‘Vijay Diwas’: Kargil’s 1st hero’s father still awaits justice
N.K. Kalia has been running from pillar to post to get his son’s death recorded as war crime
This year marks the 21st anniversary of the Kargil War, but for Dr N.K. Kalia, who had received the mutilated body of his martyred son Captain Saurabh Kalia right at the onset of the bloody battle on the daunting Himalayan slopes, it is another day in his prolonged struggle to get the death recorded as a war crime.
The only difference this time is that the Kargil anniversary coincides with the barbaric killings of 20 Indian soldiers by the Chinese army in the Galwan Valley on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) on June 15 in a fierce hand-tohand combat, reminding the people about the price soldiers pay in guarding the northern border surrounded by hostile neighbours Pakistan and China.
Young Saurabh Kalia’s eyes were gouged out, ears
pierced, and organs sliced off and burnt in tell-tale signs of torture inflicted on him by his Pakistani captors. Five other members of his patrol met a similar fate.
For Dr N.K. Kalia, it has been a lonely battle since then to get justice for his son and his five brothers’ in arm. Despite assurances by the successive governments headed by three Prime Ministers (Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi), appeal in the Supreme Court, and aggressive media campaign,
it has been an endless wait for Dr Kalia.
The Kargil War was an armed conflict between India and Pakistan that took place between May and July 1999 along the Line of Control (LOC) separating the two countries in Jammu and Kashmir.
“Twenty-one years have passed now and I think it’s a matter of shame for the nation as justice has not been served to my son, a martyr who sacrificed his life for the country, and the five other Army men who were captured by the Pakistani army, as their case has not gone in any direction.
“Initially, the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre expressed concern over the incident. While they had promised to take up the issue at the international level, nothing has happened in these years,” said Dr N.K. Kalia.
The 22-yearold Captain Kalia of 4 Jat regiment was one of the first Army officers to report the intrusion of Pakistani troops into the Indian side of the LOC when he was out on a patrol in the Kaksar sector with five soldiers.
Captain Kalia, guarding the Bajrang Post, ran out of ammunition after the continuous crossfire with the Pakistani Army. He and five soldiers, Sepoys Arjun Ram Bhanwar Lal Bagaria, Bhika Ram, Moola Ram, and Naresh Singh, were held captive for 22 days by the Pakistani troops and were tortured and killed. The body was handed over by the Pakistani army on 9 June 1999.
His family has been fighting a legal battle to get this offence declared a war crime in accordance with the Geneva Convention so that the guilty can be punished. Dr Kalia even approached the Supreme Court in 2012 seeking directions to the government to raise his son’s case in the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Dr Kalia also filed a petition with the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The case is pending in the apex court and there has been no hearing in the last two years, he said.