His gallant death fighting militancy was rewarded with the Ashok Chakra, but his widowed mother must live with the pain.

By Manoj Joshi

Thousands watching from the stands on the resplendent Rajpath and the millions glued to the TV sets shared the solemnity of the moment. They may even have felt a flicker of emotion. But as she climbed the podium to receive the country's highest peace-time gallantry award on behalf of her dead son Puneet on January 26, Anita Datt was alone in her thoughts. Could anyone have truly understood the special grief of a mother for her only son as the commentator read out the citation for the award of the Ashok Chakra -- posthumously?

"At times, I just can't believe it," Datt told India Today a few days before the ceremony. "My whole life centred on him." She has a stoic grace of someone who has suffered an irreplaceable loss. There is a reason for this: her husband, who belonged to the same 1/11 Gorkha Rifles battalion Puneet served in, had died after an illness at the age of 53. The family was forced to sell its large house in Jaipur because of, what friends term, "adverse circumstances". For sister Divya and their mother, Puneet was the lodestone who would bring back joy in the life of the family.

There are no tears left now, only an air of quiet resignation in Delhi's Defence Colony where the two live with Datt's father, Colonel (retd) S.N.C. Bakshi. Divya, an economics student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, reverently handles her brother's album, his field notebook and scrapbooks, which are crammed with photographs of training in the National Defence Academy (NDA) and the Indian Military Academy, self-improvement essays and sketches and descriptions of guns.

Twenty-eight people have received the Ashok Chakra, the nation's highest peace-time award for valour, since it was instituted in 1947. As many as 20 of them died before being considered for the honour. In Second-Lieutenant Puneet's short life, and death, there seems to be a predestination for heroism. In his NDA room, says Divya, Puneet had a hand-written poster inscribed: "Aim: Death before dishonour." Beneath it were the crest of the 1/11 Gorkha Rifles, the unit his father had commanded and to which he was commissioned, and a drawing of the army chief's commendation badge.

Puneet's can-do approach came through early enough. In the 18 months between his commissioning and death, he completed his Young Officer's Course, cleared his promotion examination, and took on the physically demanding commando course.

Puneet was one of the nearly 2,000 casualties the Indian Army has suffered in Kashmir in the past seven years fighting insurgents, Kashmiris and increasingly Pakistanis and Afghans coming across the border. The incident that led to his death was typical but, as his colleagues recount, his valour was uncommon. "What is special is not just the action, but Puneet's age of 24, his burning zeal to make a mark as a combat leader," says Colonel Shekhar Upadhyaya, now commanding the battalion.

On July 19 last year, Puneet received information that a group of mercenaries had arrived at a house in the Nowshera locality, adjacent to the Sher-e-Kashmir Medical Institute in the Soura area of Srinagar. This was the area that his company was responsible for and the eager-beaver young second-lieutenant was excited. His field notebook had lists of suspected militants in his area; it also had a plain, unmarked sketch of what appears to be a house.

Late that night, Puneet's company, along with two others, was ordered to surround the area. The Gorkhas decided to begin their search of the locality from a locked three-storeyed house as it appeared to be the most suspicious there. Puneet first tried to spook out the mercenaries by throwing stones at the doors and windows. Then, one of the soldiers was ordered to fire at the third floor of the house. Provoked or panicked, the militants holed up inside also opened fire and a three-hour long encounter began.

Puneet and his men were at the outer wall of the compound, crouched and raking the three-storeyed strongly built house with rifle and machine-gun fire. "All of us feel fear when we confront bullets," says Upadhyaya, "but Puneet seemed to be absolutely fearless as he took pot-shots at the windows and lobbed grenades."

But to little avail. The solidly-built house took all the punishment. The company then used its 84 mm Carl Gustaf rocket launchers with the hope of blasting the militants. But the rockets went clean through without exploding inside. At this point, the Army did not know how many persons were in the house or where they were hiding. Bullets seemed to rain from all three floors; the boundary wall and the open space around the house prevented a direct assault. Suddenly, one of the militants exposed himself on a first-floor balcony to fire at the Gorkhas. In a flash, Puneet jumped up and fired a snap burst from his ak-47, felling him. Colonel B.K. Chaudhry, Puneet's commanding officer, decided that the only option left was to blast their way into the house.

This was not an easy job. The rear compound wall was lower and offered a way in for someone to jump over it to place a charge on the wall of the house. But whoever did so would be vulnerable for those seconds it would take to jump over, place the charge, and scramble back before the blast went off. According to Upadhyaya, Puneet insisted on taking up the task. The moment he jumped over the wall, he almost ran smack into one of the militants making a dash for freedom towards a nullah and a copse of trees to the marshy Nagin lake beyond. They came face to face in the narrow space between the house and compound wall. Puneet's reflexes were faster. He swung his ak-47 up and shot him dead as well. After that, he placed the charge, jumped back across the boundary wall and set off the blast.

Then, crouching down, Puneet and another officer took turns tossing grenades at the house where the last surviving militant, now down on the first floor, periodically opened fire at them in return.

"We can't say what really happened," says Upadhyaya. "At some point, the militant spotted Puneet and fired at him. But at that very moment, Puneet too let off a burst and killed him. Puneet suddenly appeared to rock back where he was crouched. We saw blood in his mouth and thought he had a minor injury from flying grenade shrapnel and evacuated him to hospital. A few hours later, we learnt that he had passed away. A bullet fired by the dying militant, or a ricochet, had hit Puneet in the mouth and exited a little below his ear."

The Army, unaware that it had killed all the militants, kept up its attack, finally using a jury-rigged contraption to raze the house and collapse its roof. When the embers cooled, the soldiers were able to search the house which contained a hoard of weapons and equipment. The three militants were later identified as mercenaries from Pakistan or Afghanistan belonging to the Harkat-ul-Ansar group.

In Delhi, Datt had fretted and worried ever since the 1/11 Gorkha Rifles went to the Valley en route to its actual deployment in Siachen. Some operational requirement led to the unit being used in the counter-insurgency operations in the Srinagar area. Every day she intently scanned the papers for news about happenings in the Valley. On July 21, she saw a small item noting the deaths in separate operations of a bsf assistant commandant and a second-lieutenant of the Army. She kept it to herself. A little after 9 a.m., Colonel G.M. Nair, a former commanding officer and family friend, called to say that he was coming to visit her. Her heart sank. Somehow, somewhere in her mind, she knew that the worst had happened. She desperately tried to chase the thought away. A little while later, there was a call from Srinagar and, as she put it, "the bolt from the blue".

The posthumous Ashok Chakra award is for Datt a bitter-sweet memento of Puneet's heroism. An ancient Greek consoled those like her by telling them that those the gods favour are taken away young. There is little comfort in that, of course, for the mother left behind.

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