“The Kargil War Surgeon’s Testimony” by Arup Ratan Basu
A human story of war as experienced by a doctor who was the only surgeon at the Kargil field hospital
Arup Ratan Basu’s first posting as a young surgeon in the Indian Army Medical Corps was at a field hospital in the Kashmir valley. He was frustrated at being sent to a place that was not even equipped with a functional operation theatre while his classmates were taking up postings at established hospitals in major cities.
Little does the rookie surgeon know that he will soon be deputed to a small town that was turning into a dangerous theatre of war. Between 19 May 1999 and 24 July 1999, as the sole army surgeon at the field hospital in Kargil, he ended up performing two hundred and fifty surgeries, including on an enemy soldier.
Curious and sympathetic, the young surgeon engaged with his patients and colleagues and recorded his impressions in a notebook purchased at the town bazaar. He does not venture into the technical, logistic and strategic aspects of war; instead he remains resolutely focused on the people and the extraordinary price they pay. The result is a one-of-a-kind testimony, invaluable and enthralling.
Read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol.
The book is published by Bloomsbury India.
Shashi Tharoor, MP, endorsed the book saying:
As the first military surgeon on call at Kargil in the summer of 1999-when Pakistani troops, disguised as goatherds, crossed over the Line of Control and besieged critical Indian peaks-Lt. Col. (Dr.) Arup Ratan Basu toiled to rescue nearly 350 of our valiant soldiers from the jaws of death. One can only imagine how helpless he, trained to be a lifesaver, must have felt seeing a steadfast stream of young men marching to their deaths at those inhospitable heights-that too in a war not of their nation’s making.
In Basu’s view, it’s not so much about the futility of war as its untold human cost, which gets muffled beneath the nationalist pomp and clamour of any war effort-even one like Kargil, undertaken in self-defence. Yet for the parents who lose their sons, wives their husbands, and children their fathers, this is the only real consequence of war. And perhaps on no one’s conscience do these deaths weigh more heavily than on a doctor’s-who, for no fault of his own, could not prevent them.
A military doctor with a poet’s sensitivity and talent for lyrical expression, Arup Ratan Basu has composed a haunting elegy to the lives lost and blood spilt at Kargil. And as a powerful, poignant, and heart-wrenching indictment of the debilitating cost of war, The Kargil War Surgeon’s Testimony ought to be read-and remembered.
Interestingly, this endorsement was received the Monday of the week when Operation Sindoor happened. Later, when Shashi Tharoor spoke and was sent on the foreign mission to garner support via diplomatic channels, he echoed these very same words. It was prescient of him to have sent it when he did. Also, a curious way to connect these two incidents at the Indo-Pak border, more than twenty-five years apart.
Arup Ratan Basu received an MBBS degree from the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune. He joined the Army Medical Corps in 1989 and completed a master’s in surgery and post-doctoral fellowship in gastro-intestinal surgery. During the Kargil conflict of 1999, he was deputed as a general surgeon to the field hospital in Kargil, and he received the Yuddh Seva Medal for his services there. In 2001 he was deputed to Kabul, Afghanistan, immediately after the collapse of the first Taliban regime. He served there for ten months and was awarded a certificate of appreciation by the government of Afghanistan. Later, he served in various command hospitals of the Army Medical Corps and settled down in his hometown, Jamshedpur, in 2013.
Basu has written three books in Bengali. This is his first book in English.
20 July 2025
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