The Param Vir Chakra has been awarded twenty-one times. A disproportionate number have gone to men from Punjab or serving in Punjabi units.
Lance Naik Karam Singh, of Sehna in Barnala district, at Tithwal in 1948, one of the few recipients to survive. Subedar Joginder Singh, of Mahla Kalan in Moga district, at Bum La in 1962, died of wounds in Chinese captivity. Company Quartermaster Havildar Abdul Hamid at Asal Uttar in 1965. Flying Officer Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon, of Isewal in Ludhiana district, over Srinagar in 1971, killed. Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal, of a Punjabi family settled at Pune, at Basantar in 1971, killed.
Their villages have memorials, schools named after them and in some cases a gate.
Punjab's contribution to the Indian armed forces remains far above its population share, an inheritance of the martial races recruitment of the nineteenth century that outlived the doctrine by eighty years.
That is a source of pride in Punjab and it is also the reason a very large number of Punjab villages have a war memorial and no school library.
The decoration was instituted in 1950 with effect from 15 August 1947, and its design was drawn by Savitri Khanolkar, a Swiss woman married to an Indian officer, who took the vajra on it from the sage Dadhichi who gave his bones for a weapon. The first award went to Major Somnath Sharma, whose brother was married to her daughter.
Most were awarded posthumously. The citations describe holding a position, clearing a bunker, or covering a withdrawal, which is what the decoration is given for.
The citation is the whole record. It runs to a paragraph, written in the flat register of a service document, and for most of these men there is no biography, no collected letters and no account by anybody who served beside them. A gate with a name on it is what the country has kept.