The Night a woman fought without a gun

 This was written at an airport on Women’s Day, 08 March 2025, when I had plenty of time to kill. An announcement over the PA system, lauding the stronger gender, stirred old memories—memories that may or may not have played out exactly as I recall them. But they seemed fitting for the occasion.

Kashmir, winter of 1994.

The valley was a frozen silence.

Our unit, a Gorkha battalion, had been operating in the sector for months, hunting down a particularly vicious tanzeem responsible for a series of brutal ambushes. Intelligence had been scarce, leads unreliable—until one of them was captured alive.

The capture itself was unremarkable. A routine night cordon in a village, a slip-up by the hostile, and a swift, professional takedown. But this one was no ordinary foot soldier. He had rank. He had knowledge—routes, safe houses, names. Yet, as he was brought to the battalion headquarters for interrogation, there was defiance in his eyes. He wasn’t going to talk.

Major R, a hardened veteran, had seen that look before. He wasn’t one for patience. Experience had taught him that men like this rarely cooperated, and when they did, it was mostly lies. As the prisoner sat there, silent, staring back with cold detachment, something in Maj R snapped.

"You think we have time for this?" he muttered, drawing his 9mm Browning pistol. "One less rat to deal with."

He wasn’t bluffing. In the unforgiving reality of counterterrorism, hesitation could mean another attack, another dead patrol. His logic was brutal, though not entirely irrational. I, a Second Lieutenant at the time, held my tongue. Subalterns didn’t question field officers’ decisions.

That was when Second Lieutenant T stepped in.

She wasn’t from our unit—just on attachment from the Corps of EME. A woman officer, a rarity in our sector at the time. She wasn’t naive; she understood the stakes. But she also believed in the power of information, in intelligence over impulse.

"Sir," she said, her voice steady in a way mine was not. "Give me a chance. Let me try."

Major R looked at her, his frustration clear. A subaltern—an attached officer, no less—suggesting she could succeed where he could not? But something held him back. He holstered his weapon.

"Fine," he said. "You have one night. If he doesn’t talk, he isn't wasting space here."

No one expected much. But as the night wore on, something changed. My men and I watched her work on the prisoner.

She didn’t beat him. She didn’t threaten him. She talked. Patiently, persistently. She found cracks in his armor, appealed to his survival instincts, played on the very thing that had kept him alive so far—his ability to adapt.

By dawn, he had started to talk.

By the end of the week, we had everything we needed—locations, hideouts, names of overground workers.

Over the next two months, the tanzeem that had plagued the sector for years was systematically dismantled. Raids, arrests, and a few decisive encounters wiped it out. What had seemed like just another nameless, faceless insurgent turned out to be the thread that unraveled an entire network.

Major R never spoke of that night again, but we all knew—if not for that one moment, that one intervention, the story would have ended differently.

And so, in the dead of a Kashmiri winter, a terrorist was spared—not out of mercy, but because a woman had the foresight to see that sometimes the greatest weapons aren’t bullets. They are words.

(Disclaimer: The events in this story happened as described—except, of course, for those that didn’t.)