Hill Kaka and Kulali: Where a war memorial has been made for bigger reasons!
By: M S Nazki
When the locals and the Army do it together then it means that the area is bound to remain peaceful forever! It is and it will remain forever!
-‘ Sarp Vinash showed that innovation, intelligence and enterprise do work. The problem is that this has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past decade: only to be forgotten the morning after. But how the whole thing happened is a different story! When women are in distress they scream or go silent. The ladies in the villages around Hill Kaka were screaming at that time but the brutes loaded with lead loaded ammunition and rifles were brutalizing them! Graves had to be their next destination! The graveyard was somewhere near Surankote where no one remembers them but a war memorial in Kulali gives out names of those valiant men from the Indian Army and civil fraternity who demolished the myth of some Pir Panjal regiment of the terrorists. The snakes were so ruthlessly annihilated that they never raised their heads again though occasionally they did try. That was what operation Sarp Vinash was all about!’
-‘The middle of the 20th century changed the world equations. After the Wrold War-I and-II I do not think that there was any reason left to fight wars. But still there were and they were all for economic reasons and to be honest they still are! Everyone is fighting to become an economic giant but there are some countries who have dropped dead into the zones of the medieval era. Pakistan happens to be one of them! They want to be there and yet they cannot be and the reasons are obvious and straightforward! The thinking that gun can do everything theory has got them nowhere! It has not yet far and the future looks as bleak as it was before.War is not an option for Pakistan because the chances are that another annihilation awaits them’!
-‘Sports means brotherhood because it generates that spirit, but no one wants to go and play there in Pakistan, again there have to be reasons. In a nutshell Pakistan has got itself into a rut by playing a game of a slave who wanted to become a king, it’s neither here, nor there and in fact middle of nowhere, be it geopolitics, neighborhood politics and straight from the heart speaking, with no friends at all! But there is still a chance! Drop the terror hat, get hold of the bearded monsters, silence the rattle of the Kalashnikov’s and spend whatever money they have on developing children for their better future and not becoming terror giants! No way out other than this! I think this is a better take as far as options go’!
-‘A small voice raised on the atrocities being committed by individuals who called themselves Jihadists made sure that the locals of the area and villages woke up in unison, pooled in the money for a good cause and began a fight. The fight was to get rid of the men who were savages hunting men, women and babies just to prove themselves that they were the saviors of humanity in Jammu and Kashmir! What they deserved was a knockout punch and they were given one. The terrorists in Hill kaka and adjoining villages had no answers! They met a ruthless end, running for cover as the locals backed by the Indian chased them out of the Pir Panjals to get into holes of oblivion or rat corners never to emerge from there! This was because the women had raised their voice for the destruction of evil! The response given was sumptuous!’
-‘ The information was spot on as a band of fighters of the Gujjar community rose up in unison and that was not without a reason. Terrorists began using the Hil Kaka route to enter the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s, but did not stop there long. Until the mid-1990s, the command of groups operating in the Surankote area stayed in the hands of local residents or ethnic Kashmiris, who were relatively sensitive to local culture. Javed Kashani, a Mendhar resident who led the Hizbul Mujahideen, and Javed Haider, the South Kashmir native who replaced him, were remembered for some reasons but now forgotten but one reason was that they had affection for locals perhaps they knew that they were wrong! But the mistake they made was that they continued with their gamble with fortune which was sooner or later going to desert them. It did!
-‘Around 1998, things began to change. A large-scale influx of Pakistani nationals began, upsetting the fragile balance between the local community and the jehadi groups. That summer, Haider was eliminated in an encounter which, it is widely believed, was set up by a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander code-named Abu Abada. That was that or enough was enough!’
-‘The anger had to grow amongst the Gujjar community and one of the facets was killings of Muslim villagers, mainly from the Gujjar community, and that were common in Rajouri and Poonch, and had continued through the Sarp Vinash period. Five villagers were shot dead at Keri Khwas, near Rajouri in that year, and another six were slaughtered at Kot Dhara, near Darhal. Many of the killings could be traced to wholly non-military origins, pegged around land and resource conflict between Gujjars, Rajput Muslims, and ethnic-Kashmiri migrants.’
-‘ Obviously the next step had to be the desire to entrench themselves as sources of authority, the jehadi groups increasingly intervened in community disputes. That was done as bait to attract local people to join their cadre. If a man from one Gujjar clan joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba, another would join the Jaish-e-Mohammad to protect his family’s interests. ‘ The locals at that time never knew that the same would prove lethal later and hence were gung ho about the developments that had not happened before! But they did not realize that the snakes had entered their homes with an aim to destroy them! By the time they did, the houses were all on fire!’
-‘The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami, al-Badr and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) all got involved. Things were getting volatile as the atrocities were on the increase and the people scared as hares with no bush to hide! And thus the bugle was blown for the offensive’! Sarp Vinash was the name!’
In the initial euphoria for ‘Azadi’, the Gujjars and Bakarwals provided recruits and guides to terrorists infiltrating from Pakistan. But when the militants’ extreme ideology did not resonate with the local culture, they entered the fight against terrorists. Militancy erupted in Kashmir in 1989, but it left the Jammu region relatively untouched for the first three years. The first major terrorist strike in Jammu occurred when 17 Hindus were pulled out of a bus and shot dead in Doda district in August 1993. When a series of bomb blasts rocked Jammu city in 1994 and 1995, it was obvious that the terrorists were specifically targeting the Hindu community. That was the beginning! If the beginning had been made by the terrorists the end too was not far off! It was a nemesis for the terrorists at Hill Kaka!
‘By 1996, militancy had spread to the Muslim-dominated border districts of Poonch and Rajouri. These two districts have a high percentage of the Muslim Gujjar and Bakarwal community. In the initial euphoria for Azadi, the Gujjars and Bakarwals provided recruits and guides to the foreign terrorists who were infiltrating from Pakistan and had established a base in this area. However, the extreme ideology of Pakistani terrorists did not resonate with the local culture. Fed up with excesses of the terrorists, which included the sexual exploitation and killing of Muslim girls on suspicion of being informers, the villagers of Kot Charwal formed the first all-Muslim VDC. Furious, the terrorists attacked Kot Charwal. After this massacre, more Gujjars and Bakarwals entered the fight against terrorists. In 2002, Tahir Fazal Choudhary of Marrah village, along with a number of Gujjars working in Saudi Arabia, decided to return to their homes. They had received letters from their families complaining about the brutality and harassment by Pakistani terrorists who had established their dominance in the higher reaches of Pir Panjal. It was in this area, commonly known as Hill Kaka, that the Army launched one of the biggest operations in 2003 — Operation Sarp Vinash. The success of Operation Sarp Vinash was in no small measure due to the support of people like Tahir Fazal and other residents of the twin villages of Marrah-Kulali who provided intelligence to the Army and fought by their side. They also paid a heavy price for this support. One year later, terrorists sneaked into Teli Katha village in the upper pastures of Hill Kaka and opened fire on the sleeping Gujjar families as retribution against the locals who had participated in Operation Sarp Vinash. There were 12 deaths, including five children. The toll would have been higher if some of the VDC members who were present had not resisted and fired back.’ (Indian Army)
The major offensive axis, as the operation evolved, were Thanamandi on the Rajouri-Poonch border, where a welter of killings of civilians had recently taken place, Hari Buddha, Marhot, Hill Kaka, and the Bufliaz forests near Surankote. Troops from the 15 Corps were also pulled in to block routes from Saujian and Loran in northern Poonch, across the Pir Panjal into Tangmarg and Shopian in the Kashmir Valley. It is unclear just how successful these efforts, unlike the initial strike, have been, but large scale terrorist groups have clearly been dislocated and their logistics routes disrupted.
The price paid had to be heavy in this bullet versus bullet fight. Terrorists had to be sent home packing and they were. The AIndian Army and the people had won the battle which for the villages around Hill Kaka was a war and thus a war memorial had to come up and it did. The same was established on 16 Dec 2016 at Kulali. The names of men who fought and attained martyrdom are all inscribed on it and if one starts counting there are names of 2 officers, 2 JCOs and 39 other ranks and 35 Civilians! This was one of the biggest ever battles fought in the Pir Panjals where terror reigned supreme but a reply had to be given and it was! If the terrorists believed in brute force they forgot that a more brutal one was heading their way! Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and one example was lined up at Hill Kaka! Kulali war memorial is the big signature of the same!
