India's Most Fearless 2

by Shiv Aroor

  ‘In that moment, I knew I had to save that fisherman. In that moment, you aren’t thinking about yourself. How can you? Here was an opportunity to save a life. Here was my chance to prove all those years of training and money spent to make me a search-and-rescue diver. There was no time for emotion then. It was my job and I did not think for a moment that I had a choice,’ remembers Saini.

  ‘I don’t know what strength that poor fisherman had left in him as he held on to the rope. The Sea King’s downwash can be extremely menacing. At night, if he had slipped off, there would have been no saving him,’ says Capt. Rajkumar.

  Diver Saini was lowered into the churning sea wearing the rescue harness and with an omni-glow stick so that he could remain visible. He immediately swam up to the boat and grabbed the fisherman, strapped him to the harness and gave the other diver a thumbs-up sign, a signal for him to winch the fisherman up.

  ‘When I swam up to the boat, the fisherman was still refusing to let go. He was totally confused and in fear. In that wild, rough sea, I shouted to him over the sound of the wind and the helicopter rotors above me, trying to calm him down and telling him that we were there to rescue him. He must have thought it was a dream,’ Saini says.

  Twenty feet above, the Sea King was barely holding steady, thanks only to the flying acumen of the two pilots.

  ‘As I was holding the chopper steady, I was watching Saini as he went about the task of strapping the fisherman to the strop. This young diver, with his entire career ahead of him, had thought nothing of seriously risking his life. As the flight commander, I was immensely nervous about losing him. But I was also immensely proud.’

  As the fisherman was winched up, Saini clambered on to the boat, whirling the omni-glow stick in his hand to remain in sight. But a fresh threat had just presented itself.

  The winch with the fisherman had begun to swing wildly about halfway up to the waiting helicopter. The other diver was bringing him up carefully, but he had to ensure the fisherman didn’t hit his head on the undercarriage. With a measure of difficulty, he was brought aboard the SK 528 without injury.

  ‘We got him on board, removed the rescue harness, made him comfortable,’ says Capt. Rajkumar. ‘Then we lowered the rescue harness and winched up Saini as well. Thankfully, this wasn’t difficult because he was fit and an expert swimmer. It could have been worse if there was an emergency or if we had lost sight of him.’

  ‘I positioned myself on top of the inverted boat, staying calm and remaining positive. As the harness approached the water again, I grasped it and was winched up quickly by diver Sumit Raj. There were huge celebrations in our hearts, but we remained silent. It did not sink in what we had just accomplished,’ says Saini.

  The rescued fisherman was in shock, delirious and dehydrated.

  ‘He was like a corpse. He was almost dead. More than physically, he was mentally broken. He had given up on life. We could clearly make that out while we rescued him. He had no emotion, he was totally numb. We gave him water and glucose biscuits. He couldn’t even eat properly, so we had to do it very carefully because his throat was completely parched. He had been at sea for three days. But had displayed phenomenal strength of mind to not let go and to not give up,’ Capt. Rajkumar remembers.

  With the all-clear and its doors shut, the SK 528 climbed and turned, speeding immediately towards the coast. Hovering at 20 feet in those weather conditions would have been dangerous even for a few minutes. Capt. Rajkumar and his men had hovered at that sickeningly low altitude for 28 minutes.

  Climbing up to 200 feet, the Sea King cruised back to Thiruvananthapuram. On the way, Capt. Rajkumar radioed the MV Cosco Beijing , thanking them for the miraculous piece of intelligence and guidance that led to the rescue of one man.

  ‘If the MV Cosco Beijing had not spotted the boat, there would be no rescue. Hats off to them. The fisherman wouldn’t have had a chance in a million if the Chinese ship hadn’t spotted his boat. It was a great humanitarian gesture by them to stop and wait for a rescue.’

  Landing a short while later, the fisherman was wheeled away for treatment.

  ‘Funny thing is, we never got the fisherman’s name. There was no time. As soon as we landed, he was moved to a hospital for treatment. And frankly, I didn’t ask. It never occurred to me. He was a human being and we were doing our job,’ says Capt. Rajkumar.

  The SK 528’s engines had been on for 7 hours with two refuels. The day’s mission was now truly over. The cyclone would continue to wreak havoc along the coast for five more days before dissipating. Of a total of 661 missing in Cyclone Ockhi, 261 persons remain missing from the Kerala coast. Official estimates place the damage caused by the cyclone in Kerala alone at over Rs 15,000 crore.

  ‘This was a massive team effort, with contributions from all the men on board. Helicopters are not like fighter aircraft. If I didn’t have a competent co-pilot and a smart navigator and brave divers, this wouldn’t have been possible,’ Capt. Rajkumar says.

  What made the seasoned helicopter pilot, trained to take calculated risks, make such an enormous leap of faith?

  ‘The script was probably written by someone who lives up there that this one man had to be rescued. And I had a very small part to play in it. The emotions come in waves once the mission is over. I’m not devoid of them. After landing, I was shivering all over. While flying, you’re calm and focused,’ he says.

  Older and more experienced than the other men who flew with him that day, dangerous flying is scarcely new for Capt. Rajkumar. In 1989, he received his first gallantry decoration, a Nao Sena Medal (NM), for saving four scientists in Antarctica during an Indian Navy expedition.

  ‘I had thought that was the most challenging mission I had ever flown. It was a similar mission in snow-blown white-out conditions. During the Ockhi rescue, I was flying in complete blackout conditions,’ says Capt. Rajkumar.

  ‘I can safely say I’ve come full circle.’

  Capt. Rajkumar and the crew of the SK 528 didn’t have time for a celebration that night—they were physically and emotionally drained by the mission. And the next morning, they returned to the air for another day of rescue missions over the cyclone-torn Arabian Sea, rescuing eight more fishermen off the Kochi coast. It would be days before they fully took stock of the mission they had flown—India’s first-ever helicopter rescue at night at sea.

  Saini, whose family in Haryana’s Bhiwani live in that curious mixture of anxiety and pride typical of families of military personnel, says the mission was his life’s most critical and that he hopes to have the opportunity to do it again.

  ‘What can be a bigger achievement than saving someone’s life?’

  On Independence Day 2018, the Indian Navy announced that Saini would be decorated with the Nao Sena Medal for gallantry in the mission, his citation recording that he had displayed exemplary presence of mind and bravery in the face of grave danger.

  On the same day, the Navy announced that Capt. Rajkumar would be decorated with the Shaurya Chakra, India’s third-highest peacetime decoration for gallantry. His citation would note that, ‘The bold decision and daring act of the officer enabled saving a human life in extreme conditions and was possible only because of the sheer determination, courage and decision making abilities of the officer,’ and that he had displayed ‘undeterred commitment to save human life in the most trying conditions accompanied by courage, fortitude and display of valour in the face of danger’.

  In Kochi, there literally wasn’t a moment to celebrate. In August 2018, Kerala was in the devastating grip of historic floods, a catastrophe that forced the Indian Navy’s Southern Naval Command to suspend all training activity and commit all available military assets to rescue and relief operations. On the forefront of this effort, code-named Operation Madad, once again, was Capt. Rajkumar and his trusty Seaking 42B.

  On 16 August, the national media struggled to divide its focus between the intensifying disaster in Kerala and the death of former prime minister Atal Bi
hari Vajpayee. Elaborate state ceremonials for the departed leader diverted the media’s attention at a time when the flood situation had become impossible to ignore.

  The following day, 17 August, as Capt. Rajkumar and his five-men crew lifted off into the rainy haze over Kochi, little did they know that they were about to break a world record in aviation rescue.

  The day started with a gruelling four-hour flying mission in which Capt. Rajkumar and his crew rescued seventeen people from the submerged outskirts of Kochi. After a quick refuel, the helicopter was back in the air to hunt for marooned families scattered across the many devastated colonies beyond the metropolis.

  ‘The weather was dire and marginal for flying with low clouds, poor visibility and rains,’ says Capt. Rajkumar. ‘After flying for about an hour, we located and winched up fifteen people on board. We were returning to the Kochi base when I sighted someone frantically waving a red flag from a rooftop. I turned the aircraft around in order to investigate. I realized the rooftop of that house was low with tall trees all around the vicinity and it was difficult and dangerous to hover anywhere near.’

  Capt. Rajkumar carefully manoeuvred the Sea King close to the roof of the house and winched down a Navy diver. The diver reported back that there were eleven people waiting to be rescued. With fifteen people already on board, in addition to the six crew members, the pilot was faced with a very difficult decision. Daylight was fading, and if Capt. Rajkumar returned to base without rescuing the eleven, they would have had to wait till the following morning. He knew that the rock-steady hover he had managed eight months before out at sea was going to have to return. And this time, with the danger of trees just a few feet away.

  ‘I carefully made the Seaking hover between the tall trees. The winds were gusting and visibility was receding,’ says Capt. Rajkumar. ‘Winching up one person after the other was a time-consuming exercise and I had to continue maintaining the helicopter’s positions in those tough conditions testing the limits of the aircraft.’

  As the eleven were winched up from their submerged home, the crew of the helicopter had to carefully rearrange the fifteen who had already been rescued, so everyone could be safely accommodated. The shifting positions made the helicopter’s hover much more difficult, the shuddering airframe threatening at any moment to careen into the trees.

  After many tense minutes, with the eleven safely pulled aboard, Capt. Rajkumar eased the helicopter out from between the trees and peeled away for the Kochi base. He wouldn’t know it at the time, but that night, he would be informed that the mission had set a world record for the maximum number of persons rescued in a single helicopter sortie—twenty-six. And this was in a militarized Sea King, not specifically built to carry so many people.

  The record, once again, couldn’t pose a distraction. Capt. Rajkumar would fly out early the next morning to continue to hunt for marooned persons.

  By the time relief operations ended, he had rescued 114.

  11

  ‘Half of My Face Was in My Hands’

  Major Rishi Rajalekshmy

  Tral, Jammu and Kashmir

  4 March 2017

  ‘Amma, I may not come back. But be proud of whatever comes to you. Promise me.’

  Standing outside a house in Hafoo village in south Kashmir’s Tral, Maj. Rishi held his mobile phone to his ear with one hand. In the other hand were 15 kg of plastic explosive, wired and ready to be detonated. Some 3500 km away, in Alappuzha, Kerala, it was a wonder that his mother had even answered the phone. It was 7 minutes past midnight, well past her bedtime.

  Hearing the sound of assault rifles firing in the background, Rajalekshmy froze. The phone slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor. She stared down at it. She could still hear her son’s voice coming from it, asking if she could hear him. After a few seconds, she heard him abruptly say he would call her back later. Then, the call was disconnected. Rajalekshmy hurriedly bent down to pick up the phone, dialling his number. But there was no answer. Maj. Rishi had silenced his phone and tucked it into a zipped pocket in his combat trousers. And with a bomb in his hands, he had stepped carefully into the darkness, picking his way through the debris and into the house in front of him.

  In 3 minutes, standing inside that house on a spring night in 2017, the thirty-one-year-old officer’s world would be torn apart. He had called his mother because he had been prepared to die that night. But a nightmare like he had never imagined was about to begin, which would have no end in sight.

  That Saturday in March 2017 couldn’t have started more differently. Maj. Rishi and his company of men from 42 RR were conducting an early morning medical camp for men in Tral, part of a regular humanitarian outreach programme conducted by the army to establish friendships and trust among the local population, whose free will is frequently held hostage by militant and terror groups. The camp that morning was a busy one, with nearly a thousand men with all manner of ailments from villages in Tral lining up for treatment. As a team of Army doctors examined each one of them, giving them injections or little brown paper bags with medicines and tonics, Maj. Rishi chatted with the men in the queue. Most were from villages that fell in the young officer’s area of responsibility. He had met some of them before, played with their children, dined in their homes. They even had a special name for him.

  Khan, they called him.

  As he handed out glass tumblers of steaming hot tea, he looked at the faces in the queue—young and old, some smiling, some haunted, but nearly all relieved in some measure when they saw him. Maj. Rishi of 42 RR couldn’t have been farther from his Kerala home town. In the two years since the Malayali had set foot in Tral, the Kashmiri town infamous as a hotbed of militancy and a safe haven for Pakistani terrorists, he had never felt such a deep sense of comfort and belonging.

  Tral had been unusually peaceful that year. Just eight months earlier, one of its most notorious natives, the young Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, had been shot in an encounter 60 km south, in Kokernag. His death had sparked widespread protests, stone pelting and Pakistan-backed revenge attacks in several parts of the Valley. But in Wani’s own village and the areas surrounding it, where Maj. Rishi’s unit operated, other than sporadic protests, a strange peace had prevailed.

  As the day wore on, word of the medical camp spread and more men emerged from their villages, persuading the team of doctors to extend their timing so that all the patients could be examined. It was just after 3 p.m. when Maj. Rishi received a call from Col. Neeraj Pandey, who had taken over as the CO of 42 RR a month ago.

  ‘My CO told me that an intelligence input had just come in regarding Aaqib Molvi, a terrorist commander whom we had been tracking for a long time, a man who had managed to escape against all odds,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I was at the medical camp with all my men, so I quickly mobilized a Quick Reaction Team (QRT) and we proceeded towards Hafoo village.’

  The officer’s team didn’t need to go back to its base first, since RR companies almost always travel with everything they need for an encounter or a cordon-and-search operation (CASO). This includes weapons, ammunition, bulletproof vests and helmets, and the ingredients required to assemble IEDs—bombs customized for a desired objective.

  Hafiz Muhammad Aaqib alias Aaqib Molvi was no ordinary terrorist. Like Burhan Wani, he was a young Hizbul Mujahideen commander. A native of nearby Awantipora, he had swiftly climbed the ranks of the terror group. His methods and habits in many ways mirrored Wani’s. He had embraced avenues afforded by social media to spread propaganda against the Indian state and to exhort Kashmir’s young to enlist with terror organizations, especially in the aftermath of Wani’s killing. Photographs of him with kohl-lined eyes, carrying a camouflage backpack and an AK-47 rifle, were regular on Hizbul’s recruitment posters and digital feeds. But it was his skill in organizing attacks, and his survival and evasion tactics, that had brought him to the notice of Pakistani intelligence. And that’s why, as Maj. Rishi and his men speeded towards Hafoo village, t
hey were informed that Aaqib Molvi wasn’t alone. A Pakistani JeM terrorist called Saifullah (alias Usama) was with him.

  Intelligence agencies had long suspected that Pakistani terror groups were looking to join forces with the local Hizbul Mujahideen to conduct terror attacks in the Kashmir Valley. Information that a Jaish terrorist was with Aaqib confirmed this. The intelligence input suggested that the two had met a few days earlier at Aaqib’s home in the village next to Hafoo. When Maj. Rishi and his men approached, the two terrorists deployed a crowd of stone-pelters and protesters, using the cover and distraction to run to a house on the edge of Hafoo village.

  ‘Stone pelting started as soon as we arrived,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘Units of the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the CRPF were quickly deployed to keep the pelters at bay so we could focus on the hunt.’

  Maj. Rishi knew this was going to be an extremely delicate operation. If the stone-pelting crowds managed to overwhelm him or pin him and his men down, Aaqib Molvi would simply add another successful escape to his already impressive record. Moving quickly, Maj. Rishi and a soldier from his squad darted into a series of houses to make sure Aaqib and his Pakistani accomplice were not hiding in one of them. Clearing one house after another over the next 30 minutes, the officer emerged into the open, frustrated.

  The two terrorists could have gone in any direction. At the far end of the village street he stood in, he could see stone-pelters being held off by a police cordon. Closer to where he stood, a small group of men stood outside a house. In that kind of volatile situation, the last thing Maj. Rishi was realistically hoping for was local help of any kind. But as he watched that group, their gaze fixed on him, a single pair of eyes silently turned towards a house about 200 m down the path, in the opposite direction. Maj. Rishi stopped, turning to look at the house the man was staring it. When he turned back, the same pair of eyes was fixed on him. Followed by an almost imperceptible nod.