This about few years ago when, I had met my
friend who works in the armed forces, he narrated me the story of Major Mitali
Madhumita. Mitali, a 35-year-old Indian army officer from Orissa, had been in
Kabul less than a year. Fluent in Dari, the most widely spoken language in
Afghanistan, she was there to teach English to the first women officer cadets
to be recruited to the Afghan National Army. She was awakened at six o’clock in
the morning of February 26, 2010 by the ringing of her mobile phone.
It was a sensitive
posting, not so much because of gender issues as political ones: India’s
regional rival, Pakistan, was extremely touchy about India providing military
assistance to the government in Afghanistan and had made it very clear that it
regarded the presence of any Indian troops or military trainers there as an
unacceptable provocation. For this reason everyone on the small Indian army
English Language Training Team, including Mitali, and all the Indian army
doctors and nurses staffing the new Indira Gandhi Kabul Children’s Hospital,
had been sent to Afghanistan unarmed, and in civilian dress. They were being put
up not in an army barracks, or at the Indian Embassy, but in a series of small,
discreet guest houses dotted around the city’s diplomatic quarter.
The phone call was from a girlfriend of
Mitali’s who worked for Air India at Kabul airport. Breathless, she said she
had just heard that two of the Indian guest houses, the Park and the Hamid,
were under attack by militants. As the only woman on her team, Mitali had been
staying in separate lodgings about two miles away from the rest of her
colleagues, who were all in the Hamid. Within seconds, Mitali was pulling on
her clothes, along with the hijab she was required to wear, and running, alone
and unarmed, through the empty morning streets of Kabul toward the Hamid.
“I just thought they might need my help,”
she told me recently in New Delhi.
As she dashed past the Indian Embassy,
Mitali was recognized by one of the guards from diplomatic security who shouted
to her to stop. The area around the guest houses was mayhem, he told her. She
should not go on alone. She must return immediately to her lodgings and stay
there.
“I don’t require your permission to rescue
my colleagues,” Mitali shouted back, and kept on running. When she passed the
presidential compound, she was stopped again, this time at gunpoint, by an
Afghan army security check post. Five minutes later she had charmed one of the
guards into giving her a lift in his jeep. Soon they could hear bursts of
automatic weapons, single shots from rifles and loud grenade blasts.
“As we neared the area under attack I
jumped out of the jeep and ran straight into the ruins of what had been the
Hamid guesthouse. It was first light, but because of all the dust and smoke,
visibility was very low and it was difficult to see anything. The front portion
of the guesthouse was completely destroyed—there was just a huge crater.
Everything had been reduced to rubble. A car bomb had rammed the front gate and
leveled the front of the compound. Three militants then appeared and began
firing at anyone still alive. I just said, ‘Oh my God,’ and ran inside.
“I found my way in the smoke to the area at
the back where my colleagues had been staying. Here the walls were standing but
it was open to the sky—the blast had completely removed the roof, which was
lying in chunks all over the floor. There was cross-firing going on all around
me, and the militants were throwing Chinese incendiary grenades. Afghan troops
had taken up positions at the top of the Park Residence across the road and
were firing back. I couldn’t see the militants, but they were hiding somewhere around
me.
“As quietly as I could, I called for my
colleagues and went to where their rooms had been, but I couldn’t find them
anywhere. I searched through the debris and before long started pulling out
bodies. A man loomed out of the gloom and I shouted to him to identify himself.
But he wasn’t a terrorist—he was the information officer from our embassy and
he began helping me. Together we managed to get several injured people out of
the rubble and into safety.
“Then we heard a terrible blast. We later
learned that Major Jyotin Singh had tackled a suicide bomber, and by holding
him from behind had prevented him entering the Park Residence. The bomber was
forced to blow himself up outside. Jyotin had saved the lives of all the
medical team inside.
“But the only one of my colleagues who
hadn’t been killed on the spot, Major Nitesh Roy, died of his 40% burns in
hospital three days later. I was the only one of my team who came back alive.”
In all 18 people were killed in the attack
that morning, nine of them Indians, and 36 were wounded. Among the dead found
beneath the debris was the assistant consul general from the new Indian
consulate in Kandahar. This consulate was a particular bugbear of the
Pakistanis, who accused it of being a base for RAW—the Research and Analysis
Wing, India’s external intelligence agency. The Pakistanis believed RAW was
funding, arming and encouraging the insurgency in Baluchistan, the province
that has been waging a separatist struggle ever since it was incorporated into
the new nation of Pakistan in 1947.
This tiff between India and Pakistan has
continued ever since 1947 and there has been a constant blame game without any
resolution. Many innocent people - civilians or our security/armed forces have
lost their life during this period. The above mentioned interview of Mitali was
also taken by the famous author William Dalrymple who used it as a part of his
main article – “A deadly triangle – Afghanistan, Pakistan and India”.
