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BATTLE OF REZANG La by SHEKHAR GUPTA
(50th Anniversary on 18th November, 2012)
(The battle of Rezang La was the only bright spot for India in
the 1962 war with China. In this Walk the Talk with The Indian
Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24x7,
Ramchander Yadav and Nihal Singh, two of the six soldiers
who survived that battle, look back at the events of that icy
November morning 50 years ago)
It's sad that any time we talk about the India-China war of 1962,
horrible words like debacle, disgrace, disaster come to our
minds. This is the 50th anniversary of that war. It's a war that
this country ideally would love to forget but cannot because
it's etched in our memories as one of the saddest chapters of
our independent history. And it's sadder still that because of
that overwhelming sense of failure in that war, we tend to some-
times almost deliberately ignore the one chapter that I think is
without parallel in modern post Second World War military his-
tory, the battle of Rezang La on November 18, 1962. I will give
you a brief history. Charlie Company of a battalion called 13
Kumaon was divided in several platoons on one ridge of two
kilometres, protecting the airfield of Chushul which was vital if
India was to hold Ladakh. It was attacked on the morning of
November 18 by maybe 5,000-6,000 Chinese with heavy artil-
lery support. A crest behind this ridge prevented Indian artillery
from being able to support these jawans. And what did these
jawans do? They fought to last man, last round. That's an ex-
pression you hear in movies and read in war comics, but that
is something that actually happened in the battle of Rezang
La. Of the 120 men and officers of this Company, 114 died,
Brahmarpan December 2012 Vol. 6 NO.6
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