Kargil War 1999: The Shepherd, the Peaks and the Soldiers Who Took Them Back

On 3 May 1999, a herder named Tashi Namgyal from the village of Garkhon in Ladakh went looking for a yak that had wandered off. Near a stream in the Batalik sector, he looked up through his binoculars and saw something that made no sense: men in uniform, digging bunkers on the ridges.

He walked to the nearest Army post and told them. It was the first warning of the Kargil War.

At first, nobody understood how big it was. On 12 May, the estimate was a few militants. By 21 May, it was more than a thousand armed men, dug in on peaks up to 5,000 metres high, looking straight down on the only road between Srinagar and Leh.

Three months earlier, India and Pakistan had looked closer to peace than at any time in decades. In February 1999, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rode the new Delhi–Lahore bus across the Wagah border, with Kapil Dev, Dev Anand and Javed Akhtar on board. Nawaz Sharif received him, and the two leaders signed the Lahore Declaration on 21 February.

But over the winter, Pakistani troops had quietly crossed the Line of Control and occupied posts that Indian soldiers vacate every winter because of the snow. Pakistani sources call the plan Operation Koh Paima; Indian government notes call it Operation Badr. The aim, India says, was to cut off Ladakh and Siachen and force talks on Kashmir.

Pakistan claimed the men were Kashmiri freedom fighters. They were not. They were soldiers of the Northern Light Infantry, backed by special forces. A Pakistani general later wrote that there were no mujahideen at all.

On 15 May, 22-year-old Captain Saurabh Kalia of 4 Jat, from Palampur in Himachal Pradesh, led a patrol of five soldiers towards Bajrang Post in the Kaksar sector. After a firefight, all six were captured.

Their mutilated bodies were handed back on 9 June. The bodies showed signs of torture, and the case became a national wound. Kalia’s father has fought for years to take Pakistan to the International Court of Justice. The government’s final position is that it cannot, without Pakistan’s consent, because of a Commonwealth exception.

On 26 May, the Indian Air Force joined the fight in Operation Safed Sagar. It was dangerous flying: the targets were on narrow ridges in thin air, and the enemy had shoulder-fired missiles.

On 27 May, Flight Lieutenant K. Nachiketa’s MiG-27 went down and he was taken prisoner. Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja flew his MiG-21 low to search for him and was shot down by a Stinger missile; his autopsy suggested he had been killed after landing alive. The next day, an Mi-17 helicopter was shot down and four crew died. Nachiketa was returned eight days later, walking home through Attari near Amritsar.

The first great battle was for Tololing, a ridge that overlooked the highway near Drass. Attack after attack failed through late May and early June. Major Rajesh Adhikari of 18 Grenadiers and Lieutenant Colonel R. Vishwanathan were among those killed.

On 13 June, soldiers of 2 Rajputana Rifles and 18 Grenadiers took Tololing and Point 4590. A retired brigadier later called it the turning point of the war. From then on, India was winning.

On 20 June, a young captain of 13 JAK Rifles, Vikram Batra, captured Point 5140. His code name was Sher Shah. His victory signal, borrowed from a Pepsi advertisement, went round the country: Yeh dil maange more, the heart wants more.

It did. On 7 July, Batra was killed on Point 4875 while dragging a wounded soldier to safety. He was 24. The peak is now known as Batra Top. He was awarded the Param Vir Chakra after his death, and his story became the film Shershaah.

Yeh dil maange more!

Tiger Hill was the most famous peak of all, more than 5,000 metres high above Drass. On the night of 3 July, the Ghatak commando platoon of 18 Grenadiers began climbing a near-vertical face. Lieutenant Balwan Singh, four months into service, led them and refused to be evacuated when wounded.

Grenadier Yogendra Singh Yadav, only 19, was hit several times and kept fighting. His Param Vir Chakra was first announced as posthumous by mistake: a soldier with the same name had died, while he was alive in hospital.

By early on 4 July, the tricolour was flying on Tiger Hill after an 11-hour battle, though some accounts date the full clearing to 8 July. On 5 July, Pakistani troops counter-attacked the soldiers of 8 Sikh holding the slopes. They were beaten back.

The 8 Sikh battalion ringed Tiger Hill under Brigadier M.P.S. Bajwa of 192 Mountain Brigade. During the Pakistani counter-attack, Sepoy Satpal Singh shot dead a Pakistani officer, Captain Karnal Sher Khan, who had led his men with extraordinary courage.

What Brigadier Bajwa did next is one of the most remarkable stories of the war. He wrote a citation praising the enemy captain’s bravery and slipped it into the dead man’s pocket when the body was returned. Karnal Sher Khan was later awarded the Nishan-e-Haider, Pakistan’s highest gallantry award.

Satpal Singh received the Vir Chakra. He later joined the Punjab Police and spent years directing traffic in Sangrur as a head constable, promoted only in 2019 after his story was reported. Subedar Nirmal Singh of 8 Sikh was killed and also received the Vir Chakra.

Back home, Punjab felt the war deeply. By 19 June, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal said 19 soldiers from the state had been killed. Akali MLAs gave a month’s salary, blood donation camps sprang up, and effigies of Nawaz Sharif were burnt in Ferozepur.

The Captain had really fought bravely.

In the Batalik sector, Captain Manoj Kumar Pandey of 1/11 Gorkha Rifles had once told his selection board that he wanted to win the Param Vir Chakra. On 3 July, he led the attack on Khalubar, cleared enemy bunkers, and was killed. He was 24, and got the award he had spoken of.

In the Mushkoh sector, Rifleman Sanjay Kumar of 13 JAK Rifles, a former Delhi taxi driver who had been turned down by the Army three times, charged an enemy position on Area Flat Top on 4 July, killed three intruders and turned their own machine gun on them. He survived and received the Param Vir Chakra.

Captain Anuj Nayyar of 17 Jat cleared three bunkers on Point 4875 and was killed attacking the fourth. He was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra after his death.

As India won back the peaks, the pressure on Pakistan grew. The G8 condemned the crossing of the Line of Control, and even China urged a pull-back.

On 4 July 1999, the US Independence Day, Nawaz Sharif flew to Washington to see President Bill Clinton at Blair House. Clinton refused to mediate on Kashmir. The two sides agreed that concrete steps would be taken to restore the Line of Control. Clinton’s South Asia aide, Bruce Riedel, later wrote that the US was worried Pakistan was preparing its nuclear weapons, which Sharif denied ordering.

The next day, Pakistan announced a withdrawal. Fighting went on until 26 July, when the Army declared every post clear.

Vajpayee had fought the war as a caretaker prime minister, after losing a confidence vote in April 1999. In the general election that autumn, his alliance won a clear majority.

The Kargil Review Committee, set up on 29 July 1999 and tabled in Parliament in February 2000, set off the biggest rethink of India’s security system in decades. It led to a full-time National Security Adviser, new technical and defence intelligence agencies, and, twenty years later, the post of Chief of Defence Staff, filled by General Bipin Rawat on 1 January 2020.

The Kargil War Memorial stands at the foot of Tololing in Drass, with the names of the dead on a pink sandstone wall. On the 25th anniversary in July 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid a wreath there. Tashi Namgyal, the herder who started it all, died that December, aged 56.

J.P. Dutta’s LOC: Kargil (2003) packed in more than a dozen stars over four hours. Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya (2004), with Hrithik Roshan in a fictional Punjab regiment, flopped at first and later became a cult favourite. Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl (2020) drew objections from the Air Force over how it showed the service. And Shershaah (2021), with Sidharth Malhotra as Vikram Batra, became a phenomenon, with songs such as ‘Raataan Lambiyan’ and ‘Ranjha’ topping charts.

Kargil was a war India should never have had to fight: a betrayal weeks after a peace bus, and an intelligence failure that let an army sit on Indian peaks unnoticed. The bill was paid by young men, most of them in their twenties, climbing near-vertical rock in thin air towards machine guns.

It is also a war that shows what decency looks like in the middle of killing: a Sikh brigadier writing a tribute to the enemy officer his men had just killed. And it started with a herder who went looking for a yak and told the Army what he saw. Every one of them deserves to be remembered.