Still lost in 1965

Saraswathamma (75), a war widow, is still unable to forget the tragedy that the 1965 Indo-Pak war brought upon her. She lost her husband Kannaiah on the Indo-Pak border. He was injured in the battle and was taken away, battling for his life, by the Pakistan army. He was reported dead at the Military Hospital at Lahore four days later. His body was never returned to India.

Siblings Kannaiah (born 1937) and Chinnabba (born 1940) from Ramapuram village near Chittoor joined the Indian Army as sepoys in 1962. When war broke out in August 1965, the brothers were posted on the border: Kannaiah in Punjab and Chinnabba in the Jammu sector.

On September 18, 1965, the Pakistan Army advanced to the Khem Karan sector (site of a major tank battle) in Punjab. Over 200 Indian soldiers were killed in the Pakistani barrage, and four battalions ran helter-skelter.

Subedar (retired) Narasimhulu Naidu, a native of Sadum mandal in Chittoor district, and presently the vice-president of the Chittoor District Ex-Servicemen’s Association, shared the same bunker as Kannaiah during that attack. He recalls it like it happened yesterday. "When the fusillade started, all of us cowered in the bunker. But suddenly, Kannaiah ran out of the bunker to get to the back of it. He was shot in the back. All of us started running too. Several of the men fell behind me. We watched Kannaiah battling for his life for half an hour. We saw Pakistani soldiers take him away. Four days later, we got information that he had died at the Lahore hospital. We learnt that he was buried in a mass grave," Mr Naidu says.

Chinnabba said his brother's tragic death shattered the family. "My brother's wife (Saraswathamma) is still heartbroken and frequently becomes hysterical, asking to see her husband's body. Returning from the war, I struggled a lot to provide shelter to the family," he says.

Saraswathamma says that on every Sankranti day in the last five decades, the family prays for Kannaiah and offer him a tharpanam. She gets a meagre pension today.

Her son also served in the Indian Army and is currently working with the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD).

ON OROP: NO HOPE OF IT

Chinnabba and Narasimhulu Naidu say they have no hope that one-rank-one pension will ever be a reality. They (the government) are not really serious about it. Their lame excuse is that if the yardstick is extended to us, employees of all central government services will demand the same," they say.