by Shiv Aroor
Col. Rajiv’s calls to Jeelani went unanswered. He gathered from sources that the Jammu and Kashmir police was inaugurating a women’s cell in Handwara on Valentine’s Day, and the SSP was probably busy at the function. Twenty minutes later, though, Jeelani returned the Army officer’s call.
‘Jeelani finally called me back to confirm that he had also received an identical input about the same terrorists,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘I told him my men were already on their way to Hajin Kralgund and requested him to join the operation with his SOG. Jeelani was very enterprising and committed. He sent a huge contingent of his men to join the operation.’
In his Maruti Gypsy, Maj. Satish went over the plan that would unfold once they reached the village. With him was a quadcopter drone that would be deployed high over the village to provide them with a bird’s-eye view. He remained connected over a secure audio line to his CO. Even if he wanted to call Sujata to check on that parcel, he simply didn’t have the time at that point.
Back in Jaipur, Sujata was growing restless about the promised package delivery. Why was it so late if her husband had said it would arrive no later than noon? She switched on the television and flipped channels distractedly for a while before turning it off. She paced about the house, wondering if she should get dinner started, but decided to wait for the package or a call from her husband. Their flat in Jaipur had been rented only two months earlier, when it became clear that Maj. Satish would be stationed in that city after he completed his Kashmir posting in three weeks’ time.
‘I didn’t want to make dinner,’ says Sujata. ‘I was getting impatient. The only thought that I had in my mind was, why did he lie about a parcel being delivered? And why wasn’t he answering his phone?’
Sujata couldn’t wait for his Jaipur tenure to begin. Maj. Satish had been commissioned into the ASC in 2009, in the logistical supply wing, which oversees the enormous task of procurement and distribution of food, rations, fuel and other items nationwide to 1.2 million personnel. A few months into service, he was deployed on a three-year posting to Kashmir with the 1st Battalion of RR operating in Nowgam. Returning home to his village in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district for a short break a year into the posting, he had met Sujata.
‘It was an arranged marriage, but we took our time,’ she says. ‘When I first met him, I was shocked. He looked scruffy, dishevelled and very different from the clean, handsome man in the photo my parents had shown me. I think Satish noticed my shock. I felt bad later when I thought of this. When he visited me again two months later, he looked just like he did in the photograph—clean-shaven, sharp and tidy. I was over the moon. My heart said yes.’
They were engaged in 2011 and married on 17 February 2012, nearly two years after they first met. Still deployed in a sensitive area, Maj. Satish would get very little time with his new wife, returning to Kashmir within days of his wedding, where he immersed himself in counter-insurgency operations. On 3 July 2012, he would be part of an operation that would later win him a commendation from the Chief of Army Staff.
‘He called me during that operation,’ says Sujata. ‘I could hear the sound of bullets being fired, but didn’t know what they were. I ended the call and told my father that the call had been disconnected because there was a lot of background noise. My father understood what I was talking about. He followed the news and later told me that three militants had been killed in Nowgam. Later that night, Satish called and said he had been injured, but was okay. Apparently, a bullet had also missed his head by a few inches. I didn’t know what to think.’
Sujata remembered hearing from her husband’s friends about an operation he had been involved in before they met, when a young Lt Satish had bravely stormed a location despite being warned to be careful, and had killed a militant. They had told her he was crazy to be so brave. He had calmed her down when, agitated, she asked him about the incident. He did what he had to do, he told her.
For the young officer, an honour from the Army Chief was all the affirmation he needed to be sure that fighting insurgency was what he really wanted to do in the Army. When he had the time for longer conversations with his wife, she listened quietly, noncommittally, as he described his work and achievements. Unfamiliar with an Armyman’s work, Sujata would have trouble understanding and navigating the first few years of their relationship.
‘After we got engaged, we didn’t talk much because he was deployed in that difficult area, Nowgam in Kashmir,’ says Sujata. ‘I thought he didn’t want to talk to me, and was busy with other things. Then, when I asked around, it became clear that his unit was in a place where there was virtually no connectivity. I would call the headquarters, and if I was lucky, I would be patched through for a two-minute call with Satish. That was very precious time. On some occasions, he would walk for an hour up a hill to a spot where he could get a mobile signal and then call me for a few minutes. That one year he was there was a very hard time. He was gentle with me. But I understood how difficult Army life is.’
In 2015, when her husband was deployed once again with the RR for a two-year tenure in north Kashmir, Sujata was understandably apprehensive. She was now expecting their child and hadn’t fully settled into life as a military spouse. And while leaving his pregnant wife for a posting was difficult, his return to Kashmir was a calling Maj. Satish had been waiting to fulfil. For three years as a young Lieutenant in Nowgam, and through stints in Nagaland thereafter, he had yearned for an opportunity for some actual combat against foreign terrorists entering Kashmir.
On 30 March 2015, Maj. Satish arrived in Kupwara to join 30 RR. The CO was anticipating his arrival.
‘Satish was joining us after operating in a sector adjacent to ours,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘So he was quite clued in as far as the modus operandi of terrorists was concerned. It was apparent to me from the start that this was a bold, brave young man, capable of giving us solid dividends in the fight against terror and militancy.’
With an impressive record of counter-insurgency operations, Maj. Satish was given charge of a ‘jungle’ company. Troops of 30 RR are divided into four ‘companies’—two companies stay focused on road-opening tasks and providing escort protection to convoys travelling on National Highway 701, which connects Srinagar to Baramulla and Kupwara. The other two companies are ‘jungle companies’, deployed in the rural hinterland in thick forests.
In 2016, a year into the posting, Maj. Satish went home for a short break to see Sujata and their infant daughter. And just when he was about to return to Kashmir, a shooting pain in his abdomen forced him to delay his departure. Diagnosed with acute appendicitis, he had no choice but to report to the Army hospital in Delhi.
‘It was quite bad, and we gave him thirty days of sick leave initially,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘Once you have surgery, you can’t be part of active operations for about six months. And the general practice is to send such officers back to their parent unit to make place for a physically fit officer, so that operations don’t suffer. But as the CO, I was sure I didn’t want to lose Satish. I wasn’t sure how much time he would take to recover. But I was sure this young man had the strength to deliver—if not today, then tomorrow. Since I couldn’t send him out for operations, I placed him as adjutant in the unit.’
As adjutant, Maj. Satish was, in effect, a staff officer to the Colonel. And even though he ached to be declared fit for operations, he used this time to advise the unit’s company commanders. Crucially, he also spent time cultivating his best source, a local Kashmiri villager who would prove crucial in the months ahead. The time away from field missions also brought with it a special privilege—the opportunity to invite his young family to visit his unit and see for themselves why he was hardly ever free to talk.
‘I had a chance to meet his wife and daughter when they came,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘I found Sujata to be a very confident and supportive partner to Satish. She had many questions and was curious about all aspects of the tough job her husband was doing. And you could see she was very prou
d of him.’
The visit was brief. A disturbed area like Kupwara is, after all, usually out of bounds for families of Army personnel. But Maj. Satish had taken the time to introduce Sujata to his men—the men in whose hands he placed his life as a matter of routine, and whose lives he took responsibility for. The tough RR soldiers she met were an enormous source of reassurance. When his family left, Maj. Satish dived right back into his work.
‘Satish stayed highly motivated despite the health setback,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘I knew he was disappointed, but he still worked round the clock. Whenever I went on operations, he would always be awake, and when I returned, be up and ready to work with me. Frankly, I don’t know when he rested.’
When Maj. Satish was finally declared fit to return to combat in late 2016 and was deployed to command one of 30 RR’s jungle companies in Behak Harvet, he placed a cardboard placard above the entrance of his bunker with five words, scrawled with a red marker, that appeared to answer his CO’s question: I RUST WHEN I REST.
If anyone thought it was a cheesy line, Maj. Satish and his company very nearly had to live by it. His company had to keep a lookout for militant and terrorist activity over a huge area—over 23 sq km and nearly thirty villages—with a large part of it covered in thick forest. From the moment he took charge, inputs began blaring in about the arrival of terrorists from the JeM’s Afzal Guru Squad. Intercepts and whispers from sources had revealed that four terrorists were on the prowl. The names they seemed to go by were Saad, Baaz, Maavia and Darda.
‘This was clearly a fidayeen squad,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘They were highly trained terrorists. They had already ambushed Army convoys. They were also instrumental in carrying out attacks on a police station, inflicting casualties there and elsewhere. They had survived and escaped multiple police and Army ambushes too.’
Adding insult to injury, intelligence intercepts showed one of the terrorists bragging about how to break Indian Army cordons: ‘Fauj ka cordon kaise break karte hai, main bataunga (Let me tell you how to break an Army cordon).’
The frustrating game of cat-and-mouse had also become something of a prestige issue by now. And on Valentine’s Day 2017, as his vehicle sped towards Hajin Kralgund, Maj. Satish prayed his source hadn’t made an error.
‘Satish was after these guys, religiously working day in and day out,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘He spent every waking hour taking out parties, laying ambushes or cultivating more sources. When his source finally gave him that specific piece of data, it basically confirmed weeks of work he had done. Finally, he had something he could act on.’
A month previously, in January, on a short visit to Jaipur for a medical check-up and to see his family, Maj. Satish, who rarely went into specific details of operations, told Sujata about the terrorists he was hunting.
‘Satish had been after these militants for two months,’ Sujata says. ‘He started to tell me about the ambushes they laid for the terrorists, but that they were managing to escape. I would always ask why he didn’t shoot them or attack them. But Satish would say just one thing—if anything happens to my men, even a single man, I will never be able to face their families. “Mere bande first hain mere liye (For me, my men come first).”’
When he returned to Kashmir, he wouldn’t call home for days. And when he did call Sujata, it would be for a few minutes late at night.
‘It was only on Valentine’s Day that he called so many times,’ she says.
A few hundred metres before Hajin Kralgund, Maj. Satish stopped his vehicle near the side of the road. On his orders, one of his men got out of the Gypsy and pulled out a cardboard box from the back. Inside the box was a quadcopter drone that they powered on and launched. With a low, whining hum, the drone rose into the air, climbing steadily until the village came into view. Fitted with a camera calibrated for low-light missions, the drone streamed live images of the village to a briefcase-sized monitor operated by Maj. Satish’s men, which, in turn, beamed the images to the 30 RR headquarters where Col. Rajiv sat in the unit’s small operations room, keeping real-time watch on where his men were headed.
In Jaipur, Sujata continued to dial her husband and wait for the promised package delivery.
‘I called my mother to tell her that Satish hadn’t called and that he wasn’t answering his phone,’ she says. ‘My mother asked me not to worry and to have dinner. She reminded me that there was nothing unusual about Satish not taking calls.’
Maj. Satish’s mobile phone was with him, but it was silent—and there was no time to answer. As they arrived on foot at the periphery of the village, he had planned that his company would split into two groups and approach it from two sides. At every step, the CO, armed with the live drone video feed from the operation site, was kept updated.
‘Initially, we placed a bigger cordon around the village,’ says Col. Rajiv, explaining the plan as it unfolded. ‘Then the plan was for Satish to go with his team and lay a tighter cordon around the house at the edge of the village.’
Hajin Kralgund was one of the thirty villages that fell under Maj. Satish’s area of responsibility, and he knew it well. He and his men had made it their job to be aware of the layout, the owners of most houses and the numbers of family members. But even with all that data, a terror encounter in a built-up space with unarmed civilians couldn’t be more unpredictable. Sure, the drone provided a highly valuable live feed of the intended encounter site. But another pair of eyes was truly indispensable. A pair of eyes that was on the ground, deep inside the village, secretly watching from a vantage point. This was Maj. Satish’s source. In an inexplicable show of faith, he was risking his own life and the lives of his family members by agreeing to provide a live commentary of what he saw. In human intelligence terms, nothing could be more valuable than this.
‘While Satish and his men proceeded to form the tight inner cordon, I took the responsibility to coordinate the outer cordon with another team of my men,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘The inner cordon had two parties—the one led by Satish laid its cordon around the suspected house in the middle of the village. A Junior Commissioned Officer (JCO) was tasked with leading the second party to cordon the house on the edge of the village.’
Hajin Kralgund was a small village, but it still had a large number of women and children residents, many in houses just metres away from the two houses that had been identified as the terrorists’ hideouts. The Army was hoping to complete the operation as quickly and cleanly as possible, with the least amount of bother to residents. Both Col. Rajiv and Maj. Satish hoped that the intelligence checked out and that they wouldn’t need to search other houses in the village, because if they did, it would greatly amplify the risk of the mission. And given that the terrorists would have a number of hiding places within the village, a more delicate and dangerous operation couldn’t be imagined in the circumstances.
‘Satish voiced his confidence again in the input as he and his men walked into the village,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘After overseeing the cordon laid at the farther house, he proceeded towards the middle of the village to lay his team’s cordon. So far, the input had been that both houses had two terrorists each. But just before Satish and his men reached the inner house, his source came on the line.’
‘Sahab, donon bahar wale ghar ki taraf bhag gaye hain (Both terrorists have left the middle house and are on their way to the house on the edge of the village),’ said the source.
Maj. Satish quickly passed the information to his CO. Col. Rajiv looked closely at the drone’s video feed, squinting to see if he could make out anything at all.
‘Now we knew for sure that the two terrorists from the inner house were headed to the outer house,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘But we didn’t have a fix on whether there were two terrorists already in the outer house, or whether they had already left. When Satish called me with an update, I advised him to take the party and join the close cordon of the outer house. By this time, SSP Jeelani had also arrived at my headquarters and was monitoring the operation
with me. He was in touch with his sizeable team at the encounter site, who were part of the cordons we had laid.’
Maj. Satish’s source had been quite accurate. The two terrorists had indeed made their way from the centrally located house to the one on the edge of the village. At the latter house, where two men had been hiding, only one terrorist remained—the second had broken the cordon and escaped into the forests. Now regrouped, the three Afzal Guru Squad members took positions inside the house.
The element of surprise Maj. Satish and his men had hoped against hope for was gone. This was made abundantly clear by a hail of AK-47 fire from the first floor of the house that greeted them upon arrival.
The house sat in a small bowl-shaped piece of land surrounded by hills, with forested slopes on three sides and a stream beyond its front gate. Inside the compound, the ground undulated in small dune-like folds.
In his pocket, Maj. Satish’s mobile phone continued to ring silently. A thousand kilometres away, Sujata’s restlessness grew. The sun had set and there was still no sign of the promised delivery. She wondered if that was why she was particularly anxious that evening. Her restlessness was turning into full-fledged fear.
By this time, Maj. Satish had reached the front gate of the house with his buddy soldier. He had sent some of his men to its back to reinforce the rear cordon, in case the terrorists tried to make a break for the hills.
‘Welcomed with heavy fire, Satish and his men rapidly took position and returned fire,’ says Col. Rajiv. ‘With the cordon now as tight as it could possibly get, the three terrorists inside the house realized that their only means of escape was to fight their way out. Otherwise, it would only be a matter of time till they ran out of ammunition.’
For six minutes, the firing from the house stopped and silence descended. Maj. Satish and his buddy used the opportunity to enter the compound through the front gate and take cover behind a small mound of earth. At that precise moment, the three terrorists burst out through the front door, firing indiscriminately. Maj. Satish immediately let out a burst of gunfire, hitting the first terrorist in the head and sending him crashing to the ground. The two others immediately leapt behind a clump of earth to take cover.