How Indian Army decisively won Kargil War

In November 1998, Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmed an artillery officer commanding the 10 Corps in Pakistan went to meet his chief - General Pervez Musharraf. Lt Gen Ahmed was accompanied by Major Gen Javed Hassan who commanded the Frontier Constabulary of the Northern Areas. Present at this meeting was a fourth General, Lt Gen Muhammed Aziz, a Kashmiri by birth who at that time was the Chief of General staff in the Pakistani army. These four Generals in November 1998 decided to dig up and execute a plan that had been made and shelved years ago. From Rawalpindi army headquarters a secret order went out - occupy the bunkers and posts in the Dras-Kargil sector that the Indian Army had vacated in the winter of 1998-99.

Three months after Pakistan army's secret communiqué, on February 20, 1993, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India boarded a golden bus in Amritsar, bound for Pakistan. On board the bus were 15 other eminent personalities from India. This was the inaugural trip of the Delhi-Lahore Bus service and the first visit to Pakistan by an Indian prime minister in ten years. When the Indian PM alighted from the bus, it seemed that the ice of suspicion and misunderstanding between the two neighbours was finally on the verge of thaw. Prime Minister Vajpayee told the people of Pakistan that his message to them was short and simple: "Put aside the bitterness of the past and let us together make a new beginning".

Unknown to Vajpayee, as India and Pakistan were announcing to the world the beginning of a new era in India-Pak relationship, Pakistan's Northern Light Infantry had already occupied 132 Indian posts, controlled an area of about 130sq that stretched over a 100km-front with depth ranging between seven to 15km inside the Indian territory.

In May, India began operations to throw the Pakistanis out and for two months a bloody war raged in the high Himalayas as India and Pakistan once again fought over control over a piece of Kashmir. A duel that came to be known as the Kargil War…

The war in Kargil officially ended on July 26, 1999 but it had far reaching consequences that shaped the future of South Asian politics and military strategy...

Here are the links to most definitive documentary ever made on the war that India decisively won 16 years ago:

(Courtesy of India Today Television.)