India’s Most Fearless: True Stories of Modern Military Heroes

by Shiv Aroor

  As always, the terrorists had been well-trained in the route to follow and what to expect—the Indian Army’s most hardened mountain warriors. They followed a carefully chosen path, sneaking across the LoC and heading east towards the ridgeline. A large part of their training would be expended in putting the Shamshabari range behind them. Once crossed, all the terrorists needed to do was duck into the many hiding places afforded by the gently flattening valley that would rise to greet them as they stumbled off the mountainside. If the terrorists could go undetected for a few more hours, they would be in a position to inflict a great deal of real damage.

  Besides the deployment of its fighting units, India has spent hundreds of crores on building and maintaining a fence along the de facto border with Pakistan, but heavy snow causes severe damage to it every year. Apart from routinely taking advantage of such gaps, infiltrating terrorists, helped by Pakistan Army border units, also target vulnerable border stretches that have been left unfenced due to topographic factors.

  This group of infiltrators had, on 26 May, found 1 such gap. The distance between the fence and the LoC can vary from 50 metres to over 2 km, depending on the area’s geography. It was about 2 km in this sector.

  Dawn was just breaking as the terrorists crept up the rugged ridgeline running from south-west to north-east when a sentry of the 35 Rashtriya Rifles battalion, a unit drawing soldiers largely from the Army’s Assam regiment, saw something move from the corner of his eye. His eyes darted in that direction. There was nothing. He wondered briefly if the cold, as it frequently did in that stillness, was playing tricks on him.

  It could have been an animal, he thought to himself. Leopards and bears were known to roam the snow-swept heights. But the Army post was on the lookout for something a good measure smarter, and incalculably more dangerous. Sepoy J.N. Baite, in his early twenties, quietly ventured out of the ‘Meera post’ atop the ridgeline to take a closer look. Infiltration season was about to resume and nothing could be left to chance.

  As the icy wind whipped across his face, the Assam Regiment soldier trudged through the snow to check if the movement he had noticed in his peripheral vision was something that needed more attention. Baite’s finger rested on the trigger of his AK-47 as his company commander’s words echoed in his ears.

  ‘Never let your guard down. Not even for a moment. Split-second decisions can mean the difference between life and death.’

  It was a tenet every soldier forward deployed in J&K operated by.

  A soldier’s instinct is seldom wrong. Baite had barely walked 30 metres from his post when he spotted human footprints in the pristine snow. He knew instantly that the boys of the 4th battalion of Assam Regiment, or 4 Assam, would have to skip breakfast that day.

  Raised during the Second World War in 1941, the Assam Regiment draws its troops exclusively from the 7 North-eastern states, and the dauntless men are well-suited for deployments in the mountains. Maj. (later Col.) Sonam Wangchuk of 4 Assam was conferred the Maha Vir Chakra, India’s second highest wartime gallantry award, for capturing an 18,500-feet-high cliff in Batalik’s Chorbat La sub-sector during the 1999 Kargil conflict. It was the highest honour won by the regiment. Seventeen years later, the unit found itself in similarly hostile heights, waiting to face intruders.

  Pretending that nothing was amiss, Baite, a Manipuri, retreated to his post and immediately raised the alarm about the presence of an unknown number of infiltrators in the vicinity. Within moments, a radio operator relayed the message to the ‘Echo Company’ commander, Maj. K. Amirtha Raj, who was controlling all active operations on that patch of the Shamshabari.

  The Major had just had his first sip of the hot, comforting chai. That was all he would have that day. The radio message made it obvious that a fight was on its way—the first one of the season in Kupwara’s beautiful but deadly Naugam sector.

  A familiar drill played out. The Army’s posts near the LoC sit astride notorious infiltration ‘highways’ that terrorists use to enter the border state. The route that opened into Naugam was one of them. Soldiers manning these posts are tasked with carrying out patrols day and night, and to lay ambushes for terrorists, making sure no flank of the mountains is left uncovered even for a few minutes. Four posts on the ridgeline along with 3 posts sticking out from the snow-clad slopes below were alerted to the presence of infiltrators and ordered to tighten the net around them.

  Havildar Dada and a few other soldiers were preparing to leave one of these posts, ‘Sabu Post’, 2000 metres below the ridgeline, to collect rations and stores from a logistics base down the mountain. That’s how Army soldiers keep their forward posts stocked up on supplies. It would take the men 2 hours to reach the base on foot and another 2 to return to their post with provisions: food, fuel, ammunition, batteries and other rations.

  Havildar Dada’s patrol carefully negotiated snow-blown slopes as the higher reaches of the Shamshabari range had received more than 10 feet of snow over the previous few days, sending temperatures plunging to a bone-chilling –15 °C.

  Just as the men were about to depart from Sabu Post at 0545 hours, in came the radio alert from Maj. Raj. The Major, a mechanized infantry officer on deputation with the 35 Rashtriya Rifles, had issued a simple order: Havildar Dada’s unit, along with a handful of others below the ridgeline, had to immediately cordon off the area to prevent the terrorists from slipping away down the mountainside. No one knew how many terrorists there were—could have been 2, 4, 6 or even 8.

  The numbers were of little consequence to Havildar Dada, at least at that juncture. Taking each of those terrorists down in the shortest possible time was the only thing that mattered to him as he met with 10 soldiers in the post for a quick operational briefing.

  Dada was in charge of Sabu Post, a position he and his men had reoccupied barely a week before. Patrols are regularly sent trudging up to winter-vacated posts till the weather permits permanent positioning. Till that time, aerial reconnaissance is used as a stopgap measure. The desolation of Naugam was not entirely unfamiliar to Havildar Dada. The Shamshabari terrain resembled to a large extent some of the remote landscape of the state he had grown up in and the one he called home—Arunachal Pradesh. Havildar Dada had been sent up to the heights barely 3 weeks after he volunteered to serve in Kashmir with the Rashtriya Rifles battalion.

  The night before, he had spoken to his wife, Chasen, on the phone. In that 5-minute conversation, Havildar Dada made a fleeting mention of the setting of his post and the challenging role he and his team were assigned. In another part of the country, holding the phone to her ear and closing her eyes, Chasen Lowang Dada tried to picture the view her husband had just described.

  Eight hours later, Havildar Dada’s universe would shrink to his area of responsibility, not uncommon on difficult operations in hostile conditions. Summoning all his experience as a soldier of 16 years, he swiftly ran his men through the possible routes the terrorists could take and ordered them to take positions at vantage points near the post. Before they spread out, Havildar Dada raised his voice in a familiar and commanding tone.

  ‘Woh hamaari post tak aa gaye hain. Bas, ab aur aage nahin. Yahin khatam kar denge (They have come right up to our post. But we will not let them go any further. We will finish them off here).’

  The soldiers who departed from Sabu Post with him that morning would have obeyed any order. Havildar Dada had proven his ability to motivate teams by example. There was nothing he demanded of them that he would not do himself, or that he did not do exceedingly well. He was an extremely skilled handler of weapons. When not on an operation, he would volunteer to instruct fellow soldiers on handling support weapons like rocket launchers, medium machine guns, light machine guns and multi-grenade launchers.

  With Sabu Post some distance behind them, Havildar Dada and his men lay in wait. The terrorists were lying low near the ridgeline and the Army was yet to make contact with them.

  From his mountainside position, the 32-year-old company c
ommander radioed instructions to the posts above to open automatic fire with assault rifles and light machine guns in the direction where the terrorists were believed to be hiding. Bewildered by the sudden intensity of fire pouring around them, the terrorists made a panicked dash down the slope towards Sabu Post where Dada and his men had planned a grand reception for them.

  Escaping the hail of ammunition from the ridgeline Army posts, the terrorists were now literally running for their lives, stumbling through snow down the mountainside, unsuspecting of what lay ahead. In the meantime, Maj. Raj had left the company operating base at Jatti, at a height of 12,500 metres, and was moving as fast as he could towards Sabu Post along with his squad to provide reinforcement and supervise the operation. It would take them at least 1 hour to arrive.

  ‘I knew Dada was there and he was more than capable of dealing with any situation. He had the ability to work in teams and handle teams,’ recalls Maj. Raj, who hails from Tamil Nadu’s Dindigul district.

  Havildar Dada, flat on his belly, half-hidden by a rock in the snow, lay very still until the terrorists had come very close. The terrorists had split themselves up into 2 groups to distract the soldiers and increase their odds of survival in the fight that was about to erupt. Two of them would soon be within range of Havildar Dada’s AK-47. He didn’t move a muscle. But something was amiss. The terrorists had stopped in their tracks. Havildar Dada and his men held their breaths.

  Why had the terrorists stopped? The unthinkable, in what would have been a textbook ambush, had just happened. The terrorists appeared to have spotted the positions held by Havildar Dada’s men. In bare seconds, it became clear that the terrorists were now readjusting themselves to draw first blood. Less than a second after that realization dawned on the men from Sabu Post, a burst of fire came clattering down the hillside from 2 terrorists towards Havildar Dada and his men, pinning them down in their positions.

  What happened next is as difficult to explain for those who actually saw it, as it is for anyone else to imagine it. It would be the beginning of Havildar Dada’s fearsome ‘possession’. Watching his men duck for cover as the incessant rain of fire continued from the terrorists’ rifles, Havildar Dada leapt from his position and charged up the slope towards the intruders with his fully loaded AK-47. Reaching them in a series of swift steps, the soldier then emptied his Kalashnikov magazine, 30 rounds, into both the men, cutting them down as they fired. It was a terrible risk, but one that Havildar Dada had clearly felt he had no choice in—it would have taken the terrorists only a few more moments for their bullets to find and shred Havildar Dada’s men.

  He swiftly thumped a fresh magazine into his AK-47 as he spotted 2 more terrorists sprinting in different directions to take cover behind giant boulders. They had seen what Havildar Dada had just done to 2 of their comrades, and had correctly concluded that they needed to handle this man with care.

  By now, while his men remained in their cover positions, Havildar Dada had no cover at all. The soldiers behind him remember the silhouette that their leader cut against the snow. They could hear his breath as he finished loading his weapon and took the first tentative steps forward towards the 2 terrorists who had darted away. The men remember wondering if their leader would be doomed by his utter and total fearlessness that day.

  Fear had given up on Hangpan as a teenager. In the early 1990s, he had dived into a fast-flowing river in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tirap district to save a drowning classmate, earning the praise and admiration of an entire village. Later, shortly before he was recruited into the Army in 1997, young Hangpan risked his life to rescue passengers from a bus that had fallen into a gorge.

  Havildar Dada’s men knew they couldn’t stop him from the course he had just chosen. But they tried.

  ‘Dada sir, ruk jao, cover le lo (Dada sir, stop, take cover). Aage khatra hai (There’s danger ahead),’ one of the soldiers yelled through a cupped hand. It was futile. It became clear to his men that Havildar Dada had decided how he was going to finish this fight. And he didn’t turn around once. By this time, his buddy, Lance Havildar Vareshang, had reached a spot 20 metres behind.

  Havildar Dada, trudging through the snow, broke into a dash past rocks towards the third terrorist, with Vareshang trailing right behind. Vareshang would be 1 of the 2 men who saw what happened next.

  The third terrorist sprang from behind the boulder, attempting to bring a marauding Havildar Dada down with a sudden burst of fire.

  ‘It was a foolish miscalculation by the terrorist. And he would pay for it with his life,’ recalls a soldier involved in the operation.

  Havildar Dada twisted his body and flung himself sideways with lightning speed, incredibly managing to dodge a burst of bullets fired straight at him. The terrorist had taken cover behind the rock again, not realizing that those bullets had, far from deterring the advancing soldier, simply confirmed to him where the terrorist was hiding. The next few seconds would see Havildar Dada muster every bit of skill in hand-to-hand combat he had excelled in during his training, a skill he had demonstrated across deployments.

  Creeping gently up and round the boulder, Havildar Dada lunged at the waiting terrorist, smashing him straight in the face with his rifle butt. He followed it with a series of swift, rapid blows. The bludgeoned terrorist dropped his weapon, struggling hard to wrench himself free from the Havildar’s devastating grip. Havildar Dada made it quick. In a flash, the Havildar snapped the terrorist’s neck, and let his body fall to the snow.

  Havildar Dada had just dispatched 3 terrorists, all trained in military commando tactics and mountain warfare.

  ‘His actions spoke volumes about his mental toughness, unflinching dedication and sense of purpose,’ recalls Maj. Raj.

  But Havildar Dada’s fight was not over. There was still a fourth terrorist left, hiding a short distance up the hillside. As Havildar Dada began the final hunt, his AK-47 cocked and ready for a quick finish, a 7.62-mm round came whizzing down from behind a rock and ripped through the Havildar’s neck. He had been sniped from close quarters as he stood exposed in his hunt. Havildar Dada collapsed in the snow, bleeding out. The sun was fully in the sky now, its brightness amplifying the blinding snow and crisp, clean air as Havildar Dada took his final breath.

  The last terrorist had got him. It was 0945 hours—about the time when, in his village thousands of kilometres away, Roukhin and Senwang, Havildar Dada’s 9-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son, would be getting ready for school. They knew that their father was on a mountain far away, and often wished they could visit him.

  As Havildar Dada fell, a volley of shots spat out of his AK-47, the sound ringing through the deathly cold of the white landscape. Nobody knew it then, but Havildar Dada had managed to injure the last terrorist before he fell.

  Havildar Dada’s team and Maj. Raj’s men, who had reached the spot, were in no position to retrieve the Havildar’s body as the fourth terrorist was still alive, had a commanding view of the foreground and was possibly preparing to launch grenades. This would be a familiar situation for the Army. A beloved comrade had just been felled in combat, but the rush of sorrow and heartbreak had to be trampled, packed away, set aside at least for the duration of the operation. Fighting on with a broken heart is the most cruel, difficult thing a soldier ever has to do. Maj. Raj remembers feeling the hollow, dull grief of losing one of the most prized men in his charge.

  But there was no time to rest. He quickly devised a plan to outflank the terrorist from the top before pinning him down and finishing him off. It would take the Major and his team 7 more hours to implement the plan. Finally, it was the Major himself who crept up on the last terrorist, and eliminated him with 3 quick bursts at 1645 hours.

  The men could now finally reach Havildar Dada safely. It had started to get dark. The soldiers’ faces were furrowed with tears when they saw him lying motionless in the snow, his hand still clutching the pistol grip of his Kalashnikov.

  One of the soldiers knelt down to check for vita
l signs of life. He knew there would be none. But he had to. He pulled the magazine from Havildar Dada’s rifle only to find that his team leader had fought till the proverbial last round. His lifeless hand, frozen on the trigger, had pumped out 30 bullets from the assault rifle. It was Havildar Dada’s ghost that had injured the last terrorist, allowing the Major and his men to hunt him down later that day.

  As they stood over his body, it was an overwhelming moment that the soldiers are unlikely to forget in their lifetime—one that is bound to find special mention in the Assam Regiment’s historical records.

  ‘Dada fought like a man possessed. And it is such men who win battles for an Army. He went after the terrorists alone. There are some things that cold logic can’t explain,’ recalls Col. Manish Agarwal, who commanded the 35 Rashtriya Rifles during the operation in Naugam. The mission was officially called off only the following day as the Army needed to comb the area and make sure it had taken down all the terrorists who had infiltrated. The numbers that hadn’t mattered to Havildar Dada when he left Sabu Post mattered now.

  The tale of Havildar Dada’s final fight at the frigid heights of Kupwara would become a legend almost immediately. Hailed as a national hero, he was posthumously awarded India’s highest peacetime military honour, the Ashok Chakra, by the President of India on 14 August 2016, for scripting an incredible tale of courage and sacrifice.

  ‘I have come across lots of courageous soldiers during my 23-year military career. But when bullets are whistling over your head, even the toughest guy takes cover. Dada was something else. I feel honoured to have been his CO. The men cried, the officers wept when Dada died,’ remembers Col. Agarwal.