How Major Somnath Sharma halted the raiders at Badgam in 1947

Why did a cluster of huts and paddy fields matter so much? Because geography left India almost no margin. In November 1947 there was no all-weather road link from the plains into the Kashmir valley capable of moving an army quickly; the Banihal route was slow and easily cut. The Srinagar airfield was, in practical terms, the only door through which India could feed troops and supplies into the valley fast enough to matter. Badgam sits just a few kilometres from that airfield, on the low ground to its south-west. A raiding force that seized Badgam would be within mortar and rifle range of the airstrip and could dominate it, making further landings impossible and forcing the airlifted units already inside to fight cut off. Indian commanders knew this, which is why patrols were pushed out to the villages screening the field. Sharma's company was ordered to Badgam on the morning of 3 November precisely to watch this gap. When a large body of raiders appeared and began working around his flanks, the choice was stark: give ground and expose the airfield, or hold and be surrounded. He chose to hold.

The arithmetic of Badgam was brutally lopsided. Sharma's D Company went forward at roughly company strength — on the order of ninety men — spread thin to cover a wide approach. Against them came an estimated five to seven hundred raiders, well armed with rifles, automatic weapons and mortars, and able to work around both flanks. The fighting opened late in the morning and ran for close to six hours. Sharma moved constantly in the open, redistributing ammunition and directing fire with one usable hand, the other still in a plaster cast from a hockey injury. His last radio message reported the enemy fifty yards away, his company heavily outnumbered and under devastating fire, and ended with the vow to fight to the last man and the last round. At about half past three in the afternoon a mortar burst set off ammunition he was stacking, killing him. His company lost more than twenty men, but their stand broke the timing of the raiders' rush and kept the airfield open — the reason his Param Vir Chakra citation is dated to that day.

Major Somnath Sharma — born in 1923 in Kangra, into one of the Indian Army's most storied families; commissioned into the Kumaon Regiment, he had already fought in Burma in the Second World War. The Sharma family — his father, Major General Amar Nath Sharma, was a senior army doctor; one younger brother, Vishwa Nath Sharma, would rise to become Chief of the Army Staff in 1988, and another, Surinder Nath Sharma, to lieutenant general. The family was close to Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa. The men of D Company, 4 Kumaon — the ordinary riflemen who held the line beside him and paid the heaviest price. Brigadier L. P. 'Bogey' Sen — commanding 161 Infantry Brigade in the Srinagar sector, who understood that the airfield had to be screened at all costs. The tribal lashkar — the Pashtun raiders of Operation Gulmarg, backed from Pakistan, whose drive on Srinagar was meant to open at Badgam. Lieutenant Colonel Dewan Ranjit Rai — leader of the first battalion airlifted in, killed at Baramulla days earlier, whose sacrifice set the tone for the defence Sharma continued.

Behind the citation was a very young man and a family that kept giving soldiers to the country. Somnath Sharma was twenty-four when he died. He need not have been at Badgam at all: with his hand in plaster he could have stayed back, and he was reportedly warned to. He went because, as those who knew him recalled, he would not let his company face danger without him. His remains were recovered days later, identified in part by a few personal effects and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita he carried. The loss rippled through a household already steeped in service — and rather than break that tradition, it deepened it; his brothers went on to long army careers, one reaching the very top. For the men of 4 Kumaon, and for the wider army, his last message became a kind of creed: outnumbered and under fire, you do not withdraw an inch. Every year, units and schools recall the stand, and cadets learn the words. The human cost was real and permanent — a life ended at twenty-four — but it purchased something equally real: the airfield stayed Indian, and so did the valley.

In 1947 Badgam was an obscure village few outside Kashmir had heard of, and the Param Vir Chakra did not yet have a single name attached to it. The medal was formally instituted only later, with effect from 15 August 1947; Sharma's posthumous award made him its first recipient, Param Vir Chakra number one, and gave the young decoration its founding story. Today that same airfield he died to protect is a major air force station and civil airport, the busy gateway to the valley he helped keep. The village lends its name to a district. And the Param Vir Chakra, once an unclaimed idea, is now the highest wartime gallantry award in the country, held by a small and revered list of names that every soldier knows. Somnath Sharma sits at the head of it. What was in 1947 a desperate, improvised defence with borrowed time and thin numbers has become, in memory, the template for how the Indian Army talks about last stands — measured, unromantic, and absolute about not giving ground when the stakes are a whole region.

Badgam matters because it shows how much can turn on a few hours and a single decision. Nothing about 3 November 1947 was grand or well-prepared: a thin company, an officer with a broken hand, a patrol that walked into a much larger force near an airstrip that could not be lost. What made it decisive was not numbers or planning but the refusal to trade the airfield for personal safety. By holding Badgam long enough to keep Srinagar's lifeline open, Sharma and his men bought the time India needed to pour in reinforcements and, over the following weeks, push the raiders back from the valley. The larger lesson is not about glorifying death; it is about clarity under pressure — knowing which ground cannot be given up, and paying the price to hold it. The Param Vir Chakra that followed was less a reward than a definition: this is what the highest courage looks like. Remembering Badgam honestly means keeping both halves in view — the terrible cost of a twenty-four-year-old's life, and the strategic stakes that made his stand worth its weight. Courage, here, was a calculation as much as a feeling.