’s unit was sent to the Poonch–Rajouri sector of Jammu and Kashmir to operate under the 38 Rashtriya Rifles (RR) counter-insurgency force. Thrown into one of the most challenging sectors along the LoC, he would frequently operate alongside officers and soldiers from the Army’s Para Special Forces units. On foot patrols and reconnaissance missions, from high-altitude cordon-and-search missions to full-blown terror hunts, Lt Mohit would take to his duties with great eagerness. That eagerness would see him peel away the layers of counter-insurgency operations to discover the terrifying complexities he was being entrusted with.
Almost exactly two years into the Army, with over half of that time spent in Jammu and Kashmir, a piece of news exploded on the morning of 13 December 2001. Military intelligence reports streamed in from Delhi as five terrorists from the JeM and LeT breached security at India’s Parliament House. They were stopped in their tracks only after a tense and extended firefight that killed nine Indians—six Delhi Police personnel, two Parliament Security personnel and a gardener. The terrifying assault, coming as it did just three months after the 11 September attacks in the United States, was the most insidious and shocking provocation from Pakistan’s notorious state-sponsored terror instruments. It was, in effect, a call to war.
In Jammu and Kashmir, where Lt Mohit and thousands of Army personnel were deployed, an already volatile situation had just been violently escalated. The attack on Parliament triggered a massive five-month standoff between India and Pakistan, with enormous mobilization of troops, missiles, artillery, tanks and other weaponry to the LoC and the international border, the largest both countries had seen since they had gone nuclear three years earlier. India code-named the mobilization ‘Operation Parakram’.
On the threshold of war, Lt Mohit and his unit were compelled to significantly crank up the tempo of their operations. The Poonch–Rajouri area was seeing major exchanges of fire across the LoC. The hostilities were also aiding the movement of terrorist infiltrators across and through these sectors, resulting in a significant increase in the need for patrolling and search operations.
On one such cordon-and-search operation (CASO) on the Poonch–Mendhar road in early 2002, as Mohit and a Special Forces Major took a break, Mohit asked the officer if he had a chance with the Special Forces. The officer’s reply was all the validation he needed at the time.
‘Bhai, dekh (Brother, look), I’ve seen absolute beasts of men come and fail to make the cut. And I’ve seen seemingly unimpressive guys come and nail it better than anyone. So what I’m saying is, there is only one way to find out.’
Weeks later, Mohit would receive his first recognition, a Chief of Army Staff commendation from the Army chief, General Sundararajan Padmanabhan, for leading a counter-insurgency operation in the Rajouri area. But the fight against terrorists was hardly being won. For every small victory, there was a body blow waiting around the corner.
A horrific reminder of how the flow of terror across the LoC hadn’t been stopped by the massing of forces came on 14 May 2002. Three Pakistani terrorists infiltrated across the LoC, boarded a bus in Jammu’s Vijay Pura, then went on to massacre Armymen and their families at their living quarters in Kaluchak. The dead included ten children (the youngest was four) and eight women, with a total of thirty-one killed. The attack would have a devastating effect on Mohit. On a phone call to a course mate in Chandigarh four days after the attack, he would say he had totally lost the ability to sleep, asking how the terrorists could bring themselves to fire at toddlers. Then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee would describe it as ‘a most brutal and inhuman carnage’. If bad blood defined relations between India and Pakistan after Kargil and the Parliament attack, the Kaluchak massacre stirred India into a frenzy of disbelief and fury.
Operation Parakram would see military exchanges along the length of the frontier, but enormous restraint from India, diplomacy and a great measure of global press
ure helped ease tensions, resulting in a gradual pullback of troops starting June 2002.
A year later, in June 2003, after being rejected in his first attempt due to an illness, Mohit, now promoted to Captain, was welcomed into the 1 Para Special Forces.
Brigadier Vinod Kumar Nambiar, then a younger officer with the unit and later its Commanding Officer (CO), remembers the time clearly.
‘Mohit had come for Special Forces probation to 1 Para. He didn’t get selected initially because he was unwell. And when we turned him away, he said he would be back. Normally, people give up. Probation breaks you. But Mohit recovered his strength and came back to the same unit again. So his feeling for 1 Para was very strong. He had the humility to come back despite being rejected in his first attempt. Any normal person would hesitate a bit about going back to the same unit for a probation attempt. He could have volunteered for another battalion, to avoid being rejected twice by the same people. To me, that was the determination aspect of it. Not afraid of failures and not afraid to come back to the same challenge. It also showed his love and affinity for 1 Para “ki kuch bhi ho jaaye (whatever happens), I will come back to the same unit.”’
Getting to wear the maroon beret and balidaan (‘sacrifice’) badge for the first time would be a day of solemn reflection for Mohit, once the celebrations at his unit had died down. On a phone call home, his mother, Sushila, who had become used to worrying every day ever since her son was deployed in J&K, would now demand to know why he had felt the need to move into even more dangerous territory with the Special Forces. At that moment, Mohit had news he knew would calm his mother down—he was to report shortly to Chandimandir, the headquarters of the Army’s Western Command on the outskirts of Chandigarh, to take charge as a Special Forces team leader. He was right. Sushila Sharma did exhale, but knew it was only a matter of time before he was sent back to Kashmir.
‘You have finished your responsibility in Kashmir, Mohit,’ his mother said. ‘Why don’t you seek a posting elsewhere now?’