This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  In preparation for the worst-case scenario, the army had already fleshed out a ‘Six Day War’ plan, deploying troops so that the boundary separating India from Pakistan could be crossed in less than a week, if needed. Upset with Vajpayee’s public announcement that India had no intention of entering Pakistani territory, General Malik met the prime minister and explained that such absolutisms unfairly restricted the strategic manoeuvrability available to his troops. The army chief was blunt: ‘If we can’t undo this in Kargil, I will have to attack somewhere else,’ he told Vajpayee, making it clear that a new war front could soon be opened in another part of the subcontinent—one that, by definition, involved crossing over. Seeing the need for a more nuanced articulation of the Indian position, that same evening, Brajesh Mishra went on television to say that the approach of confining operations to the Indian side of the LoC held good only for the present. In the meantime, General Malik quietly moved an army brigade from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the western border and the navy’s Eastern Fleet was moved from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea.

  Even as all these developments took place behind closed doors, India’s main effort took place on two fronts—the war on the ground, and a delicately nuanced diplomatic initiative to try and get the Americans to intervene. Pakistan was trying hard to present the dispute around Jammu and Kashmir as a potential nuclear flashpoint so there would be aggressive international mediation. India wanted America to help contain the conflict, but on terms that would be set by India. Washington could not drive hard bargains, especially not on Kashmir. The India–Pakistan equation was still a hyphenated one for the US and India was apprehensive that the classic ambivalence practised by America in all its dealings with countries in the Indian subcontinent would yet again dominate the proceedings.

  So when Bill Clinton phoned Vajpayee in June 1999, three weeks into the war, and promised that he was working on Pakistan to pull back its soldiers from Indian territory, a sceptical Indian prime minister—a man who knew how to make masterful use of silence—did not respond. Later, Clinton would say of him, ‘that guy’s from Missouri big time’, after the American state known for the disbelieving demeanour it preferred to adopt when confronted with a tricky situation.

  Two days after Clinton’s call, Vajpayee sent Mishra, in his capacity as national security adviser, to Geneva, where the American president was to address a meeting of the ILO. From there, Clinton was headed to a meeting of the Group of Eight (G-8) countries in Cologne on 19 June. India clearly wanted intercession from this gathering of the world’s most powerful nations. In Geneva, Mishra handed over a secret missive from Vajpayee to Sandy Berger and Karl Inderfurth, both high-ranking officials in the US government. To this day, the contents of the letter have never been released. But Mishra told me that the kicker in the letter addressed to Clinton was the paragraph that warned, ‘One way or the other, we will get them out’. ‘They were taken aback,’ Mishra said. ‘Inderfurth pointed to that particular paragraph immediately.’ The letter never spelt out what option India was considering. However, the subtext that all bets were now off the table was clear to the Americans. ‘Crossing the LoC was not ruled out, nor was the use of nuclear weapons,’ Mishra revealed to me, adding that had the American asked him a direct question ‘I would not have expanded on what I meant’. Mishra believed that without this letter, Clinton would not have got actively involved. The G-8 countries did not just jointly ask Pakistan to pull its men back behind the LoC; two days later, Clinton sent Anthony Zinni—the commander-in-chief of the US Central Command—to Pakistan. There, Zinni did some plain speaking with Pervez Musharraf. His message was unvarnished—Pakistan’s position was untenable and the country stood isolated internationally. When Musharraf pressed for US mediation on Kashmir, Zinni was terse and dismissive. ‘My mandate is Kargil, not Kashmir,’ the US general said. ‘If you don’t pull back, you’re going to bring war and nuclear annihilation down on your own country.’ By now, there was enough evidence to show that, contrary to Pakistan’s claims, the armed intruders were not Kashmiri militants, but mainly soldiers of the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light Infantry. But Pakistan needed a face-saver, a respectable way to extricate itself from the military mess, and Zinni had none to offer. He returned to Washington without a breakthrough.

  For the rest of June, both the war and the diplomatic offensive eddied back and forth. On the ground, the momentum was shifting in India’s direction. Just as Indian troops were preparing to take back Tiger Hill, Pakistan’s beleaguered prime minister was on the hotline to Washington. On 2 July, Nawaz Sharif pleaded with Bill Clinton for his personal intervention. Twenty-four hours later, at fifteen minutes past five, even as fireballs formed luminous red clouds over Tiger Hill, Sharif was packing his bags to leave for America.

  ■

  The Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day, was also a day of liberation in India. The military gains of the victory at Tiger Hill restored the Indian Army’s control over the town of Drass and a large section of the national highway. In fact, a different result would have significantly increased the possibility of India executing the till-now-under-wraps Plan B: crossing over into Pakistan from one of the states on the western border of the country. All this while, India and Pakistan had been standing on the precipice of a nuclear exchange. Reclaiming Tiger Hill gave India the space to walk a few steps back from this brink and review strategy. But one push, and it could still be a sharp fall down the cliff. In any case, the mood in India remained grim. There could be nothing celebratory when every victory in the battlefield was shadowed by images of flag-draped body bags and the coffins of men in the prime of their youth being received by ageing, stoic parents who were almost always too proud to cry. The rising number of deaths had only increased the pressure on the government to send either troops or aircraft into Pakistan to snap the supply lines to the well-dug-in camps of the infiltrators.

  Pakistan knew this, so did the Americans. The US administration in Washington wasn’t having much of a holiday as its officials briefed Bill Clinton on what one aide described as ‘the most important foreign policy meeting of his presidency because the stakes could include nuclear war’.

  By the time Clinton crossed Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC to meet a rattled Nawaz Sharif, his administration had two different drafts of a statement that would be released to the press. What would eventually be transmitted would depend on whether Pakistan’s prime minister agreed to pull his soldiers back behind the LoC or not. That Sharif had arrived in Washington with his entire family had already added to American doubts about whether he had the authority to take a decision on the military operations of his country—perhaps he’d come looking for asylum. American diplomats have published detailed accounts of the negotiations that took place during Sharif’s visit to Washington. Clinton wanted to know if Sharif was aware that his military was preparing to launch its nuclear arsenal. When Clinton warned him about the dire consequences that would ensue if ‘even one bomb was dropped’, Sharif agreed it would be a ‘catastrophe’. Sharif denied that he had ordered Pakistan’s nuclear missiles to be deployed for launching. In any event, Sharif’s attempt to procure a promise of American mediation on Kashmir as a quid pro quo for a military pullback was rejected by an enraged Clinton who likened it to ‘nuclear blackmail’. The American president warned Sharif that if Pakistan did not restore the sanctity of the LoC, he would have to release the second of the draft media statements—one that blamed Islamabad for the crisis. Quoting from John Keegan’s book, The First World War, he warned that the drama of battle never played to script; military operations had a way of taking on a life of their own. If India crossed the LoC, Clinton argued, a ‘nuclear war by accident’ was a very real probability.

  With talks in meltdown mode, both sides retreated for a brief break. A phone call from Clinton to Vajpayee in this interlude elicited mostly taciturn scepticism. By the time Sharif returned for another round of negotiations, a new statement was on the ta
ble—one that called for a ceasefire after the Pakistanis were back on their side of the border. Finally, one last sentence was added at the request of the Pakistanis—a promise of ‘personal interest’ from Clinton to resume the Lahore dialogue process. The reference was to the historic trip that Vajpayee had made to Lahore just a couple of months before Musharraf betrayed India with the Kargil incursions.

  The Fourth of July holiday ended with the Americans hoping that they had rescued India and Pakistan from a military morass.

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  The reality on the ground was different. For Vajpayee to convince the Indian Army to accept the principle of safe passage for retreating Pakistani soldiers—which was part of the truce that America had brokered—with hundreds of its own men dead, wasn’t easy. When the prime minister first phoned General Malik with the suggestion, his shocked reaction was, ‘No, sir, no one in my army would let me do this. It is impossible’.

  Malik asked for time to discuss the proposal with the forces. By now, progress in the Batalik sector, the barren mountains fifty-six kilometres to the north of Kargil, had given the army a sense of being in what Malik calls a ‘commanding position’. The idea of looking the other way as the intruders simply hotfooted it back to Pakistan was unacceptable. When the prime minister called a second time, he had two questions for his army chief. If no orders were given to stop firing on the retreating Pakistanis and the Indian Army was to chase them all the way to the LoC, how long did Malik think this would take and how many more Indian lives would be lost? The general said he needed at least a couple of more weeks.

  On the front line, no one had any indication that the war was inching to a close. The soldiers who had sheltered us in the underground bunker had got orders to get ready for the next assault. In a moment of sentiment, we had asked if we could accompany them to the last motorable point before they went into battle. It had to be absolutely dark before it was safe for the jeeps to drive up to base camp. As the vehicles were loaded with men and machines, we hopped on to the back of one, perching ourselves on a bench much too narrow to fit us all, sticking together for comfort, feeling the closest we had felt to gut-wrenching panic. Up we went, racing over sharp rocks and loose gravel, defying the terrain that was trying to slow us down. We had to be quick as we were driving parallel to several Pakistani outposts, and darkness did not guard against the rattle of gunfire that followed us as we drove. In minutes, the speeding jeep braked to a halt behind a gigantic boulder. We had reached the point from where the soldiers were to climb upwards on foot. Strangely, as my colleagues shivered in the cold of the night, a strange, stinging heat rose from the soles of my feet, rushing through my veins and hitting my head with the force of a furnace fire. I stripped off the first layer of my woollens, though we were standing out in the open. The heat felt like it would scorch me, I removed my jacket and stood there in a half-sleeved polo neck t-shirt, hoping to feel better. As I began to babble incoherently, acutely embarrassed about being sick, feeling even more self-conscious for fear of being perceived as someone who wasn’t tough enough, somebody bundled me up, flung me onto the backseat of the same jeep we had come up in and drove downhill at breakneck speed to the highway. Later, I was told that I had displayed the classic symptoms of hypothermia as a result of the abrupt jump in altitude. But the fact remained that I had been driven to an inconsequential height; there were soldiers, up there in the mountains, several thousand feet higher, walking on ice without snowshoes, in many cases without bulletproof jackets, lugging light machine guns, finding their way in the dark without night-vision goggles, battling in circumstances where even breathing was a challenge. It was a dramatic reinforcement of why the Kargil battlefield was one of the toughest war zones in the world.

  In Delhi, an anxious Vajpayee made a third phone call to his army chief. General Malik finally agreed to the idea of a withdrawal agreement for the Pakistani infiltrators, but one he insisted would have to be ‘on our terms and conditions’. By 11 July, the Director General of Military Operations of India and his Pakistani counterpart met at the Attari check post on the Punjab border. At this meeting, India stipulated the framework within which a pullout of Pakistani troops would be acceptable.

  Up on the icy slopes of the Himalayas, Indian soldiers were now in the poignant position of having to bury the very men they had fought. Strewn all across the slopes were hundreds of Pakistani dead. Dwarfed by the mountains, the bodies looked even smaller and more forlorn as their country refused to acknowledge the role they had played. As Pakistan had still not officially conceded the involvement of its soldiers in Kargil, its officials refused to take many of the bodies back. The antagonism of battle became more important than the basic decency demanded of a soldier’s code of honour. The emotional complexity of that moment was confounding to us. What did it take to bestow dignity and honour upon a man you had been compelled to kill, after struggling up a mountain for two days in the dark, one handhold at a time, weighed down by thirty kilos of guns and ammunition? A man you’d had to kill just after you had seen him fire a bullet that sheared right through the head of one of your comrades.

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  By now, the government in New Delhi made an announcement that it expected the war to wind down within a week. Air operations were suspended and 16 July was set as the deadline for the intruders to make their way back to Pakistan. The announcement was delicately worded for public consumption; so far as the Indian Army’s leadership was concerned, it was not giving up the right to attack, should it become necessary.

  On the front, the guns had certainly not fallen silent; men continued to die. In fact, on 22 July, just four days before Operation Vijay was declared closed, a troubled army chief had to go back to the prime minister to inform him that despite the agreement between the two countries some peaks had not been vacated. The fighting had continued till the bitter end. Were it not for American intervention, the war would have dragged on even longer and, even more dangerously, would have expanded; it looked set to expand into a much larger theatre of conflict. The deterrence that some argue has been guaranteed by nuclear weapons on either side would have been meaningless without the Americans responding from their own alarm over an imminent Armageddon. And, had that letter from Vajpayee to Clinton in Geneva not indicated India’s readiness to escalate the conflict if compelled to do so, America may have remained ambivalent.

  The proponents of the nuclear deterrence theory would still argue that because the world cannot afford to even contemplate a nuclear war, India and Pakistan’s military options would always be bound by the chains of diplomatic pressure. But, as Kargil revealed, the origin or context of a conflagration, the unpredictable pressures of public opinion, the speed with which global powers respond and the arguments around what constitutes a ‘just’ war will always have the force to smash all the usual assumptions. And once that happens—just as Clinton told Sharif in Washington in 1999—plans can go awry; the script will write itself. From his experience at the helm in 1999, General Malik argues that ‘the effectiveness of a nuclear deterrent depends on the threshold and the threshold is very dynamic’. In other words, in a future conflict between India and Pakistan, if either country were to cross a certain threshold, nuclear confrontation becomes a very real danger. Every point of near-war between India and Pakistan after the Kargil conflict has been white-flagged by American pressure. But the future cannot trust the consistency of past patterns; there are no guarantees that Western intervention will be timely the next time. And there will be a next time.

  VI

  The Kargil conflict was the first battle between India and Pakistan that was captured on television. Although the fighting originated in the remotest reaches of the Himalayas, much of it spilt over onto the national highway that connected Srinagar, the capital, to Leh. Under constant bombardment by Pakistani troops, whose aim was to snap the supply line of food, fuel, ammunition, and winter clothing to the Indian Army and simultaneously cut off the battlefield from the rest of India, the road
had been dubbed the ‘Highway to Death’. For those network reporters willing to risk driving through a blizzard of mortar fire, past oil tankers up in flames from the impact of the shelling, often through miles of darkness with only the faint illumination of the moon or the intermittent glow of gunfire as a guiding light, this was a chance to bring the war straight into Indian drawing rooms across the country.

  For days we just lived on the road, spending long nights crouched in the backseat of our sturdy old Tata Sumo till shells smashed holes through its window and rear and the driver said he could no longer be part of our party. With regular communication lines unavailable, we would ferry our tapes to Delhi on the choppers that flew the dead and the injured back from the front. Initially, wary of the idea of a woman reporter at the front, the army headquarters in Delhi had feared that my being there would be entirely impractical. I had promised them—and believed it—that I expected no special treatment on account of my gender. Going to the loo was always a quick crouch behind the nearest available rock. I barely noticed that my period came and went, only grateful that I still had a strip of analgesics left over in the cavernous pockets of my Nehru jacket.

  Did my being a woman ever influence the way I reported the war? Tough to say, except that the scrutiny made me acutely, and perhaps childishly, self-conscious about displaying emotion or any attribute that could be perceived as a weakness. Our emotions in any case were distorted; either heightened by a volatile combination of adrenalin and empathy or suppressed by the sheer pressure of meeting a news deadline from a war zone.

  Personal considerations aside, the television coverage changed forever the way in which we looked at our soldiers and at ourselves as a nation. It would build a new narrative of patriotism; it would force us to confront the horrors of war and it would leave another festering wound in the damaged, dysfunctional relationship between India and Pakistan.