“Flowers on a Kargil Cliff” by Vikramjit Singh
“At 15,700 feet, I was clinging for dear life. Like a lizard’s belly I had pressed my body tight into a cliff of the Kargil War. There was no safety rope around my waist to secure my passage along the cliff wall, which was near-perpendicular in stretches. My hands and feet had the barest of holds and pressing against the cliff wall was the only safeguard against the forces of gravity that would send me plummeting thousands of feet below into the Gragario nallah.”
Posted with The Indian Express in Kashmir and later, during the Kargil War, Vikram Jit Singh is that rare breed of war correspondents who took grave risks to their lives in the line of duty. Embedded with Army’s seek-and-destroy columns, he climbed Safapora mountains at night to hunt down killers of 23 Wandhama Pandits.
Incorporating unpublished photographs of Point 5353 in Drass taken by Pakistani intrusive patrols in Oct 1998 during the Kargil build-up, Flowers on a Kargil Cliff establishes how 5353 and Bajrang Post were captured. Photos reveal Gen P. Musharraf and his entourage of generals across LoC in March ’99.
Vikram Jit Singh is a correspondent of the proverbial trenches. And, a diehard romantic who sent alpine flowers from Kashmir & Kargil battlefields in letters to his anxious fiancée.
Singh was embedded with the Indian Army’s riflemen and sepoys in the innermost cordons of Kashmir counter-terrorist operations. He was then stationed at Srinagar for The Indian Express since October 1997. When the Kargil War broke out, his experiences of facing bullets with ground soldiers during day-and-night Kashmir operations stood him in good stead. He was the only media person permitted twice to climb to the enemy bunkers at the Kargil high-altitudes with the assault troops, while navigating treacherous cliff faces, ducking Pakistani air-burst shelling and staying the night under small arms and artillery fire at 15,700 feet. As a combat journalist, Singh filed first-hand battle accounts with unique datelines: ‘Safapora Heights’ and ‘Point 4812’. It led the Siachen legend, Lt. Gen. Sanjay Kulkarni (retd.), to inscribe on the book: “Vikram has been baptised under fire as a war correspondent, and has operated less as a correspondent and more as a soldier in Kashmir…Truthful reporting is his forte…An inspirational journalist.”
Singh was invited to write an eyewitness account of shelling duels from his vantage points in the towering heights for the book, With Honour and Glory — Five Great Artillery Battles, published in 2021 by the United Service Institution of India under the aegis of the Directorate of Artillery, Army HQs, New Delhi.
A journalist of 33 years standing, Singh reported for India TV while stationed at Srinagar in 2004, the second of his two stints in the troubled vale. He has been an investigative journalist for Tehelka and The Indian Express, and his stories include the expose of the judges in the 2002 Punjab Public Service Commission ‘Ravi Sidhu’ scam, the $1 billion International Financial Consortium fraud, the petrol pumps allotment scam and the serial poaching escapades of Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna awardee & international trap shooter, Manavjit Singh Sandhu.
Singh has featured in several podcasts and national / regional TV interviews relating to wildlife conservation, defence, security, regional geopolitics, Kashmir and the Kargil War. He is also a naturalist who was groomed in his formative years by the birdman, Dr. Salim Ali. He writes columns on wildlife / environment for The Times of India and Hindustan Times newspapers in Chandigarh and his articles on wildlife conservation have been published in Sanctuary Asia magazine. He was nominated as a Member (Expert) to the Chandigarh State Wildlife Advisory Board and has been a consultant to the Governments of Punjab and Chandigarh UT on conservation issues.
Vikram Jit Singh’s writing style is very precise, clear, and calm despite all that he documents in Flowers on a Kargil Cliff. His accounts are clearcut and as descriptive as his writing hero Hemingway whom he invokes in the quote to the extract given below. Singh’s articles about the conflict in Kargil and subsequent pieces on the military are worth reading.
Read an excerpt from his book that was published on Moneycontrol.
10 May 2025
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