The Brave: Param Vir Chakra Stories (7 page)

The Army had always appealed to him as a career and he kept going to recruitment camps till he was selected. At 18, he joined the Army, coincidentally on his birthday—20 May 1936. He was sent to 10/1 Punjab. After training for a year at Jhelum he was posted to 5/1 Punjab. Though he had hated school, once in the Army, where he always wanted to be, Piru quickly cleared his promotional exams one after the other and soon became a lance naik and then, within a year, a naik. He was posted as an instructor in the Punjab Regimental Centre at Jhelum. In May 1945, he was appointed company havaldar major. He even went to Japan after World War II ended to serve with the Commonwealth Occupational Forces. By the time he returned in September 1947, India and Pakistan had become two countries. Being a part of the Rajput segment of 5/1 Punjab, Piru was sent to 6 Raj. Rif.

These were the terrible days when the Pakistani Army, in connivance with Pathan raiders, were attacking Jammu and Kashmir. Piru’s battalion was flown to Kashmir and was part of the force used to push the raiders back beyond Uri. This was the background in which Piru Singh showed exemplary bravery and posthumously won his Param Vir Chakra.

He died on 18 July 1948. He was 30 years old.

Sixteen small, slim Gorkha soldiers stand quietly in the shrubbery, their olive green combats blending in. In their hands they hold their. 303 rifles and between their teeth, their khukris, blades glinting dangerously in the afternoon sun.

The soldiers are still1500 yards from Roundabout, the location they have been ordered to close in on. They were to approach from the airport side, along with a troop ofSwedish armoured personnel carriers, and block the gendarmerie’s withdrawal route. However, they had run into an ambush and now have enemy fire coming at them from a subsidiary location. Just a little way ahead stand the hutments that have been deserted by the locals and converted into bunkers by the revolting gendarmerie of Katanga. The enemy has two armoured cars and 90 men holed up in trenches and on rooftops, equipped with semi-automatic guns, far superior to the obsolete. 303 rifles that the Gorkhas are using, the pre-World War II rifles painfully tedious to handle. After every round is fired, the bolt has to be pulled up and brought back to eject the cartridges and then moved forward to load fresh ones. Khukris, their traditional Nepali knives, are much, much faster. That is why the Gorkhas have unsheathed them and are now waiting for orders to attack.

‘We will storm their location,’ orders their company commander, Captain Gurbachan Singh Salaria, his cool, no- nonsense voice cutting through the moist heat of the afternoon.

The men get into position. They steel their hearts against all fear of death and when Salaria yells out their war cry, ‘Jai Mahakali, Aayo Gorkhali’, breaking into a sprint towards the enemy location, they follow.

Salaria is the first to charge. He runs across with his gun blazing, bared khukri clasped in his mouth, flashing in the sunlight. Taking on the first trench, he shoots dead the big gendarmerie on the left. From the corner of his eye he catches movement to his right, turns around and, gripping the khukri with his right hand, whips it fiercely through the air, slicing the man’s horrified face. It rips off an eye and runs down his nose, slicing it into two bloody halves that bare the cartilage. Salaria’s trained hand followed the standard slashing drill of right to left, left to right and, blood spraying from his lacerated face, the man falls into the trench, his intact eye still open in shock and terror.

With a snarl, Salaria turns to the next man, the blood-soaked blade glinting. He leaps into the trench and cuts the throat of the enemy soldier, who hasn’t even had time to cock his rifle. A warm spray of red splashes across Salaria’s sweat-soaked face. He wipes it with the sleeve of his shirt and turns to the next trench.

Capt. Salaria, with one platoon of Alpha Company, is ordered to take over the protection duty of a refugee camp in Elizabethville. Around the same time, there is a skirmish between two drunken gendarmerie, who are trying to molest a Congolese woman, and soldiers of the peacekeepingforce. It has led to a shootout. Though no one is hurt, it has resulted in the nearby gendarmerie garrison creating a roadblock and, over the following days, they manage to create a lot of trouble. Fourteen UN personnel are abducted in those days of trouble. Earlier in November, Major Ajeet, also from 3/1 Gorkha Rifles—who had been tasked to force the release of two kidnapped UN officials—had been abducted by the gendarmerie along with his driver. While Ajeet never returned, the driver’s body was later found wrapped in green canvas. He had been shot at point-blank range. Ajeet had most certainly been taken hostage but all efforts to trace him were unsuccessful. He was reported missing and later declared dead.

The abduction of Ajeet is playing heavily on Salaria’s mind when he goes in for the final battle. He has been seething with fury about this cowardly kidnap of a peacekeeping officer on duty. Alpha Company is guarding the refugee camp when, around 9 a. m. on 5December, orders come for them to clear the roadblock created by the Katangese gendarmerie at Roundabout, on the route to the airport. It has to be done immediately because the block is aimed at stifling the lifeline of the UN forces that depend upon planes for not just rations, arms and ammunition, but also the evacuation of the dead and the wounded.

Sitting in his Dehradun house, retired Major General R. P. Singh, AVSM, VSM, who has written
A Star on the Mount of Jupiter
on Captain Salaria, giving the Indian brigade’s account in the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Congo, talks about Salaria, his voice soft. Gen R. P. was the battalion adjutant during that operation. It was the morning of 5 December 1961, he remembers, when he spoke to Salaria on the radio set and briefed him on the plan to attack and clear the Roundabout road block. In clear, concise terms he told Salaria what his orders were. He was to take a platoon of the Alpha Company and block the gendarmerie’s withdrawal route, attacking them at midday, when they would be least expecting an attack.

Around 11. 50 a. m. Salaria reported to him that he would be moving out of the camp in 20 minutes. The two lost contact while the platoon was moving, but, an hour later, Salaria sent a message over the radio saying he was under heavy machine- gun fire, which seemed to be coming from four different directions. He said his men were engaged in a gun battle with the enemy and that they had managed to blow up two of the enemy’s armoured cars with their rocket launcher.

In his voice was a note of jubilation. This, he felt, was the moment he had been waiting for. He was very confident about what he wanted to do next. Though Maj Gen Singh remembers that he warned Salaria to assess the situation very carefully before taking any further steps, Salaria had curtly replied, ‘I am going for the attack. I am sure I will win’.

‘That was the last conversation he had with me,’ Maj Gen Singh remembers, his gravelly voice heavy with 50-year-old memories. ‘It required sheer naked courage to do what he did. Leaving his radio set and operator behind, he just charged ahead in broad daylight with his handful of Gorkhas.’

Salaria was like a man possessed. He had lost count of how many men he had killed; he’d turned into a killing machine, flinging grenades, bayoneting men and slicing through necks with his khukri. Maj Ajeet’s abduction and the murder of his driver had been on his mind for many days now. He was convinced that Ajeet had been killed and his heart shrank at just how painful his death must have been. The mercenaries were cold-blooded killers with no conscience. They needed to be taught a lesson and he was going to teach as many as he could. Here and now. For him, it was a meditative moment. He lost all fear of pain or death. As he charged at the gendarmerie, all instincts of self-preservation were forgotten and he became a yogic warrior as he wreaked havoc on the battlefield.

With immense satisfaction he watched the much larger group of enemy soldiers scatter and run in terror of the tiny group of Gorkhas. They had never encountered such a ferocious enemy before. His soldiers had instilled terror with their savage charge and their deadly use of the khukri—a weapon the enemy had never seen before. In the distance, fumes were still rising from the armoured car that his men had knocked out with their rocket launcher. It was unbelievable, but they had chased away a 90-strong enemy force of men, who were bigger and equipped with the latest arms and ammunition. Around him were strewn the corpses of the gendarmerie, stunned disbelief writ large on their lifeless faces.

Salaria had just bayoneted a man who had been trying to escape, when a burst of automatic fire from another fleeing enemy soldier sprayed into his neck. He felt his neck and found it covered in blood. Two bullets had pierced his neck. The blood was seeping down and soaking his shirt. Right ahead he could see the gendarmerie running away. Some of his brave and gutsy Gorkhas were still giving chase.

He did not resist when an immense weariness enveloped him. He had lost too much blood. His task had been achieved and he was at peace. Closing his eyes, Capt. Gurbachan Singh Salaria of 3/1 Gorkha Rifles, dropped his rifle and fell, drifting into unconsciousness from which he would never awaken.

Many years earlier, when Salaria had joined the Gorkha Rifles, he had been told that his regiment’s motto was: It is better to die than to be a coward: ‘Kafar hunu bhanda marnu ramro.’

Salaria had lived up to the motto.

Salaria fancied himself a palmist. Before the Congo deployment in February 1961, he had visited Chotta Shimla for some work and run into an excise officer, who used to read people’s palms. Reading Salaria’s hand, the officer told him that there was a star on his mount of Jupiter, which would bring him great fame. Salaria took the prediction very seriously and would often point it out to fellow officers in lighter moments. Maj Gen R. P. Singh remembers how in Congo one day when he and Salaria were discussing the abduction of Maj Ajeet by enemy soldiers, and hoping that Ajeet would be returned to them unharmed, Salaria told him quite seriously that he had read Ajeet’s hand and that he had a clear break in his lifeline. He quickly added though that Ajeet also had a supporting lifeline so nothing should happen to him.

He then went on to show the general his own right hand. He again pointed out the star on his mount of Jupiter. ‘Wait and see, this star will take me to great heights, ‘ he said. Singh had leaned over to feel the mount, but only out of politeness. ‘I just shrugged it off as I never took his knowledge of palmistry seriously, ‘ the general recounts. ‘I did not know that his day of reckoning and attaining fame was just a few days away. Or that he would never know of this fame since it would come when he was in his heavenly abode, ‘ he says quietly.

Instead he just told Salaria that no one could stop anyone from achieving fame if it was written in their destiny. Soon after Salaria left after refusing a dinner offer, Singh took out a copy of Cheiro’s book on palmistry that he had in his suitcase and read about the star on the mount of Jupiter. ‘These people are ambitious, fearless and determined in all that they undertake. They are leaders. They concentrate on whatever they may be doing at that moment and see no way but their own, ‘ said the book. A cold shiver ran down Singh’s spine. He knew just how upset and angry Salaria was about Ajeet’s abduction and just how keen he was to teach the gendarmerie a lesson. A concerned Singh went down to the control room and asked the operator to check if Salaria had reached his location safely. He heaved a sigh of relief when confirmation came that he had.