by Mike Edwards
As the 1970’s moved onto the 80’s, senior IAF men either didn’t know who Harjinder Singh was, or they felt it unwise to admit to any knowledge of him.
‘Harjinder Singh? Not sure I know of him, or are you referring to Menon’s man in the IAF?’
The nephew of Amrit Saigal proved to have absorbed many of Harjinder’s traits as he had seen him in action. He added these to his own exceptional intelligence during his time in Kanpur, living with Amrit. Just like Harjinder, he drove himself tirelessly to excel in college to such an extent he was asked to take up an immediate teaching post after graduating. When he moved on from teaching he found himself in the petrochemical industry, but Mr J.R. Nanda had aviation running through his veins. Harjinder worked tirelessly to achieve self-reliance for India, so, when Mr Nanda discovered that all the various oils used throughout the IAF had to be imported, he set out on a long road to form his own company that would produce the IAF’s every need from within the country. He had to use the same tenacity as Harjinder to fight bureaucracy to achieve this, but achieve it he did, with the very successful company, Avi-Oil. He remained very close to his uncle and kept Harjinder’s legacy as close to his heart as his uncle had.
The Air Force Day Parade became the main event in the IAF calendar to celebrate the past, present and the future. In the 1980s, it was held every year at Palam, in Delhi, with the IAF Vintage Flight taking part without, however, any reference to the man responsible for its inception. In 1989, the Vintage Flight performed as usual with Harjinder’s Spitfire, still with his call sign, ‘Plumber’ scrawled down the left engine cowl, leading the growing fleet which included a Tigermoth, a Harvard, a Vampire and the only HT2 left still flying. The brand new fighter in the IAF’s 1989 fleet was the dart shaped, French Mirage 2000 fighter that would still be on display in the 2012 parade, but as the old girl herself.
So how did these airplanes find themselves locked up in a hanger for over three decades? There are of course, several versions of what happened next. Historian, and pilot instructor, Mukund Murty, saw the display, and said that Joe zoom climbed his machine heavenwards, rolling as he went. He then pushing the nose down into a spiralling dive, but crucially holding it in for one extra turn compared to the practised routine. But no matter who tells the story, the end is always the same, Joe Bakshi found himself with the nose of his aircraft pointing directly at the ground in front of the Chief, standing on his dais. A jet pointing earthward, gobbles up the sky in a fraction of a second. Joe Bakshi would have hauled the control column back into the pit of his stomach. The nose of the aircraft was pointing up, but the momentum was still dragging it down (what is known as ‘mushing’, in aviation parlance), as it smashed into the ground producing the awful, greasy, oil-laden fireball that marks all air crashes. Shrapnel from the engine sizzled and zipped over the heads of the crowd, and through the doors of a hangar nearby. By some miracle, all the opened mouthed spectators escaped any major injury from the metal shards slicing through the air in all directions, but three people in the servants’ area behind were not as lucky. The Chief knew that by all rights his children should have been orphaned at that moment. His reaction, when he returned to his office, was to order all unnecessary flying to cease. Harjinder’s Vintage Flight was deemed unnecessary, and was pushed into the same hangar that the shrapnel from the crash had slashed through, where it would remain , gathering dust, until the next millennium.
The work Mr Nanda had done in his industry brought him in direct, and close, contact with the upper echelons of the IAF, resulting in invitations to all the parades. At the Air Force Day Parade in 2005, he met the then Chief, Air Chief Marshal Tyagi. Mr Nanda’s uncle had come into possession of the typewriter that Jumbo had kept with him during the war in Burma, and his time in England, as he flew missions over the D-Day beaches. Mr Nanda’s offer of Jumbo’s typewriter, as an exhibit, was accepted by the Chief, so a date was arranged to drop it off personally to the Chief’s office.
Mr Nanda had kept in close contact with Harjinder’s wife, and was a frequent visitor to their house in Chandigarh. Harjinder’s son then moved into the house. Not long after his arrival, all contact with Harjinder’s wife was severed, and this greatly troubled Mr Nanda. There had been persistent rumours within the Nanda family, which seemed too extreme to be true, but Mr Nanda felt he could no longer ignore them. He took the opportunity of his time with Air Chief Marshal Tyagi to discuss his concerns.
There had also been a number of pleas to the local military police from residents who lived near the Singh’s house, and knew Beant Kaur, but now with Air Chief Marshal Tyagi taking a personal interest, these were taken seriously.
Early one morning, the military police moved down the high green hedge that kept all but the flat roof of the single storey house hidden. They kept low as they gathered at the white painted brick pillars supporting the large, arched metal gates and the gold-coloured plaque announcing the name of the inhabitant, and the house number. The men opened the locked gate with ease to make their way to the front door of what had been Harjinder’s house. They rang the bell and waited. The door was cracked open and the military police pushed against it, then poured in. The police found, and released two women from the house; Beant Kaur and her sister Satwant Kaur. Harjinder and Beant’s adopted son had reached the rank of Colonel in the Indian army before moving into the house that Harjinder had helped build. It is alleged that he had held the two women captive; fearful that they would sell the house which he regarded as rightfully his. He denied all the allegations levelled against him, but the fact is that, once released, the women went to live with a cousin and arranged for the sale of Harjinder’s house, the home he had helped build after a life he had devoted to his country and his Air Force. The press gathered when Beant Kaur handed the Congress President, Sonia Gandhi, a cheque for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. Beant’s sister Satwant Kaur told The Tribune newspaper that they were feeling relieved, and free of tension, after donating the cheque to the Foundation. In words that could have been written by Harjinder, she told the reporters ‘It is better not to have money if it brings so much misery and pain. What is the use of having a house, carpets, money, jewellery, if they bring so much unhappiness? We went through hell for 25 years because of all these.’
Sonia Gandhi was visibly shocked when she was told of what the women had been through. She said that while it was true that older people were not cared for in Western societies, that such a thing had happened in India was shocking.
I knew nothing of these events; it is fair to say that I had the stereotypical view of India held by most of the British population. Even if I had heard about a woman being rescued from alleged imprisonment by her own adopted son, it would have had little effect; I had concerns closer to home at the time. My youngest daughter, Gracie, was just 2-year-old as my oldest daughter, Ella, was celebrating her fourth birthday in 2005, and it certainly was an event worth celebrating. We had got Ella this far but we still had 18 months of chemotherapy to complete if she was going to beat leukaemia. She was home for her birthday, but the intensive chemotherapy, and any infection, would mean days of our own little imprisonment in the isolation ward. The reality was hours, flowing into days, of boredom interspersed with moments of terror; just like flying! In the days spent with a listless child in bed, or a happy child putting jigsaws together on the hospital floor, I filled my spare time doing research on my laptop. With my father having been a display pilot, I had grown up in the world of air shows and old aircraft. My search for possible gems left in abandoned hangars, or sheds, took me into 1940’s India, and their squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes. The image search for ‘Indian Spitfires’ kept throwing up an unusual colour picture; a lone aircraft buzzing very low over the heads of a crowd. I found out this was a picture from 1989, at the IAF Parade held every year. So they did have a vintage flight! As I followed the links, I stumbled upon pictures of a Harvard, a Vampire, a Tigermoth and a chipmunk-like little trainer called an HT2. Strange how the
re was no mention of this vintage flight in more recent times, I thought. There were mentions of an Air Force Museum in Delhi, so I bundled all the info together on my laptop, just in case my job, as a long haul pilot, took me to Delhi.
It was just as Ella finished her treatment that I finally arrived in Delhi. Tempted as I was to sleep through the day after the long flight, then head to the bar for an early beer, I forced myself up after just a few hours of sleep, a routine that would become the norm! I thought I would take a hotel car as the driver would know the whereabouts of the IAF Museum. He didn’t! We roamed around the International Airport, to the more obscure military side, but even the people we stopped to ask for directions seemed to know nothing. It was by chance we saw a sign, half obscured by an unruly bush, which took us down the road where the nose of an aircraft, on a plinth, jutted over the high wall; we had found the Museum.
The aircraft in this hangar, for that was all the Museum was, were interesting in their own right, but there was no sign of a vintage flight. Out of the far doors was an aircraft parking area with an identical hangar visible in the distance. If I had a vintage operation, I thought, I would keep it close to my Museum, so I crossed the parking area at a pace that I hoped wouldn’t look too suspicious, but would get me to the door expeditiously. When I got there, the hangar doors were padlocked together. I would have left it there but hangar doors never meet perfectly and it is possible to peer through the gap right to the equally poor-fitting door at the other side. The light from one end to the other was obstructed by a wing tip; a crescent shaped wing tip – a Spitfire’s wing tip. This must be the Vintage Flight. I pushed through a side door to get down the side of the hangar but there was still no way in. The far doors were also locked. I trudged back and took one last look through the doors. In frustration, and disgust, I rattled the lock, throwing some strong Anglo Saxon words at it. As I held it in my hand it popped open; somebody hadn’t pushed the metal loop fully home to lock it. Hangar doors are heavy, but I don’t recall having any trouble moving one, because my next memory is that of standing in the gloom after the harsh light outside, and, as my eyes adjusted, the shapes around me took form.
There, in this single hangar, were the aircraft of Harjinder’s Vintage Flight, covered in a layer of dust, but all complete. The Spitfire I spied through the door was perfect, if painted with a strange choice of colours, and had this metal plate with ‘Plumber’ down the side. My camera clicked into action before the shout, the scamper of feet, and the uniformed figure of an IAF Sergeant was running at me. He wasn’t happy, and I was bustled to the front gate and expelled. A year later he was working with me!
People I knew in India started to take my idea of resurrecting the Vintage Flight seriously, and I was introduced to retired officers of ever-rising seniority, in particular, Air Vice-Marshal B.A.K. Shetty. On my days off in Bangalore, we would meet for a lunchtime beer, and swap stories of flying deeds, and narrow escapes. At first, he dismissed my idea of the Vintage Flight, but on a subsequent meeting, he revisited the subject, my enthusiasm rubbed off on him, he suggested that I write a proposal and he would see that made it as far as the desk of a man who had been his student at the Air Force Academy. So it came to pass that Air Vice-Marshal Tiny Kumaria received my carefully drafted proposal, delivered, courtesy of my new found friend. The young man, whose natural flair for aviation had saved his life, went on to become a Jaguar pilot. Having done his conversion on to the Jaguar aircraft, courtesy of the RAF in Scotland, he understood better than most how the RAF used their Memorial Flight to great acclaim. He was, perhaps, the only senior officer within the hierarchy who would have grasped the concept, let alone done something about it.
It was shortly after I flew the restored Tigermoth, with Air Marshal Kumaria, and then, on the 80th Anniversary Parade, that I started my meetings with Mr Nanda, and my interest was pricked about this man Harjinder Singh, MBE. My interest had come just a few months too late. In May 2012, Beant Kaur finally joined Harjinder and his musketeers. Harjinder’s widow showed that she too shared her husband’s principles and was not concerned with material things, giving all of the money from the sale of her family home, to charity. Despite allegedly being held a prisoner by her own adopted son, Beant kept her dignity intact and lived the final years of her life simply. She was 95-year-old when she died. In 1932, when Harjinder had been there at the beginning of the IAF, he had been one of two hundred men, with just four Wapiti aircraft. When his widow finally passed away, the Air Force had grown to over 127,000 personnel and 1,500 aircraft. Harjinder’s influence threaded all the way from those first few days of the IAF, right up to present day. By many twists of fate this Gora, this white face, this Welshman, came to pick up what Harjinder had started, in Kanpur, with the Vintage Flight and through these old pieces of machinery to learn about the man behind it. In 1932, Air Vice-Marshal Sir John Steele had gathered Harjinder, and his 200 colleagues, to tell them that they had brought nothing but the greatest disgrace to themselves, to the Air Force and to India. But nothing could be further from the truth. Harjinder had already turned his back on a lucrative engineering career in the British Raj to dedicate himself to the Air Force, and through that to an Independent India. He drove himself, and those around him, to serve to their best ability. Harjinder never wavered from being the most upstanding, incorruptible, fair, conscientious person with a life of relentless adventure. Disgrace is not a word to be used for Harjinder or Beant Kaur Singh.
Acknowledgements
After discovering Harjinder’s dust covered aircraft in the Delhi hangar, it took a conversation with Danny Phillips, a British Airways Engineer, to get the ball rolling. We became good friends and his introduction to a close family friend, retired Wing Commander Pradeep Karvinkop, started the chain reaction up the IAF ranks.
Without Air Marshal Tiny Kumaria, there would have been no mentor to revisit Harjinder’s Vintage Flight. Without the endless support, and tireless work of Group Captain Mukesh Sharma, there would have been no rebirth of Harjinder’s Flight, or an introduction to Mr Nanda. Without the enthusiasm of Air Commodore Maheshwar, and then the knowledge and drive of Air Vice-Marshal Vikram Singh, there would have been no progress of Harjinder’s Vintage Flight. There has been a stream of IAF officers and technicians who have thrown themselves behind the Vintage Flight project. Air Chief Marshal Major took the decision to back my idea to reform the Vintage Flight and his successors, Air Chief Marshal Naik and Air Chief Marshal Browne carried that forward. The present Chief, Air Marshal Raha is a strong supporter of the whole project and I have never seen a smile bigger than the one he wore as he sat in the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Spitfire.
Without Mr Nanda’s love of the IAF, and dedication to Harjinder’s memories, there would not have been the material to write this story. Without the assistance of historian, Mukund Murty, there would have been no punctuation in this story; but plenty of historical, or is that hysterical, errors. Jagan Pillarisetti was a constant source of information and he, and his friends, supplied the photographs to add to those of Mr Nanda.
It has not just been a succession of Air Force Chiefs that have been behind my project. Air Vice-Marshal GS Bedi served as India’s Air Attaché in London, always on hand to keep the momentum of the Vintage Flight moving forward with a smile. There has also been the line of UK Air and Naval Advisors in the British High Commission. Ian Draper was there at the start and remained, in a different role, throughout. He has always been on hand to ensure I am fed and watered during my Indian visits, but much more too. A thanks to Charles Ashcroft, especially for my medal, and to Andrew McAuley and Stuart Borland.
Another team there from the beginning has been the staff at the ITC Sheraton hotel, especially the concierges led by my friend, and co-owner of my Royal Enfield Bullet motorbike, Rajesh Mitharwal.
The team at Bloomsbury have been outstanding. It is just a shame the gentleman who started my association with Bloomsbury, Suresh Gopal, is not around to see the f
inal result.
The biggest thank you must go to my family and friends for encouraging me to keep at, what must have seemed like, this crazy idea for a Welshman to write the story of a forgotten Indian military man from a different age. Extra thanks to my brother Paul and to Norman Rhodes for being additional editors for me.
The final ‘thank you’ must go to Harjinder for having such an outstanding life and keeping such comprehensive notes. I just wish we could have met!
