A Journalist’s Memoir: Flowers on a Kargil Cliff

A Journalist’s Memoir: Flowers on a Kargil Cliff — India’s first war correspondent in the line of fire in Kashmir & Kargil:

If I may, take the liberty to inform you about my memoir which has recently been published. Its title takes from the alpine flowers of the remote Kargil battlefields sent in letters home, and their identification over the years following the war by the efloraofIndia group. It includes photos of flowers around the LOC posts and Kargil battlefields taken by the author and by high-altitude link patrols of the Army. The book features Dr. Gurcharan Singh’s explanation of their existence at those heights ranging to 17,000 feet and above.

A glimpse of Flowers on a Kargil Cliff:

(i) The book’s title takes from the miniature alpine flowers I plucked from rock crevices while under fire at 15,000-16,000 feet during the Kargil War and dispatched in love letters to my distraught fiancée; some of these blooms were contributed by the lonesome troops I was embedded with

(ii) As the only mediaperson allowed access to the high-altitude zone of the Kargil War twice, including a night in a pup tent at 15,700 feet with 12 JAK Light Infantry, I ducked artillery shelling and navigated cliff walls to file first-hand accounts for The Indian Express, that included the sui generis ceremony during the raging battle to bury enemy soldiers with the religious rites due on the knife-thin, Khalubar ridge. The basis for the Army permitting outlier Kargil access was my track record of live reportage of multiple counter-insurgency operations in the Valley while stationed at Srinagar: October 1997-October ’99, (and for India TV in 2004)

(iii) The book is endorsed by reputed veteran officers and hosts a prolific foreword by Maj. Gen. Raj Mehta (retd.), who served seven tenures in Jammu & Kashmir, and with whose troops I went into battle. Titled, India Needs War Correspondents, Mehta details the global history, role of war correspondents, Indian media persons reporting on war / conflict, and the world’s best ones: “I saw Ernie Pyle in Vikram Jit”.

(iv) The book tells the tale of unseen blood on the dim and distant snows. I witnessed an unsung 48-hour battle waged by 3 Kumaon (Rifles) and 9 Dogra to nail six terrorists who slaughtered 23 Kashmiri Pandits of Wandhama and climbed the Safapora mountains at night in February 1998 with the assaulting riflemen. Accompanying 56 Mountain Brigade on the three-day, village Gund Rahman operation in Ganderbal (February 1999), I was fired upon thrice by terrorists in close-quarter battles and witnessed a fearless CRPF officer slip an IED through a shack window and blow to smithereens the heavily-armed and notorious IED bomber, Saifullah, hiding in a coal stack inside

(v) Since courage knows no line of control, the book digs out the heroic stand of Capt Rommel Akram, Sitara-e-Jurat, of the Pakistan Army who was grievously wounded while fighting alone against a concerted Indian assault on Kargil’s Point 5140. Named after the German General of WW II by his grandfather who had battled in North Africa with the British Indian Army, Capt. Akram bears a long, jagged Prussian fencing-like, Mensur scar across his left cheek. It is the vivid, macho testimony of an Indian sniper round’s mangling impact as the bullet entered under his left eye and exited from his ear in June 1999. The memoir also revisits the graves of 244 Pakistani soldiers who lie buried for the last 25 years in Indian soil, and whose families have no chance to seek a return of the rotting remains and attain a sense of closure. In forgotten corners and crags of enemy’s land, the snows shroud their nameless graves in white, where icy winds wail in anguish and in summer’s brief interlude do alpine blooms lend a wreath. These are the most unfortunate soldiers, who will never go home, not even in coffins

(vi) It speaks about decorated young officers of the Pakistan Army’s 6 NLI, who fought in the Drass-Kaksar (Kargil) sector in summer 1999. They took photographs and marked critical Indian peaks on maps when they roved unchallenged across the LoC in secret recce missions in October 1998, seven months before the intrusions were officially detected — by an Indian shepherd. The classified photographs were released by retired Pakistanis for the book, as also three expose images of Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his Generals (the Kargil Clique of 4) across the Mashkoh LoC on March 28, 1999, where the entourage stayed the night with incursion troops of 12 NLI. The book incorporates accounts from the Pakistani side of the capture of Point 5299-SW Spur (Bajrang Post, the claimed mutilation of an Indian patrol under Lt. Saurabh Kalia) and photos taken in October 1998 by intruding recce patrols of the southern slopes of the Indo-Pak ‘sore point’ of 5353 (Marpola Ridge, Drass)

(vii) The book unearths the tense HQs-battlefield radio set exchanges and court-martial threats involving the virtual refusal of Capt. Manoj Pandey (Param Vir Chakra-Posthumous) to follow suicidal orders issued by HQs 15 Corps (Srinagar) to assault Point 4821-Kukar Thang on May 17-18, 1999, and thereon for his under-strength, under-equipped battalion to clear the Batalik axis (Kargil War) in just 72 hours. Of the 12 JAK LI’s Commanding Officer who threatened his superiors with battle withdrawal after they refused to sanction a heli-lift and instead ordered him to have the decomposing bodies of his 13 dead officer / jawans (of Point 5203 battle) lugged dishonourably, in uneven loads of dangling limbs, on lurching mules to a road too far

(viii) Untold stories of love and loss wrought by war’s collateral wounds are told. Of Tek Kumari Shrestha, who refused to accept widowhood and turned down the compensation due on the death of a Gurkha Rifles soldier. She refused to believe her missing husband had been killed in action. If so, show me his body? She stubbornly kept applying ‘sindoor’ to the central parting of vermillion in her hair and her weary arms continued to tinkle with nuptial bangles she was loathe to discard, even as Lance Naik Dun Narain Shrestha lay decaying in a Kargil cave for two years. Of late Capt. Jintu Gogoi, Vir Chakra, and AIR news presenter, Anjana Parasher, whose love triumphed death and was graced by the divinity of coincidence. Anjana’s daughter from a marriage years after the war was born on November 21, also the date of Jintu’s birth

(ix) The 16 pages of the book’s eclectic photo section are sourced from unpublished collections of Kargil veterans. Along with a startling photo of a Gurkha soldier who used his khukri, there is the mysterious one of a dead Pakistani soldier on Khalubar ridge (17,000 feet) with a white handkerchief belonging to another Gurkha soldier tied tightly around the chin and wedged under the ears to secure his tottering head. The haunting image of the ashes of a young Indian officer being sprinkled from a red ‘matka’ during battle at Kaala Pathar (Point 4927, 16,165 feet) where he had laid down his life. An image of veneration, too: the one taken by the author of the unknown, functional temple run by LoC soldiers on top of Tololing (15,100 feet), the site of the most famous and ‘turning-the-tide’ battle of Kargil. The book showcases images of wild alpine irises, rhodiola and delphinium from the LoC heights taken by the author and the Army’s high-altitude link patrols — the flowers were blooming at Point 4355 (Mashkoh) in the shadows of ‘Batra Top’ (Point 4875) and Gun Hill-Drass (Point 5140-16,864 feet), the two peaks associated forever with the ‘Yeh dil maange more’ victory signal of Capt. Vikram Batra (PVC-P) and the battle-winning role of Artillery, the God of War

(x) The book acknowledges the unsung war effort put in by humble, nimble Ladakhi donkeys. It narrates the animals’ stories with an evocative sketch of donkeys and a war porter in action drawn by an artistic and animal-loving Kargil warrior officer. The donkeys excelled by carrying uneven battle loads under shelling, guided troops along virtually-vertical cliffs and lugged the computer, diesel and generator from an Indus road head to the Yaldor nallah battlefield to enable the formal formatting of a battalion’s gallantry citations — a compulsion imposed on fighting units by the rigid staff officer bureaucracy of HQs 3 Infantry Division

Congratulations Vikram Jit Ji…

It’s really a great achievement, and a civilian living a life of combatting soldiers needs to have unparalleled courage. Even the fiercest will tremble in such circumstances…
I am sure the memoir is a masterpiece for everyone to read. Please let me know how to get it..

Thank you very much for the kind words, ….
It was with the grace of Mother Nature that I was able to weather the challenges in Kashmir and later Kargil as India’s first combat journalist.
The book is available online and in bookstores.
Best regards,
Vikram Jit Singh.

Thanks a lot, Vikram ji, for such a wonderful title.

The book must certainly be equally enchanting.

Thanks for writing down your story of those difficult times.

Congratulations as well.

Thank you very much for the kind words, …
EfloraofIndia has been so much a part of the book’s journey. Those miniature alpine flowers peeping out from rock crevices were the only manifestation of Nature (apart from stone & snow) on those war-torn heights of Kargil. It is a treeless terrain and the few wild creatures that dwelt there had fled.

Congratulations Vikram Jit Singh ji for this wonderful publication. We did extensive exploration of Ladakh in 1970, 1971 but unfortunately there were no handy cameras those days to photograph plants, we would only collect plants for herbarium. With my two friends in Ladakh in 1971, one retired as DIG Police and One as Professor from Jammu University.

Flowers on a Kargil Cliff
Flowers on a Kargil Cliff is a compelling read… chronicling the military events of those fateful days, all along keeping a keen eye on the flowers peeping from the crevices in the cliffs, especially while negotiating arduous slopes or while crawling over the cliff edges, is commendable. Ever since I got the book in my hand during last week of November 2024, I have read it twice, and flipped through pages randomly a number of times… every time I find it gripping, getting fascinated by the details, many a times with a feeling of trekking on these cliffs alongside you! Great, many thanks for presenting such a vivid account of the cliffs and the flowers there upon!

Updated on January 26, 2025

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