Former Northern Army commander Lt Gen HS Panag (retd) named his farmhouse near Fatehgarh Sahib, ‘Teetar Lodge’, due to fond memories of partridge shooting. That sport is outlawed but the analogy of a ‘’partridge hunt’ persists and is used in discourses on contemporary military matters. I queried Lt Gen S Ata Hasnain (retd), the authoritative commentator and former 15 Corps Commander, after he embellished his latest essay in the ‘Swarajya’ magazine with this intriguing analogy. The essay’s thrust is to decipher the Pakistan Army’s stratagem of launching terrorist attacks in quick succession at Baramulla/Langate/ Pampore and invites comparison to fidayeen attacks launched after the Kargil War by a humiliated Pakistan Army. But first, a tidbit on Lt Gen Hasnain’s family history of traditional shikar.

‘’My hunting days started in 1957 at Jammu in the company of my father who was the Brigade Major of the Damana Brigade under Brig Harbaksh Singh (the Western Army Commander during the 1965 War). My father had a BSA .12 bore shotgun and would take me and my brother hunting for ‘Tilyer’ (Common starling). We did family shoots every winter as one grew up in our home town of Allahabad and sometimes in areas around Meerut. We used to do beating in sugarcane and partridges flew at lightning speed. The beat was with a rope which was dragged by two men holding both ends and passing it over the sugarcane. The number of partridges flying out was very high but not to our ability to down them in flight mode. Difficult shooting indeed!’’ Lt Gen Hasnain told this writer.

Decades later, posted as Colonel (GS) at the Victor Force HQs, Awantipur, Lt Gen Hasnain tasted rich success with ‘’partridges’’ of another kind: those that could also peck pretty hard! His definition of the other hunt: ‘’The analogy of partridge hunt in the Army usually applies to the ease of multiple contacts because in such operations if you get a contact once in a month and that, too, on your own terms it is a big advantage. Units (battalions) go without contacts with terrorists for months. It is also used when an environment is created for multiple contacts and success at a relatively better rate.’’

Such favourable conditions arose after Kargil. ‘’The term partridge hunt was related to the situation of winter 1999-2000. Our one full division was employed (prewinter) for extensive operations in the upper reaches, rural and jungle terrain and we destroyed many hideouts and captured lots of rations and logistics material stocked by terrorists. This forced them to spend winter in the villages of South Kashmir. When we got wind of the situation, we did not await intelligence as there were so many terrorists all over. We started search and destroy operations by beating through villages with some intelligence sources. It is not as if terrorists came flying out like partridges but we started to pick up more intelligence and firefights commenced almost daily. There was a time when as the Colonel (GS), I was handling seven firefights in our area of responsibility. We killed a very large number through DecemberJanuary 1999,’’ he recounted.