When she was leaving on assignment to Kabul, my friend Harinder Baweja came to me with a strange request: Could she borrow some of my long-sleeved kurtas? Shammy, as she is known among friends and family, famously wore only sleeveless blouses, even in winter. But she was off to meet the Taliban who had just taken over after shooting president Mohammad Najibullah and then stringing up his body from a pole. Then they issued a series of edicts that included severe restrictions on women, including how they dressed.

One of the few women conflict reporters of her generation, Baweja cut her professional teeth in Punjab at the height of militancy in the 1980s and witnessed insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir from her first trip in 1989 following the kidnapping and subsequent release of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of then union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in exchange for jailed militants.

She was there in Kargil in 1999. She went off to interview underworld don Chota Rajan after the Mumbai blasts of 1994 and his falling out with Dawood Ibrahim. And she remains the only Indian journalist to have visited the Lashkar-e-Taiba headquarters in Muridke, just weeks after the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai and in the news again after it was destroyed by the Indian Airforce in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror strike.

Baweja’s book, They Will Shoot You, Madam: My Life Through Conflict, published by Roli Books was released earlier this week and I caught up with the woman who has had a ringside view of the most tumultuous events in India’s history.

I would not call it ‘propositioning me’ but a case of sexual harassment. When I sat down to write that chapter, I did ask myself the same question because it has been a few decades since that happened. That memory is so deeply etched within me, I needed the cathartic comfort of words to perhaps tell it now.

When you’re writing for a publication, your personal stories never get recorded. The book gave me the liberty of sharing my personal journey through conflict. I’ve spent four decades moving from one conflict zone to another, meeting a cast of characters. Yasin Malik was an important voice in the nineties. He was called the Che Guevara of Kashmir, the hero of Kashmir’s liberation movement. But I discovered a very eerie side to him.

Malik had been arrested for the killing of four Indian Airforce officers and for........

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