Eight dispatches on the ground, the enemy, the orders, and the men — the weeks that shaped one line in a citation: "the post was captured at 0200 hours."
In the winter of 1998–99, Pakistani regulars of the Northern Light Infantry, backed by irregulars under the codename Operation Badr, crossed the Line of Control into the Kargil-Dras-Batalik heights that Indian troops normally vacated each winter and reoccupied every spring. When Indian units returned in May 1999, they found the high ground already held against them.
In the Batalik sub-sector, the intrusion ran deep — up to eight to ten kilometres south of the LoC — across four ridgelines rising like fingers from a single knuckle: Jubar, Kukarthang, Khalubar, and Point 5203 along the Chorbat La watershed. From these heights, at 15,000 to 18,000 feet, the enemy could see and shell National Highway 1A, the single road linking Srinagar, Kargil, Leh, and the Siachen Glacier beyond.
70 Infantry Brigade, under Brigadier Devinder Singh, was inducted into the sector on 8 May 1999 with orders to clear the intrusion and restore the sanctity of the Line of Control. Three battalions carried the weight of that task: 12 JAK Rifles, 1/11 Gorkha Rifles, and 1 Bihar.
Picture a staircase with no railing, built from loose scree, rising nearly a vertical mile, with no oxygen to spare and no cover from the top step down. That was Jubar. The slopes across the Batalik ridgelines were steep-sided and jagged-spined, offering almost no natural cover on the final approach — every metre gained had to be climbed in full view of a dug-in enemy looking down the barrel.
At 15,000 to 18,000 feet, the air itself works against an attacker. Every step uphill under a fighting load draws breath meant for two. Night temperatures fall well below freezing even in July. Units had to move, fight, and hold ground in conditions where simply carrying ammunition to the front was its own campaign, let alone assaulting a bunker at the top of a cliff.
Jubar Top sat at 16,800 feet — high enough that altitude alone would have exhausted a man standing still. Major Hari's company had to climb it while under fire.
Before Jubar Top, 1 Bihar fought for Point 4268 — and paid for it in a single night that the battalion's then-Commanding Officer, Col O.P. Yadav, later set down in his own account. Major M. Saravanan, known to his men by his call sign "Changez," led the assault himself, launching at 0330 hours in pitch darkness against enemy sangars that illumination alone could reveal. The supporting star shell took nearly twenty minutes to arrive after misfires at the gun end; when it finally lit the target at 0400 hours, Saravanan took up the rocket launcher himself and destroyed the enemy bunkers outright.
The cost climbed fast. Around 0500 hours, Naik Ganesh Prasad was hit clearing an enemy sangar, and fell soon after to a second burst — not before killing two of the enemy with his own rifle. Word reached the Commanding Officer by radio in Hindi: "Changez ko goli lag gayi hai" — Saravanan himself had been hit. The CO ordered a tactical withdrawal to a safer position, warned that first light was approaching, and told Saravanan there was time to press the attack again after dark the following day.
Saravanan refused. Wounded, his head injury bound with his own black patka, he asked for thirty more minutes to finish the last bunker still firing on his men. The CO turned to Major K.P.R. Hari, asking him to talk Saravanan out of pushing on into daylight — but Saravanan's answer left no room for it: "Ab Changez ko koi nahi rok sakta" — "Now no one can stop Changez." Seeing his conviction, it was Hari who recommended the Go Ahead be given. The CO agreed, reluctantly.
Saravanan led the final rush himself, taking the rocket launcher from Sepoy Albish Tirkey and destroying the enemy sangar outright, his men charging in behind him under heavy fire. At about 0545 hours, a burst of enemy automatic fire hit him in the head. He fell with his finger still on the trigger, having killed four of the enemy before the end. Major M. Saravanan was the first officer in the Batalik sector to lead an assault from the front with that degree of open bravery, and was named "Hero of Batalik" by the Army and by the people of the region alike.
The dead could not simply be carried home. On ground this exposed, it took as many as eight soldiers to bring back a single casualty under effective enemy fire, and the recovery effort cost lives of its own. Captain A.J. Singh was sent out on the night of 29/30 May to retrieve the remains of Major Saravanan and Naik Ganesh Prasad; in the attempt, an accompanying porter identified in the record as Mr Abdullah ("Ikwani") took a bullet wound to the thigh, Sepoy Pramod Kumar was killed by heavy enemy fire, and Naik Shatrughan suffered a grievous leg wound and could not make it back to the Firm Base. A second attempt on the night of 30/31 May, by Captain Revety Bhandari and Captain Shatrughan, succeeded in bringing back the bodies of Saravanan and Ganesh Prasad under covering fire — but cost the life of Sepoy Shiv Shankar Prasad Gupta, and Naik Shatrughan, still out on the mountain from the night before, remained untraceable.
On 30 May, the battalion lost another soldier, Sepoy Arvind Kumar Pandey, whose remains were sent to his hometown with full military honours. Four of the battalion's fallen, however, could not be brought back from Point 4268 at all — the enemy retained direct observation and fire over the position, and the cost of trying again was judged too high.
Across the Batalik and Kargil sectors that summer, the pattern the infantry ran into was consistent, and grim. The enemy held the high ground in fortified, mutually supporting bunkers — some cut into rock, others built from stone sangars — sited with pre-registered artillery on every approach and machine guns positioned to sweep the only usable routes uphill. Companies moving to contact routinely walked into ground already zeroed by enemy guns before a single rifle shot was fired at close range.
At Jubar Top specifically, the citation records a Heavy Machine Gun bunker positioned to engage any force climbing the cliff face, under cover of artillery fire falling on the same ground. An HMG on high ground is not a nuisance weapon — it can pin an entire platoon in the open, on a slope with nowhere to go but forward or back the way they came.
This was the picture radioed back down the hill, sitrep after sitrep, through May and June: an enemy that would not simply be walked off a mountain, and ground that gave the attacker nothing for free.
Kargil was fought against a deadline that no one at battalion level controlled. Diplomatic pressure was building for a ceasefire, the international spotlight was intensifying by the week, and the approach of winter would soon close the high passes to further operations either way. From the perspective of a company commander on a forward slope, that pressure did not arrive as a tidy plan — it arrived as urgency from above, sometimes ahead of what the ground and the enemy's dispositions actually allowed for.
This is the uncomfortable, ordinary reality of infantry command under Op Vijay: a battalion simultaneously receiving pressure to move fast from higher headquarters and hard evidence from its own forward positions — fresh casualty reports, a bunker not yet located, a feature that had just changed hands once already — that said the ground was not yet ready to be taken cheaply. Reconciling the two was the job.
By early July, the neighbouring ridgelines were falling one after another — Khalubar South by 3 July, Kukarthang cleared and handed to 1 Bihar in the same window, 12 JAK Rifles pressing at Point 5203. Jubar was the piece that had to close to complete the picture across the whole sub-sector, and the tempo of the brigade's operations left little room for a slow, textbook build-up.
What that meant in practice for a company commander was a compressed planning cycle: confirm the objective, work out a route up ground that offered almost no cover, coordinate supporting fire, and go — often with the assault timed for the hours before first light, when movement had the best chance of reaching the objective before the sun gave the climbing troops away. The citation's own timeline reflects this compression: the post at Jubar Top captured by 0200 hours, and Jubar Main taken by 0600 hours the same night. There was no second day built into the plan.
Major K.P.R. Hari split his attack into two prongs and went in under artillery and small arms fire that was already coming down on the slope. Rather than move his men upright across open ground, he crawled the boulder field himself, using the cliff's own broken rock as the only cover available, closing the distance without presenting the enemy gunners a clean shot.
Fifty metres short of the enemy sangar, the crawl ended and the assault began — a close-quarter rush with six men, firing and throwing grenades as they closed the last stretch. The Heavy Machine Gun bunker, the single weapon most capable of stopping the climb outright, was destroyed at close range, and two of the enemy manning it were killed. Sensing the danger they were in, the remaining defenders withdrew, leaving behind their arms, ammunition, and equipment.
The post at Jubar Top fell at 0200 hours, without a single Indian casualty. Rather than pause to consolidate, Major Hari pushed on together with Major V.K. Rai, keeping pressure on the retreating enemy through the rest of the night. By 0600 hours, Jubar Main — the feature beyond Jubar Top that completed the objective — was also in Indian hands.
An Indian infantry officer at Kargil was never simply given a clean, fully-formed plan and told to execute it. He was handed an objective, a timeline he did not set, a picture of the enemy that was incomplete until the moment his own men made contact, and the weight of a battalion's — and often a brigade's — schedule resting on whether his company got there in time. The gap between the order and the ground was his to close, usually at first light, usually uphill, usually under fire.
What the citation calls "initiative, bold action, indomitable courage, strong determination and exceptional leadership" is really a description of how that gap gets closed: by an officer choosing to lead from the front of the crawl rather than direct it from behind, by reading a stalled attack in real time and finding the fifty metres of dead ground that lets six men close in rather than be pinned, and by refusing to let a captured objective sit half-finished — pushing on to complete the task the moment the first bunker fell, instead of waiting for permission to consolidate.
It is a mindset built on the same foundation as the fight for Point 4268 and every other action in the Batalik sector: the willingness to accept personal risk as the price of protecting the men following behind, and the discipline to keep moving toward the objective when every physical instinct at 16,800 feet says stop.