Shooting the Brother

Shot at, jailed, assaulted, branded a deserter. All this for exposing his seniors in a theft of seized gold. After 26 years of a traumatic ordeal, the army officer has been reinstated. The full story...

- Ushinor Majumdar

SOME TIME on April 11, 1991, an army vehicle making its way from Kupwara to Srinagar pulled to a stop. The driver got out and an armed soldier leaned into the vehicle from the other side and said, half-­inquiring­ly…“Lieutenant sa’ab?” He just wanted to confirm whether the one riding shotgun was indeed Second Lieutenant Shatrughan Singh Chauhan. Upon receiving a positive response, without a further word, the soldier (later identified as a sepoy) emptied the clip of his AK­47 assault rifle in the direction of the passenger seat. A sole bullet from the arbitrary spray created a hole in Chauhan’s left flank at entry—two inches below his left ribs.

Randomness can have both happy and cruel outcomes. From the young second lieutenant’s view, the bullet traced a lucky trajectory, going glancingly through a por­tion of his torso, spilling out some of his guts as it exited hardly an inch to the left of his navel. This was the early 1990s—mili­tancy in Kashmir was young and happen­ing. The gunfire drew the immediate att­ention of a nearby Border Security Force (BSF) vehicle, whose jawans chased the retreating men, assuming they were milit­ants. The chinar leaves overhead would have been in their spanking summer green as Chauhan slumped from the vehicle to the ground and stumbled in a trail of blood and guts towards the BSF post, losing consciousness on the way.