Thirty-year-old Santosh Yadav should be flying high. In '93, she became the first woman to have climbed the crescent summit of Mt Everest twice in the space of one year. On May 28 this year, she also became the first Indian " and woman " to successfully assault the Everest from the Kangshung Face; a side so treacherous and desolate that only seven expeditions have attempted it, of which only three have triumphed.
But a shadow darkens the heady excitement of Santosh's success. Days before she left with her 14-member team on March 28 for Everest's icy slopes, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (itbp) where she'd worked for nine years, 'accepted her resignation ' .
Ask Santosh about braving stormfalls, crashing icewalls and winds that can make you hallucinate at breathless heights and her eyes kindle with passion. Ask her what provoked her to leave a successful career as a Class-I gazetted officer and the only woman assistant commander in an all-male task force and she's resolutely tight-lipped. Her friends hint at a traumatic tenure with the itbp, especially over the last few years, but all Santosh will say is: 'I don't want to be dragged into a controversy. I'm a very positive person. I refuse to go back to the past. The itbp was no place for me, they weren't being good to me; I was not happy. Now I am free to follow what I love. '
The itbp is less circumspect. Though quick to acknowledge her as a star performer and mountaineer, its officials list indiscipline, frequent requests for leave or soft postings', long absences and ill health as reasons for Santosh's final stand-off with the forces. The problem, they assert, really began after her marriage, or 'mismatch ' as Mr Manon, DG, administration, calls it, to Uttam Kumar Lal, a Gurgaon businessman in 1994. Gynaecological problems and differences in temperament, they say, began to take their toll on Santosh. 'We're recognised as the tough guys, as a guerrilla commando force. We plan careers for officers, not women, ' says Gautam Kaul, DG, itbp. 'We can't make concessions and as things were going, Santosh would've failed medically to make the next grade. '
Santosh is incredulous. Uttam, she says, is her backbone, the man behind her success, and if she was medically unfit or depressed, could she have led the team to Everest? Then why was she on medical leave for almost five months, counters the itbp. What's the truth behind the volley of charges between Santosh and the itbp? What soured, in Kaul's words, Santosh's 'employment of excellence ' ? Do the professional charges cloak a classic case of a woman being made to feel a misfit in a man's world?
Santosh hints at that but refuses to elaborate. 'I never demanded special privileges as a woman officer, ' says she. 'But some people expected me to be more social' than I was willing to be, or was proper. As a woman, I could've exploited the situation and made life miserable for them, but I want to achieve things, not be destructive. '
The flashpoint came with Santosh's posting at the Saboli Supply Battalion, 100 km out of Delhi. Having just come from a year's tough posting' at Auli, Santosh protested at the strain of travelling from Delhi to Saboli everyday and the extended separation from her husband. She was denied reprieve.
There's, however, a longer history of discontent. Santosh was inducted into the itbp in November '90 by her mentor Hukum Singh (itbp) who spotted her singular talent on an expedition to the White Needle mountain at Nunkun, Jammu and Kashmir, in '89. Nurtured to begin with as an itbp prodigy, after her Everest climb in '93, and after her present mentor D.K. Arya left itbp in '94, Santosh started to feel 'suffocated ' . She climbed Mt Fuji in '95 and the Aconcagua in the Andes in '98 as part of international expeditions, but she was not part of the itbp expedition to the Everest in '96. Nor was she privy to the Everest expedition being planned by the itbp as a joint venture with the Chinese around the same time when she was planning her Kangshung climb. The itbp plan fell through, and there seems to be some sense of betrayal, professional jealousy and point of grouse there.
Kaul conjectures that the lure of money and corporate endorsements on the lines of Bachendri Pal's precipitated Santosh's resignation. But having missed her, to quote Kaul, 'personal appointment with Everest ' , (as leader, Santosh was forced by bad weather and faulty equipment to let two other team members climb the summit while she provided the back-up) " where does the feisty, indomitable Santosh Yadav go from here?
To begin with, she wants to activate her recently registered Santosh Yadav Institute of Mountaineering and Adventure Allied Sports through which she plans, a little incongruously, to involve herself in 'girl child education, child-woman welfare and research work in rural areas ' . An irony there about the life and times of sportspeople in India, too savage to be missed.
