Having won the Battle of Naushera, Brigadier Usman must have had big dreams to secure the borders of India. On the fateful day of July 3, a normal routine was followed till five in the evening. The morale of the Indian forces was high. They had tasted success at both Naushera and Jhangar. And Brigadier Usman's stock was high.

At the 50 Parachute Brigade headquarters (tent structure) at Jhangar, Brigadier Usman held his regular half-hour-long meeting at 5 pm, and after it ended, he and a few of his subordinates decided to take a walk.

Suddenly, there was shelling at the brigade headquarters at 5:45 pm. There was massive confusion and scrambling as the shells first landed at a little distance from the headquarters. Then they fell closer to the headquarters. Brigadier Usman and his subordinates, including his Battery Commander Major Bhagwan Singh and Brigade Intelligence Officer Captain S.C. Sinha, found cover under an overhanging rock above a bunker.

To silence the firing from the other side, the Indian forces began counter-fire but the enemy was well entrenched by then.

Brigadier Usman, who often showed his spark in such challenging times, quickly realised that if the enemy had to retreat to point 3150 on the west side, the Indian side would have to attempt to push the enemy back with firing of its own. He ordered Major Bhagwan Singh to fire at the target.

Soon, there was a lull in firing from the enemy. While some of Usman's subordinates quickly turned to repairing the damaged wireless aerials on the top of the command post a few metres away, Usman, followed by Major Bhagwan Singh and Captain S.C. Sinha, began moving towards the Brigade Command Post. Little did they know that the lull from the enemy side was the marker of an impending tragedy.

Soon, artillery gunfire began from the enemy and a 25-pounder shell landed on a rock close to the entrance of the Command Post, where Usman was giving words of guidance to some signallers. Major Bhagwan Singh and Captain S.C. Sinha had no time to warn Usman.

That was a dark, dark night. Nearly 800 shells were dropped on Jhangar, and one of them took the life of Brigadier Usman.

It seemed the enemy was determined to be at the Brigade Post headed by Usman. Apart from him, five army men lost their lives. The rock stands testimony to his sacrifice, and a memorial has been built over it at Jhangar. A little under 30 years ago, in the mid-1990s, an Usman Avenue was inaugurated here by Major General (Retd) K.S. Sindhu.

In a throwback to the medieval tactics of warfare, many Pakistani newspapers repeatedly and mischievously carried reports about Brigadier Usman's death even before it happened so that Indian forces valiantly fighting on the front under his leadership would be affected mentally. Such was his aura. It was imagined by the enemy that without him it would be easier to capture Naushera and Jhangar. Hence, rumours of his death were floated even when he was alive. Once this forced his brother Subhan, a noted journalist, to actually issue a denial.

However, the repeat circulation of such news items concerned Brigadier Usman deeply. After one such report in late June led to his brother inquiring from the Western Command headquarters about his safety, he replied, ‘I am fit and flourishing still in the world of the living.’

Just a few hours after his message reached the Western Command Headquarters, Brigadier Usman had died, becoming the senior-most Indian officer to lose his life on the battlefield in 1947-48 in Jammu and Kashmir. As he breathed his last, he said, ‘I am dying but let not the territory we were fighting for fall to the enemy.’

His untimely demise in all likelihood cost us the opportunity to make further inroads in Kashmir and probably enabled Pakistan to exercise control over Mangala Dam as well as the township of Muzaffarabad.

Major General (Retd) K.S. Sindhu, former commander in the Naushera Brigade on the Line of Control, recalls that when he climbed up to the hill, he discovered pieces of a belt, old bullets and scabbards of bayonets, showing the ferocity of the battle in 1948.

“All you have to do is scratch the earth and you will find something related to the battle. I know the post from which the firing took place, where he died. The bunker where he was taking shelter and even the communication wires were discovered by me,” he said with a nostalgic look.

The Pakistani media, which had otherwise reported on the Indian version of the battles with a degree of honesty, underplayed Brigadier Usman's death, and why not! He had already been declared dead many times when he was alive!

In a small report published on the front page of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, founded by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and published from Karachi, news agency API was quoted as saying, “Brigadier Mohammad Usman commanding Indian troops in Kashmir was killed in action”.

The news item was sandwiched between news items like ‘Soviet Moves in Germany’ and ‘Terrorist Outrages in Malay’. The placement was interesting as at that time the moves of the Soviet Union concerned the world, and there was a global readership for news related to it. It effectively took away attention from Brigadier Usman's martyrdom.

Announcing this, the report reproduced a press note issued by the Ministry of Defence on the night of July 4, 1948. It said, “The Government of India much regrets to announce the tragic death of Brig. Mohammad Usman, killed in action fighting in Kashmir. Brigadier Usman was commanding troops in Kashmir.”

The Pakistan Times, a left-leaning newspaper which started circulation a little before independence in 1947 from Lahore, carried a condolence message from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to Mohammed Subhan, Brigadier Usman's brother, in which he hailed the brigadier, saying, “It was a soldier's and a brave man's death and as such we should not grieve over it. Nevertheless, the cutting short of a brilliant career in the services of the nation is a tragedy, which we feel deeply.”

He further said, “Usman had already made a name for himself by his gallant leadership in Kashmir and a bright future in the army of the nation awaited him. Quite unassuming and retiring in spite of the fame that had come to him, simple in his habits, he was an ideal soldier and an ideal servant of the nation.”

Nehru referred to the closeness between Brigadier Usman's place of birth and Allahabad, where he himself was born: “To my own province from which he was so intimately connected, Brigadier Usman's death will be a peculiar sorrow.”

He also noted that to the people of Kashmir in the service of whose freedom Brigadier Usman died in action, his memory would remain evergreen and inspire them to fight to retain freedom. “While we naturally grieve, we rejoice also at the courage which triumphs over death and which in the ultimate analysis makes a nation.”

Foreign secretary K.P.S. Menon wrote to Subhan telling him that his sense of tragic loss was shared by the whole nation.

M.O. Mathai, private secretary to Prime Minister Nehru, in his handwritten condolence message, said that Brigadier Usman was “a beacon of light in our distracted country” and called for living up to his standards, which were magnificently noble.

A condolence message from the Ministry of States (set up after independence to deal with the princely states) to Subhan read, “Sardar [Sardar Patel] phoned up last night to say how deeply grieved he was to hear the sad news of the death of your brother … Our loss is all the greater because Usman represented the type of Indian in whose example we have built our hopes for the future of the State ... May your family continue to emulate Usman's example.”

H.C. Sarin from the Ministry of Defence wrote a moving letter to Subhan on July 5, 1948, saying, “I find it difficult to believe that he is gone. I still remember his smiling face, I can still see him moving from one bunker to another inspiring his men, sharing their risks and discomforts, their difficulties and privations, always with them, with each of them, everywhere.”

Even those who did not know Subhan personally wrote to him, so overpowered were they with grief and sorrow. G.V. Mavalankar, who was then speaker of the Constituent Assembly and later first speaker of the Lok Sabha, wrote,

“Though not personally known to you, I feel I must convey to you my deep sense of sorrow at the demise of your brother Brigadier Usman. Though one feels sad at the thought of death of one's near and dear ones, there is yet a feeling of pride and satisfaction that your brother, the late brigadier, laid down his life for the cause of his country. How I wish it is given to every one of us to die in the service of the country.”

July 15 is Brigadier Mohammad Usman's birth anniversary.

Excerpted with permission from The Lion of Naushera by Ziya us Salam and Anand Mishra, published by Bloomsbury.

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