The Brave: Param Vir Chakra Stories (16 page)

Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon was born in RurkaIsewal village of Ludhiana, Punjab, on 17 July 1945. He was the son of Warrant Officer Trilok Singh Sekhon, which made him a second-generation officer of the Indian Air Force.

Sekhon was commissioned into the Air Force on 4 June He was from the 97 GD (P) Pilots’ Course and was posted to No. 18 Squadron (Flying Bullets) in October He was a brave though unassuming man with a lot of experience in flying Gnats. More than six feet tall, Sekhon was lanky with an awkward gait and people sometimes wondered how he could fit into the cockpit of the tiny Gnat. He was a simple man from a rustic background and was affectionately called ‘Brother’ by his course mates and friends because of his habit of starting all conversations with the word ‘Brother’, a literal translation of the word ‘bhai’ that he probably used in his village.

He was twenty-six years old when he died and had been married for just a few months, most of which he had spent on duty in Srinagar. He was awarded the Param Vir Chakra for his heroic action during the bombing of Srinagar airbase by Pakistan. The young and fragile Mrs Sekhon, draped in a white shawl, receiving the PVC from President V. V. Giri, is a poignant image immortalized in the records of the Indian Air Force. Mrs Sekhon later remarried.

Freelance researcher Air Cmde (Retd) Ramesh V Phadke, who was Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon’s course mate, has helped recreate the atmosphere of the Srinagar airfield by sharing his memories and research for the under-publication book, Air Power and National Security.

Seated inside the cramped Famagusta, his Centurion battle tank named after a port in Cyprus, 2
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Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal is watching with narrowed eyes the enemy tanks before him. Most of them are wrecked and burning, the flames filling the sky with billowing grey smoke. He is trying to judge the trajectory of the shot his gunner has just fired. He will know if it has hit home because the moment a tank is hit the Pakistanis raise their gun and run out. Their religion forbids them a death by burning.

A vein is throbbing madly in Khetarpal’s neck. If he manages to get this one, his tally will be five. He knows his tank is already on fire and exposed. He has switched off the radio set because he is being asked to pull back. His gun is still firing and he wants to get the bastards. He knows changing his position will give the enemy an opening. He will not let that happen.

There is a deadly whistling sound as a shell shoots in through the cupola of Khetarpal’s tank. In that split second, he doesn’t realize it has ripped his stomach—he is surprised when the confined interior of the tank fills with the acrid stench ofburning flesh. Then it moves further, smashing into his thigh. It shatters the bone and bends it at an angle that traps it under the seat of his tank.

Bleeding profusely, all he can whisper hoarsely to his gunner Sawar Nathu Singh, who is imploring him to climb out of the tank, is: ‘I wont be able to do it.’ With that, Khetarpal collapses, guts spilling out of the bloody wound in his abdomen. It is around 10. 15 a. m. The date: 16 December 1971. Khetarpal, breathing his last, is 21.

Shortly after a U-turn from Ghitorni metro station is a small Indian Oil petrol pump with a narrow path on the left marked ‘Forest Lane’. Follow that and you come to a massive iron gate with a nameplate saying ‘Khetarpals’. Inside is a beautiful old farmhouse, quietly getting soaked in Delhi’s retreating monsoon shower. There I find one of the most celebrated Param Vir Chakra awardees 2
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Lt Arun Khetarpal’s 87-year- old mother. Scampering around her is a young golden retriever wagging her tail and pushing her wet nose into my palm before settling down to chew on a rubber bone. The lady on the wheelchair has very short white hair, withered, old hands and tired eyes that look at me wearily. She is trying to piece together fading memories of the son she lost 42 years ago.

Neither Mrs Khetarpal nor I want to revisit today the bloody battlefield of Basantar from where Arun never returned one cold December day. We’d rather talk about what he was like as a little boy. Was he quiet or outspoken, gentle or boisterous? Did he plead to sleep with his parents when the lights were turned off in his bedroom? Did he catch tadpoles in stagnant pools of rainwater or did he chase butterflies in the garden? Did he part his hair on the right or left? Did he pull his shoes off without untying their laces?

I want to know these little things about the hero I don’t know. About those times when he would faithfully follow the soldiers working in his Army officer father’s house and listen wide-eyed to their war stories. When he would insist on eating in the langar with them and then come back and tell his father that one day he would join the Army too. I want to know about the times he would coax his grandfather, his head on the old man’s lap and little fingers entwined in dry, calloused ones, to tell stories of the Partition.

Maheshwari Khetarpal wants to tell me all this. For close to an hour she tries. She lets his name roll lovingly on her tongue, she tries to put her thoughts together, to string them into coherent words. But all that she can come up with are long meandering sentences that don’t say much. The truth is that memory has failed her. Eventually, she gives up. Arun hamara beta tha. Par ab hamein kuchh yaad nahin.’ (Arun was our son. But I remember nothing now. ) Her voice is tinged with helpless frustration. Behind her, his hands on his waist, is a black and white photograph of the young and good looking 2
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Lt Arun Khetarpal. He smiles at the two of us from his mother’s bedroom wall.

I switch off my Dictaphone and begin to tell her about the son she cannot remember—the eight-year-old boy from St. Columba’s School, Delhi, who carried his younger brother’s schoolbag on his back, held his hand and walked two and a half miles home from Gole Dak Khana to Sangli Mess when the car didn’t come to pick them up one afternoon. I tell her how brave he was, not letting his little brother sense his fear even for a moment, and bursting into tears only when he was safely home in his mother’s arms. I tell her about that afternoon in Shillong when he came back from school without his cardigan. He had given it away to a poor child and lied that it was lost. He was six then. I tell her about the day he got his first salary and how he sent some of it to his grandfather with the message: ‘Dadaji, please accept my humble offering.’ I tell her about the time he returned from the Lawrence School, Sanawar, and was thrilled to be mistaken for an Army officer at a party since he was so confident and dignified. I tell her about the teenager who joined the National Defence Academy, excelled at swimming and played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on his clarinet at parties in cosy sitting rooms and translate for her the Robert Burns poem; she listens as if for the first time.

Mostly the old lady with very white hair cut really short sits on her wheelchair and continues to sip the tea that has grown cold in her hand. She slowly scoops spoonfuls of namkeen into her mouth with shaky fingers. I steady the cup and saucer on her lap each time it tilts, fearing the tea will spill on to her cotton nightdress.

I have just one more question for her. Did she send her elder son, then only 21, to war with the words: ‘Your grandfather was a brave soldier, so was your father. Fight like a lion and don’t come back a coward.’?

She is using all her willpower to raise the cup to her lips without spilling the tea. She lets it stay in midair, and looks at me.

‘Kya aapne aisa kaha tha?’ (Did you say that?) I ask again.

‘Haan, kaha tha, ‘ Yes, I said that, she says, her voice strong. On her wrinkled face is a glimmer of pride.

The train whistle shrieked, there was a deep shudder, a jolt, and then the rush of people getting on in a hurry. The Punjab Mail had started to move out of New Delhi railway station. Arun was hanging from the door, waving. His brother Mukesh, studying at IIT, Delhi, was walking along with the moving train, looking at him with envy mingled with anxiety. Arun lifted his eyes to his parents, Brigadier and Mrs Khetarpal, standing on the platform and moving farther from him with every passing moment as the train picked up speed. His father’s arm was around his mother, strained smiles on their faces. He knew they were all trying to be brave. He smiled back at them and then lifted his right hand in a crisp salute. By that time the train had moved too far for him to see the glint of tears in his mother’s eyes.

Many young officers had been recalled from the Young Officers course they had been attending at Ahmednagar when the war with Pakistan broke out. Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal was one of them. He and his unit officer Second Lieutenant Brijendra Singh had got on to a train to Delhi without a reservation. There were no seats for them and they had wangled some space in the pantry car. At Delhi, when they had had a few hours to change trains, Arun had unloaded his motorcycle and ridden it to his parents’ house in Naraina to leave it there. He had returned in time for the Punjab Mail, happily lugging his blue patrol uniform and golf clubs. When Singh asked him why he needed the clubs and the ceremonial uniform on his way to fighting a war, Arun grinned: ‘I plan to play golf in Lahore. And I’m sure there will be a dinner night after we win the war so I’ll need the blue patrol.’

Wars were not new to the Khetarpals. Arun came from a family of soldiers. His great-grandfather had been in the Sikh army and fought against the British. His grandfather had served in the British Army during World War I and Arun’s father, Brig. M. L. Khetarpal, was a Sapper. After studying at Sanawar, Arun had decided to become an Army officer and had joined the National Defence Academy in 1967. He was commissioned into 17 Poona Horse, an armoured or tank unit of the Indian Army, on 13 June 1971. He had been in the Army six months when the war broke out.

The winter night is pitch-dark. The young wheat in the fields is rustling gently in the breeze. In the daytime it had shimmered a brilliant green. At night it is like a soft carpet that shows the tracks of the tanks that have passed over it like ghosts of the night, crushing the fresh fronds under their weight.

The massive Centurion tanks of the Poona Horse are moving in a single file. Each is locating the one in front by the tiny glow of a red tail light small as the tip of a burning cigarette, directed at the ground so that it cannot be seen by enemy tanks or aircraft, only the tank following it. Their instructions are clear. They have to cross a 1500square yard minefield strewn with anti-tank and anti-personnel mines to reach the infantry in the bridgehead. They have to do it fast.

That same morning, the commanding officer of 16 Madras had reported that enemy tanks were gathering for a major counterattack and unless the Indian tanks reached them quickly they would not be able to hold on much longer. The retreating Pakistani army had left behind anti- tank and anti-personnel mines. It was up to the engineers to breach this minefield and make a safe passage for the tanks. As the engineers were clearing the minefield with the trawls, the tanks of the regiment started moving behind them so they could speed up the induction into the bridgehead.

When Colonel (retired) S. S. Cheema, Sena Medal, talks about the war he says every single action flashes in front of his eyes as if it happened yesterday. He was a company commander with 3 Grenadiers and had played a key role in the daring attack on Jarpal as well as holding on in the bridgehead against the subsequent counter attacks by the enemy. It was a joint operation with 17 Horse, 4 Horse (the two armoured regiments) and 16 Madras. He recollects how Lieutenant Colonel Hanut Singh, the commanding officer of 17 Horse, decided that as the trawling by the sappers was going on to clear the minefield, his tanks would follow simultaneously, so that they could save precious time. He knew how much enemy pressure was building against the infantry in the bridgehead and realized that the tanks had to get there fast if they wanted to win this war. ‘It was the most super-coordinated effort by the regiment and the engineers,’ says Col Cheema. ‘The operation is still believed to be miraculous in military history since not one tank was blown up by a mine.’