NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 2 A Tale of Valour: Major Somnath Sharma and the Battle of Badgam — Let us think and reflect

B. There was intense fighting on the battlefield.

… because he knew that his own visible presence was the one thing keeping ninety heavily outnumbered men in their positions, and that every hour they held Badgam bought time for reinforcements to reach Srinagar.

A. Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

injuries

The full sentence: Major Somnath Sharma was filling magazines, and encouraging his men to hold their ground despite injuries.

C. His family and heritage inspired his bravery and sense of duty.

False.

It tells us that he performed his duties with exceptional dedication, honour, and excellence.

The word from the extract is picturesque.

The repetition turns a statement into an echo, and an echo is the exact image the chapter has been building.

• Said once, “remains forever alive” is a claim. Said twice, with the trailing dots, it stops sounding like prose and starts sounding like a refrain — like the patriotic song quoted just above it on the same page.
• The chapter later says the day “ended with echoes of courage that served as an inspiration for generations to come”. Repeating the phrase makes the sentence do what it describes: the words come back a second time the way his memory comes back to each new generation.
• The ellipsis (…) leaves the second repetition unfinished, so it fades rather than stops — suggesting that the repeating has not ended, only moved out of earshot.

Because at Badgam almost every advantage lay with the enemy, and leadership was the only one left on the Indian side. Four decisions show this.

1. He read the battle correctly. When the first attack came, he “correctly visualised that the first attack was just a distraction” — and the main attack did then come from another side. Ninety men in the wrong position would have been finished at once.
2. He called for and guided air support. He “bravely laid out ground panels to guide the aircraft towards their target”, which meant exposing himself in the open to mark the target. The strikes hit the invaders.
3. He kept the company firing. He moved through the position “directing fire, filling magazines for his gunners” — that is, he kept the guns supplied by hand when the company was running out of ammunition.
4. He refused to withdraw. Ordered to pull back, he replied that he would fight “to the last man and the last round”, because a withdrawal from Badgam would have opened the higher ground above the airfield.

His last recorded words were the message he sent to Brigade headquarters when he was told to pull back:

They reflect a sense of duty that is clear-eyed rather than reckless, and this shows in the way the message is built.

• The first three sentences are pure fact — distance, numbers, volume of fire. He does not soften the report to make his decision look easier. He is telling headquarters exactly how bad the position is.
• Only the last sentence states the decision. Placed after the facts, it reads as a considered choice made with full knowledge, not as bravado.
• “I shall not withdraw an inch” fixes duty to a measurable thing, and “to the last man and the last round” defines exactly when the duty would end — when there is no one left to fight and nothing left to fight with.

Very probably the loss of Srinagar, and with it the Valley. The chapter gives enough detail to trace the chain.

1. Badgam would have fallen first. It lay “less than 5 kilometres away from the Srinagar airfield” and “was on a higher altitude than the airfield”. Whoever held Badgam looked down on the airfield.
2. The airfield would have followed. The invaders' stated aim was “to capture the Srinagar airfield and its surrounding areas”.
3. Reinforcement would have stopped. The land route through Pathankot “was not in a good condition”, so troops and supplies were arriving by air. Lose the airfield and the only working door into the Valley closes.
4. The larger plan might have succeeded — “to engineer a revolt in Kashmir, overthrow the government, and capture the territory”, and to control the mountain passes, peaks and rivers.

Because the story is about a series of choices, and choices are something any reader can recognise, whereas battles are not.

• He chose to go. His left hand was in plaster; he could have stayed behind honourably. He said instead, “I know my men better than anyone else, and if they are going into action, they are not going in without me.”
• He chose to tell the truth. His last signal reported the hopelessness of the position before announcing his decision — an honesty that costs more than courage.
• He chose the smaller task. He died filling a machine gun for a gunner: a major doing a rifleman's job because that was what the moment needed.
• He was twenty-four. The chapter says so plainly, and that fact makes the story reachable for a school student in a way that a distant hero's would not be.

By separating the value from the battlefield. None of us will be asked to hold Badgam; all of us are asked, most weeks, to do a smaller version of what he did.