Pakistan’s Nishan-e-Haider has been awarded eleven times since independence in 1947. Eleven. Across eight decades, two generations of wars, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers who served and fell, the nation’s highest military honour has gone to eleven men. Three of them came from the same district.

Not from military posts, nor from a town with a tradition of breeding military commanders. Not from a large city, but from Gujrat, a town located where the Chenab River meets the northern border of Punjab in Pakistan. To most people throughout Pakistan, Gujrat is synonymous with producing fans and furniture; however, the area also has a substantial diaspora. The streets within the town will contain names that almost no one outside of Gujrat has ever looked at, and there are three sample villages within Gujrat (Ladian, Dinga and Kunjah) that quietly proseveralber of soldiers who died defending places they shouldn’t have; at the same time, they survived in circumstances that they shouldn’t have survived in.

Major Raja Aziz Bhatti, Major Muhammad Akram, and Major Shabbir Sharif, three men, three wars, one district. The story of what each of them did and what it cost them.

The Award That Is Never Given Lightly

The-Nishan-i-Haider, Emblem of the Lion, is the highest military honour Pakistan gives. Nothing else, military or civil, comes above it. The name comes from Hazrat Ali, the fourth Caliph of Islam, remembered in Islamic tradition as its greatest warrior. In that sense, it sits alongside the British Victoria Cross or the American Medal of Honor, though Pakistan has handed it out far more sparingly, eleven times, against the VC’s 1,358 and the Medal of Honor’s 3,515. 

There is one aspect of the award that sets it apart from almost any comparable honour in the world: it has only ever been awarded posthumously. Every single recipient paid for it with his life. The medal itself is forged from captured enemy equipment, 88 percent copper, 10 percent gold, and 2 percent zinc, and the recipient’s name, rank, regiment, and date of award are inscribed on the back. It is handed to a family. Never to the soldier himself.

Pakistan’s military has a simple, stark position on why this is so. When the Chief of Army Staff was once asked why the award was never given to a living recipient, his reported answer was that if it were awarded to a living person, that person might one day act dishonourably and disgrace the award. The Nishan-e-Haider’s integrity, in this view, depends on the certainty that the recipient’s record is closed. The only way to guarantee that is death. Three of those eleven closed records belong to men from Gujrat.

Major Raja Aziz Bhatti Shaheed: The Guardian of Lahore

Major Raja Aziz Bhatti was born in Hong Kong in 1928. His father was stationed there at the time, though the family itself was from Ladian, a small village in the Kharian tehsil of Gujrat district. He was back in the subcontinent before Partition happened, and eventually found his way into the Pakistan Army in 1950, commissioned into the 17th Punjab Regiment. He was, by all accounts, one of the more outstanding officers of his generation: the first person to complete the PMA long course and receive both the Norman Medal and the Sword of Honour, as documented by the District Gujrat government.

In September 1965, India launched a major armoured offensive in the Lahore sector. The objective was to cut the GT Road and isolate the city. Major Bhatti’s company was positioned at Burki, on the outskirts of Lahore, directly in the........

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