Madhuri, Punjabi abuses & honour at heights of Kargil War

CHANDIGARH: Indian troops had closed onto Pakistani bunkers at the Point 4875 complex in the Mashkoh heights. A brief lull in firing and Punjabi being a common language, choice abuses were exchanged between soldiers who were within distance of a bayonet charge. But there was a spot of unforgettable humour, too.


A Pakistani soldier of the 12 Northern Light Infantry (NLI) suddenly shouted at troops of the 13 JAK Rifles, who had encircled his bunker: "Why do you fire so many bullets at us, Saathiyo? Don't fire at us, we will go back, but just give us Madhuri Dixit as a return gift!"

It was not Madhuri but a bullet between the eyes that the Pakistani soldier got as a swift gift a few minutes later. Soldiers would later recount they emptied the full magazine of abuses acquired over a lifetime in those intense battle moments when comrades lay wounded and dead beside them. "Abuses were hurled between us and they acted as a kind of psychological operations against the adversary. But I recollect, during a brief lull in firing, it turned quite funny. A Pakistani soldier asked us to stop firing and requested we give him Madhuri Dixit and he will go back to his side of the LOC. It got me thinking, that this fellow has just a few seconds to live and yet his humour has not deserted him," Brig S Vijay Bhaskar, Vir Chakra, told TOI.

During the 1999 Kargil War, Bhaskar was a Major commanding Alpha company with the highly-decorated 13 JAK Rifles immortalized by the Param Vir Chakra awardee of 'Yeh Dil Maange More' fame, Capt Vikram Batra.

On the north-eastern flank of the Kargil War, soldiers of the 12 JAK LI were waging a very tough battle in the Batalik sector. The battalion was to later receive the rare distinction of Battle and Theatre Honours for the War. The troops had entered into a vivid verbal exchange with Pakistani troops of the 8 NLI entrenched in the Point 4812 complex on the Khalubar ridge. Fresh from that battle, 12 JAK LI soldiers had recounted the exchanges to this correspondent when he spent the night with them on Khalubar ridge during the Kargil War amid intense small arms fire from NLI still entrenched on the flanking Kukarthang ridge and shelling from Pakistani mortars and artillery from across the LOC.

When troops had closed in 3-5 yards from the bunkers, they were greeted by filthy abuses and the sobriquet of kafir. But Havildar Mohammad Younis's voice bellowed through the night: "We are Muslims. You are also Muslims. If you have drunk your mother's milk, then leave your bunkers and come out and fight."

The vestiges of fight still remained in the NLI and one of them shouted back after rattling off a series of abuses that sought to cast aspersions on the parentage of the soldiers. "Do not dare come up to these bunkers or you will be taken alive. Then you know what fate your soldiers suffer," shouted back a NLI soldier.

Another NLI voice rent the air amidst the noise of the machine guns and exploding grenades. "You kafirs, we will scoop your heart out and will cut off your ears and noses.''

But all this had the effect of only further charging up the 12 JAK LI troops, who had gone through enormous difficulties charging up mountains, surviving on meagre rations to close in on the enemy and had suffered heavy casualties. Pent up feelings were now given vent. Younis says what demoralized the enemy was the fear of the native troops of the state scaling the most formidable of rock faces with ease and clearing the most difficult bunkers, which were tactically well located in clefts and craggy spurs. "I expended the entire vocabulary of 'gallis' (abuses) acquired over a lifetime. What rattled the enemy was our threat to not to kill them but capture them alive," said the 12 JAK LI's Younis, who hails from Jammu. It was aimed at getting the enemy to give up the fight and retreat from the bunkers.

After the battles, there was blood all over in the Khalubar bunkers and it took a few days of rains to clean up the place. The same enemy, with whom they had exchanged bullets and abuses, lay dead at their feet. However, soldiers of the 13 JAK Rifles and 12 JAK LI chose not to mutilate the bodies. Instead, they gave the enemy dead an honourable burial at the battlefield heights since Pakistan refused to claim the bodies as their own.


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