Flowers bloom in Kargil battlefields

The hill that takes its name after the tiger stands quietly, like a solemn sentinel above Drass. There is no sign on the horizon and beyond that Tiger Hill was the site of a fearsome battle 20 years back and brought dramatically to Indian homes via television. Brown bears have returned to the nullahs at the base of the hill and tiny blooms of prostrate vegetation dot the slopes today. There is no Indian post at Tiger Hill or further westwards to Point 4875 in Mashkoh, the site of another epic battle. Indian Army deployments are now strung forward like a string of pearls on the LoC.
This writer, who as a war correspondent with a national daily in 1999, had climbed the high-altitude battlefields at 16,000 feet in Bhimbet, Drass and Khalubar ridge, Batalik sectors with assault troops then, gathered flowers from there amid shelling and sent them enclosed in letters to his fiancée in Chandigarh.
This July, TOI's correspondent collected flowers and photographed them during a pilgrimage with infantry expeditions to the same battlefields that tower thousands of feet above the valleys of Drass, Mashkoh and the Indus, where the Army's various headquarters, administrative bases, mediacorps and thin populations were confined during the conflict.
Tololing's ascent, from the eye of a flower
The Tololing ridge towers above the Drass bowl. The ascent to the top at 15,137 feet begins from the fields adorned by lush, big blooms of yellow and pink wild roses growing around streams emptying into the bowl from Tololing, Bhimbet and Sando nullahs.
Botanists describe the Drass's floral biodiversity as an "intermediate" one - a region wedged into the transition between the lushness of Kashmir and the arid vegetation of Leh.
The flowers get sparser and smaller as one moves towards the top. Then, there is no colour to discern on the ground except the Indian Tricolour. Tololing's fall was a shot in the arm for the Army. As Army COAS Gen VP Malik would recall: "In the space of a few days, after Tololing fell, we were able to conquer Point 5140 (also in Drass sector) and Point 5203 in the Batalik sector. That gave me the confidence that we can do it, ie, the Army can evict the intruders from everywhere."
Stealing into the heart of Khalubar flowers
Collections of floral specimens from the inner ridges of the Batalik sector by botanists are mainly from along roads traversing the broad river valleys or the sketchy bags from the era of the British rule. The ridges of Point 5203 - Hansubar, Khalubar, Kukarthang and Jubar running south from the LoC - were occupied by the enemy while the nullahs in between were dominated by fire and shelling.
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References

1. ^{^} Drass (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
2. ^{^} Tiger Hill (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
3. ^{^} Indian Army (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
4. ^{^} LoC (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)

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