NJ9842 April 13 – Siachen

Women,NJ9842 Now In Indian Navy – Warships!April 13 – Siachen Day! Article

13th April! This date has a significant impact on India and our zest for attaining our freedom and sovereignty. While many of us remember the tragic Jalianwala Bagh incident, most do not know about the Siachen Day. Jalianwala Bagh incident, which happened in 1919, gave a new dimension to our struggle for freedom. On the same date, 13th April, in 1984, an operation called as ―Operation Meghdoot‖ was launched to eliminate the threat posed by the Pakistani aggression in the dreaded and treacherous Karakoram Range at Siachen!

The story of Siachen didn‘t start in 1983. It started way back in 1949. At the end of the UN- brokered ceasefire in 1949, India and Pakistan agreed on a ceasefire line (CFL) in undivided Kashmir as per the Karachi Agreement of 1949. The eastern most stretch of the ceasefire line was not demarcated beyond a point called NJ9842 because it was inhospitable and uninhabited. It simply said that from NJ9842, the line would run ―thence North to the glaciers‖ — the Siachen glacier, the Rimo and the Saltoro.

However, the nefarious plans of Pakistan to occupy the territory had already started taking shape after the 1962 war. Between 1964 and 1972, Pakistan began depicting the ceasefire line as extending from NJ9842 to a point just west of the Karakoram Pass, not northwards as the agreement said. Global mountaineering maps soon started portraying

this as the authentic and internationally accepted CFL-LoC, backed by mountaineering legends.

In 1978, Colonel Narendra ‗Bull‘ Kumar, one of India‘s foremost mountaineers, was given the task to lead an operational patrol of the Army to the glacier by the Army Chief General T N Raina. By 1983, it was concluded that India needs to control the region and stop Pakistan from making illegal claims on the region.

Operation Meghdoot was then launched in 1984.Executed in the morning of 13 April 1984, this military operation, launched on the highest battlefield in the world, was the first offensive of its kind. Subsequently, the Indian troops controlled all three major mountain passes of Sia La, Bilafond La, and by 1987 Gyong La and all the commanding heights of the Saltoro Ridge west of the Siachen Glacier. Currently, the Indian Army remains the first and only army in the world to have taken tanks and other heavy ordnance up to such an altitude (well over 5,000 m or 16,000 ft). What is it to maintain our posts in Siachen glacier? -60 degree temperature, Rs. 6 crores per day, braving frostbites, challenging weather hostilities, and above all, approximately 900 Indian soldiers have sacrificed their lives in protecting our motherland, in maintaining the strategic advantage that India has over Pakistan and China!

Let us all remember, cherish, and join the Indian Army in celebrating the ‗Siachen Day‘! Jai Hind.

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