Kargil martyr's parents still fighting a lone battle

Palampur: Capt Saurabh Kalia, the first to report Pakistani incursion in Kargil in 1999, was taken captive by the Pakistani troops and a few weeks later his mutilated body was handed over to Indian authorities.

Ten years on, the martyr's parents fight a lone battle to highlight war crimes against their son and other Indian soldiers.

N.K. Kalia and his wife Vijaya, who have settled in this town in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, have been waging a war to highlight Pakistani violations of human rights and brutalities committed on their son, Saurabh Kalia, and other soldiers during the Kargil war in 1999.

Saurabh Kalia of 4 Jat Regiment, who was the first army officer to report incursion by the Pakistani army on Indian soil, had along with five soldiers - Sepoys Arjun Ram, Bhanwar Lal Bagaria, Bhika Ram, Moola Ram and Naresh Singh - gone for a routine patrol of the Bajrang Post in the Kaksar sector when they were taken captive by the Pakistani troops on May 15, 1999.

They were barbarically tortured for weeks before being killed. Their mutilated bodies were handed over to Indian authorities on June 9, 1999.

"Of course, his supreme sacrifice has made us proud, but what has exhausted, disappointed and dejected us is that the nation for which he has sacrificed his life least bothered to highlight the plight of war crimes at the international fora," N.K. Kalia, 61, a retired senior scientist from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, told IANS.

"We have been shuttling between various government offices and organisations with the hope of highlighting the plight of the war victims. The Indian government has failed to deliver justice as it has forgotten atrocities meted out on six heroes. For days, they were tortured. Their limbs were chopped and bodies burnt," rued Kalia.

"Though the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the centre expressed concern over the heinous crime and promised to take up the issue at the international level, in all these years the issue got diluted," he recalled.

"Even today our only demand is that it should keep its promise so that no POWs (prisoners of war) could face Saurabh's fate. Had this happened to any American or Israeli soldier, the culprits would have been brought to justice."