ON December 15, 1971, Haji Mohammed Issu of Turtuk went to bed on one of the coldest days of a harsh winter as a Pakistani citizen. It was an eventful and long night, and he could hear bombardment all around him through the dark hours. When he awoke the next morning from his disturbed sleep, he was an Indian citizen. In a day, all his elementary ideas of the nation, borders and identity had been overturned because of a war that had started almost 3,000 kilometres away for the liberation of Bangladesh, or what was then East Pakistan.
While the Pakistani military was surrendering to an allied Indian-Bangladeshi (the provisional government of Bangladesh) force in Dhaka on December 16, the Indian military had made an advance called “Operation Turtuk” in the northern part of Ladakh along the Cease Fire Line (CFL) as part of the short-lived war with Pakistan. Villages such as Chalunka, Turtuk, Tyakshi and Thang, which lie along hillsides in the Nubra valley along the Shyok river and had remained on the Pakistani side of the CFL after 1947, found themselves in India overnight. On July 2, 1972, this boundary became recognised as the Line of Control (LoC) in the Shimla Agreement signed between Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi.
“We welcomed the Indian soldiers with walnuts and apricots and there were celebrations in Turtuk for three days,” Issu, now 75, recalled with a broad smile, sitting outside his small house in Turtuk. Behind the house lay a green field of barley, at the end of which a barren mountain rose steeply. The sudden change in the status of his citizenship did not perturb Issu too much. He had worked as a porter for the Pakistan Army and continued to do the same job for the Indian Army. With a limited road network in this high valley between the Karakoram and the Himalayan ranges on the road to Siachen, donkeys owned by the local people are handy for transporting material for the military, and they can be a lucrative source of employment in winter. The only casualty of the 1971 transition for Issu was the sundering of his family—his uncle and his cousins remained on the other side of the LoC. “Their house was right here,” Issu said as he stood on his knees and pointed to a stone house down the lane. He has not seen them since 1971.