In the Line of Life and Death

 

Photos: Author Arup Ratan Basu; the book cover; Indian Air Force Squadron leader Ajay Ahuja

In his book, ‘The Kargil                                                                                                                                                    War Surgeon’s Testimony’, Arup Ratan Basu offers a gripping first-hand account of what it was like to serve on the frontlines during the Kargil conflict

By Shevlin Sebastian 

Arup Ratan Basu was deputed as a general surgeon to the field hospital in Kargil. To reach Kargil, Arup was flown from Chandigarh to Leh, and then drove to Kargil on May 19, 1999. The surgeon on duty Major RPS Gambhir was going on a two-month leave. 

One of the first things Arup did when he reached Kargil was to buy a hardbound notebook at the town bazaar. The aim was to note down his experiences.

With just a month’s surgical experience, Arup felt understandably nervous about the assignment. By this time, the skirmish between the Indian and Pakistan armies had begun in the heights near Kargil.  

On Arup’s first night itself, casualties were brought to the hospital. At first glance, he realised that they were wounds from bullets or artillery shell splinters. They hit limbs, necks and shoulders. 

Thankfully, Major Gambhir did all the necessary surgical procedures. 

Two days later, Major Ramaprasad told Arup, tongue-in-cheek, that he had not received a proper reception since he arrived in Kargil. Moments later, the Pakistani Army responded to that request when there was a booming noise and the hospital shook. 

Arup’s first patient was a 21-year-old sepoy, who had a splinter on his left armpit. Arup quickly got to work. 

Once a sepoy, who was returning to consciousness, as his anaesthesia wore off, shouted, ‘Of you mother……, just wait till I get you. And that bi…, who does she think she is. You bloody Benazir, just you wait.’ 

As Arup wrote, ‘In his reduced mental state, the poor fellow thought that Benazir Bhutto was still the prime minister of Pakistan.’       

Soon, Arup got settled into the routine of the surgery: ‘scrub, drape, pass the forceps, scissors, suck this area, ligatures, artery forceps, and hydrogen peroxide, saline and betadine dressing.’ 

When asked why the casualties were always arriving in the evenings, a hospital staffer explained that during the day the soldiers were trying to scale up the peaks to get rid of the Pakistani intruders. So, if they were shot, they had to lie down till night because the rescuers wanted to avoid getting shot during the daytime. 

As the fighting intensified, one day, Arup received a call that an officer had been wounded gravely. When he asked the name, he was told it was Major Vikram Shekhawat of the Jat regiment. 

The same seemed familiar. Then he realised that some news channels had already declared him dead. He bemoaned the inaccuracy of the media reports. 

Arup realised some people had miraculous escapes, to the detriment of others. Once a lieutenant colonel was travelling in a jeep from Leh to Kargil. After a while, the colonel took the wheel to give the driver some rest. As they neared Kargil, an artillery shell exploded and a splinter pierced the passenger seat and hit the driver. 

But when Arup opened up the stomach, he found that the splinter had missed the spinal cord, the bigger blood vessels of the abdomen and the right ureter. As Arup wrote, ‘If any of those had been hit, the injury would have been fatal.’

But not every surgery ended in success. 

One day a 22-year-old sepoy was brought in, hit by a splinter. Despite several hours of surgery, the sepoy died. ‘A healthy and energetic man was gone forever,’ wrote Arup. ‘Never will I forget the sight of his pale face and his distended abdomen. He had come to me for help – and what had I done? I was numb with guilt, shame and disgust.’    

During a lull in the fighting, Arup came to know from wounded soldiers that they lacked proper rations and clothing for the freezing weather. One captain was suffering from frostbite. He said that he had survived on one chapati by day and another by night, with occasional dried nuts and sugar candies. When that ran out, they ate snow and ice to satisfy their hunger pangs. 

‘Of course, we had other things to eat too,’ he said, with a sardonic smile. 

‘Such as?’ Arup asked. 

‘We could feast on a steady stream of bullets.’         

Arup was summoned to examine a body in a coffin. This turned out to be Indian Air Force squadron leader Ajay Ahuja whose MIG 21 was shot down by a Pakistani heat-seeking missile. When Arup inspected the body he realised that Ajay had been subjected to torture before being shot.

One day an officer rushed into the mess and begged for water. When asked why he looked in so much distress, he said that he had seen the bodies of Captain Saurav Kalia and his team who had been captured by Pakistani soldiers. 

The officer was trembling as he blurted out, ‘I have never seen such horribly mutilated bodies… their nails had been pulled out, their earlobes cut away, their eardrums punctured, their eyes gouged out, and their bones broken. Even their penises were cut off.’

Arup had one thought, ‘Could the Geneva Conventions be simply ignored like this? Besides, could any human being do such a thing to begin with?’        

There were light moments, too. 

On one occasion, the wards lit up with excitement when Bollywood luminaries,  Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Salman Khan, Javed Jaffrey, Vinod Khanna, Raveena Tandon and Pooja Batra arrived. 

The commanding officer pulled Arup aside, pointed to one of the patients, and said, ‘Wasn’t that fellow admitted three days ago with intense back pain and sciatica-like symptoms?’ 

Arup looked with narrowed eyes and confirmed it. 

‘Then how is he jumping from one bed to another trying to get photographed?’ bellowed the senior officer. ‘Discharge him right away.’  

As India slowly regained control of the peaks, aided by the firepower of Bofors guns and precision airstrikes, the soldiers began moving up the peaks. The Pakistani soldiers began to withdraw when their positions became hopeless. International pressure was also heaped on Pakistan. As a result, there were fewer casualties for Arup to minister to.  

Interestingly, when the Indian soldiers captured bunkers left by fleeing Pakistanis, they were met with a putrid stench – the bodies of dead Pakistani soldiers left behind to rot.

Arup’s book offers a raw, eyewitness account of war’s brutal realities. The sheer waste of human resources, and equipment, the damage to the environment, the terrible loss of life, and the resulting disruption to normal life – there is nothing good about war. 

Or as Shashi Tharoor wrote, ‘In Basu’s view, it’s not so much about the futility of war as its untold human cost, which gets muffled beneath the nationalist pomp and clamour of any war effort – even one like Kargil, undertaken in self-defence. Yet for the parents who lost their sons, wives, husbands and children, their fathers, this is the only real consequence of war.’ 

Adds Lt General (Retd.) Vinod Bhatia, ‘Basu captures the human face of the Kargil war. Touching, easy to read, and an interesting perspective.’ 

After his short stint of two months, when he did an astonishing 250 surgeries, as Arup prepared to leave, he fell into a philosophical mood. ‘The concept of war is based on the idea that others should be subjugated,’ he wrote. ‘Humans have a desire to dominate others, and control and possess that which does not belong to them. This insatiable greed has led to history repeating itself time and time again.’ 

For his services, Arup received the Yudh Seva Medal. 

In 2001, he was deputed to Kabul, following the collapse of the first Taliban services. He served with distinction for ten months. Later, he served in various command hospitals of the Army Medical Corps before retiring to his hometown of Jamshedpur in 2013 where he works as a consulting gastroenterology surgeon. 

Arup has written three books in Bengali. This is his first in English. 

(Published in kitaab.org)