by Shiv Aroor
Immediately summoning his men, Maj. Rishi jogged towards the house that had been silently pointed out, ordering a cordon to be formed around it. If the two terrorists were indeed inside that house, it was almost certain they would be armed. Maj. Rishi and his men took protective cover behind a low boundary wall around the house.
‘I shouted out, requesting several times that they come out, saying we didn’t want to kill them,’ he says. ‘At this point, we were still not sure if they were in that house. Either way, I didn’t expect them to surrender under any circumstances. That’s not how they’re trained. But I had to give them that chance. The moment after I made my offer, there was firing from the second floor of the house.’
A fierce firefight commenced, with Aaqib and Usama shifting positions on the second floor and firing at the cordon with AK-47s. Policemen joined the operation as well. The exchange continued in waves for nearly 3 hours—bursts of fire punctuated by minutes of silence, as the terrorists reloaded their weapons or planned their next move. It was a stalemate that would end only if the terrorists ran out of ammunition. The steady firing from the second floor suggested that the house they had chosen was something of a safe house, stocked with rifle magazines—clearly enough to draw out a firefight for hours.
But for how long? In any encounter, the forces do their best to finish in daylight. Darkness brings with it obvious challenges. Most of all, it gives the terrorists an exponentially better chance to escape through the cordon and into the night. No search operation in the darkness thereafter stands a chance of tracking them down. Something had to be done before sunset.
‘I called my CO, letting him know that we needed to step up the offensive,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I told him I needed to get an opening into the house. The best way to do that was with an IED. He approved the idea, so I got moving.’
Maj. Rishi asked the explosives expert in his squad, a young soldier, to quickly construct the IED with 15 kg of highly explosive material. Just before last light, at about 6.30 p.m., the officer picked up the IED. Then, under covering fire from two soldiers off to the side, Maj. Rishi held up a bulletproof shield and stepped lightly over the boundary wall and moved towards the house. Following close behind him was his buddy soldier, Lance Naik Avesh Kumar, who fired in short bursts at the top floor till the two reached the front door.
‘The two were still firing from above, so we had to move to the side for cover,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I placed the IED right outside the house, near the front. The terrorists stopped firing for a minute. They were clearly changing positions to protect themselves. They must have known what we were trying to do.’
With hand signals, the officer let the soldiers standing around the house know that he was about to detonate the IED. Then he pushed down on the detonator, which was wirelessly connected to the bomb device. The loud thud of an explosion shook the ground and smashed a big hole in its front wall, causing one half of it to come crashing down. A piece of rock knocked loose by the blast came flying straight at Maj. Rishi, hitting him on the side of the head just below his helmet.
‘The stone hit a vein, so I began to bleed almost immediately,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘My buddy said he would escort me out so I could get medical help and leave the site. I told him the bleeding didn’t matter. It was a small wound. I don’t remember even feeling it.’
With half the house now a smoking mess of debris, Maj. Rishi and Lance Naik Avesh carefully returned to their positions outside the boundary wall. After a 15-minute pause, firing resumed from the top floor. If the terrorists were jolted by the blast, they were showing no sign of it yet. And since there were clearly two streams of fire still, it was clear that both Aaqib and Usama were alive and well enough to keep the fight on.
‘One of my men helped me bandage my head to stop the bleeding,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I remember that we moved a little distance away to do this, because the firing had started again, very aggressively. The IED had given us an opening into the house, but Aaqib and Usama were still holding out. It was time for the next move.’
Darkness had fallen when the squad received word that Maj. Rishi would approach the house again, this time with an armload of Molotov cocktails. These improvised incendiary weapons, made of bottles filled with petrol and a kerosene-soaked cloth as wick, are famous around the world as a weapon of choice for rioters and guerrilla fighters. It is unclear when these simple devices were invented, but the name, in sardonic honour of Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, was a gift from the Finns during the Winter War, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland before the Second World War broke out in 1939. Molotov cocktails were widely used by the Finns to attack Soviet tanks when the latter rumbled in to invade. Eighty years later, nearly identical devices had been assembled in that tiny village in south Kashmir.
Maj. Rishi’s squad needed to try smoking out the two terrorists by starting a fire, and Molotov cocktails seemed their best option. The ones they made were with half-filled rum bottles and kerosene-soaked rags.
‘I stepped into the compound again and tossed one Molotov into the kitchen area from the outside,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘There was an immediate flare-up and the fire caught. There was carpeting and wooden panelling inside, so the fire intensified quickly, with a lot of smoke. I flung a few more of the Molotovs deeper inside the house and stepped away. It was now a proper fire. I was hoping this would force the terrorists to jump down or try and escape. That would be our moment to get them.’
But Aaqib and Usama stayed put. The fire raged for 20 minutes, burning large parts of the house, and then died out. The two terrorists were proving to be extremely resilient and were showing signs of having received the sort of combat survival training that was only possible to get from a military force. It is well known that Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists train at Pakistani Army-run camps in PoK, where the curriculum has rapidly evolved from basic hit-and-run tactics to full-fledged commando-style training. It was clear by now that Aaqib and Usama were among the elite in their batches.
As he watched the fire die out, Maj. Rishi knew that another big move had failed to push the mission to a conclusion. And that each passing hour was making it steadily more unacceptable that the encounter end in failure.
‘At midnight, I called my CO again,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘By this time, he had arrived at the encounter site. I told him I would like to go back in with another IED.’
Col. Neeraj heard out his officer, perhaps wondering what it was that gave Maj. Rishi the nerve to volunteer to venture into the house again with another IED. The bandage on his head was soaked in blood, but the officer didn’t seem even remotely tired or weakened from the blood loss. Col. Neeraj asked Maj. Rishi if he was absolutely sure about the move he was proposing. Surely, someone else from the squad could be sent in to plant the device. But Maj. Rishi politely refused, requesting that he be permitted to proceed inside with the second IED. Col. Neeraj relented.
‘I don’t remember any fatigue. I was pumping adrenaline and very keen to finish the mission,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I’m not saying I’m a hero or anything, but when you’re in the middle of an operation with your men, you don’t feel pain. I had forgotten about my head injury.’
Maj. Rishi asked the explosives expert to assemble two IEDs with 15 kg of explosives each. When they were ready, he held a quick briefing with his men, telling them that if the explosions didn’t kill the terrorists, they would at least have nowhere left to hide—and would therefore have no option but to attempt to break the cordon and run away into the darkness. Under no circumstances should that be allowed to happen, he told them.
The two IEDs were brought to Maj. Rishi. The moment he picked one up, he felt a strange foreboding. Fighting terrorists in a situation like this was always a life-and-death affair, but for the first time that day, Maj. Rishi sensed personal danger. And that’s why, even though he knew his mother would be fast asleep at her home in Kerala, he decided to call her.
‘Maybe my mother had an intuition
too, and that’s why she picked up the phone despite it being so late,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I just wanted to hear her voice. She dropped the phone when she heard the firing from the house starting again. I tried to say a few words to calm her, but she couldn’t hear me. I put the phone away and picked up the second IED. There was no time to spare. I knew that back home, my mother would spend the whole night praying.’
The firing from the second floor was coming in a furious non-stop barrage now, without the usual pauses. The two terrorists were alternating their fire, so there were no pauses when one of them reloaded with ammunition. They were clearly becoming desperate and it was likely that they were holed up in a corner on the remaining part of the top floor. With the sort of training they had demonstrated that evening, desperation could make them even more dangerous to deal with.
‘I went inside with the IEDs in both my hands,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘There was a lot of firing and action. Once inside, I used my walkie-talkie to speak with Lance Naik Avesh, whom I had asked to stay behind, right outside the house. He wanted to accompany me inside to plant the IEDs, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for the rest of my life if anything happened to him.’
When Maj. Rishi had taken charge of his company in early 2015, 42 RR was going through its darkest phase. On 27 January that year, the unit’s then CO, Col. Munindra Nath Rai, had died fighting terrorists in Tral. He had led the operation from the front, but was shot in the head as the hiding terrorists burst out of the house in a bid to escape. Hailed for his leadership in fronting the assault, he will be remembered even beyond the Army, for something else. Two days after his death, images would go viral across the country of his inconsolable eleven-year-old daughter, Alka, saluting her father’s casket while screaming lines from her father’s parent regiment, the Gorkha Rifles, ‘Keta 9 GR ko ho ke hoina (Is this boy from 9 GR or not)?’ and joining in the refrain from her father’s comrades, ‘Ho, ho, ho (Yes, yes, yes, he is ours, he’s our pride!).’ To the Army and beyond, this would be telling of how the officer had ensured that even his children imbibed the fearless spirit that the Gorkhas are famous for.
The 42 RR didn’t have the time to mourn, but grieving it was when Maj. Rishi arrived. He had spent the first few days promising his men that he wouldn’t let them come to harm, no matter what.
‘I told my boys I will never send you back in coffins or with broken limbs,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I might die or take a bullet, but even though you are my strength, I will never let a bullet get past me to you. That was my promise. The battalion was tense and grieving. Before the CO’s death, two jawans from the unit had also died in operations. The boys were restless but focused. We trained hard together to get through that phase.’
Two years later, the scene was still Tral. And the two terrorists holed up inside that half-destroyed house in Hafoo were probably contemplating a final bid to escape Maj. Rishi’s cordon, a full 9 hours after the encounter began.
‘I entered the house with two IEDs, crawling in through the huge hole blown by the first IED. I found a spot near the undamaged part of the ground floor to place the IEDs in my hand. Then I crawled back out.’
Once outside, he spoke on his walkie-talkie with his buddy, calling for a 30-second countdown to detonate the IEDs. The countdown began as Maj. Rishi crept away from the house. Two IEDs would be double the intensity of the first. But from a safe distance, with 10 seconds to go for the detonation, Maj. Rishi clicked his walkie-talkie back on and asked the soldier holding the detonator to pause.
‘It suddenly struck me that if I placed the IEDs a little deeper inside the house, they would have a more destructive effect. So I told my men to wait, crept back inside and went to pick up the IEDs. As I was about to, I saw a shadow move down the shattered staircase and instantly, there was a flash of fire. I was thrown off my feet and fell to the ground. In that moment, I fired back at the shadow with a long burst of ammunition, hitting him straight and dropping him right there.’
Three bullets hit Maj. Rishi. One blew his helmet right off his head. Two more bullets hit his nose and jaw, ripping a large part of his face off.
‘I was thrown several feet by the impact, but I was lucid. I couldn’t tell what damage had been caused, but I realized that I couldn’t speak and my vision was a little blurred because of the blood. But I couldn’t feel any pain. I started crawling out from the house and I remember thinking in those moments about action movies, where you see people function even after getting shot. I’m telling you that it’s possible. I didn’t feel weak at all. In fact, I don’t think I had ever felt stronger.’
Maj. Rishi saw Lance Naik Avesh run towards him as he crawled out, but raised a hand to stop him. The second terrorist hadn’t been accounted for yet and was probably still alive on the top floor. With cover fire from his men, the officer exited the house from one side, dropping off a metre-high platform, and then began moving on his elbows towards the outer boundary wall. Halfway back, Lance Naik Avesh and two other soldiers leapt into the compound and pulled him out. He stood up, and the other officers reeled when they saw what was left of his face.
‘I couldn’t speak, as a large part of my face had come off,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I signalled with my hands to them that the second terrorist was likely still inside, even though the firing had stopped.’
Unknown to the team, the Jaish terrorist, Usama, had been hit in the firefight and was incapacitated on the top floor. He would die shortly thereafter.
Escorted from the encounter site, Maj. Rishi was bundled into a jeep that sped to a helipad nearby. The Army medic who accompanied him couldn’t help but stare at Maj. Rishi’s injuries. He knew there was nothing he could do with the emergency equipment he had. This needed specialists. The officer’s eyes were open but clouded now, and he was sitting upright. But his face was a bleeding, gory mess of flesh and bone. Loaded into a helicopter a few minutes later, he was quickly flown to the 92 Base Hospital in Srinagar.
As the helicopter flew at low altitude towards Srinagar, a soldier from Maj. Rishi’s unit phoned the injured officer’s wife. Maj. Anupama Rishi, also an Army officer, was posted at the 92 Base Hospital with the Military Nursing Service. She was awake when the call came through, waiting for her husband to check in with her before she called it a night. Hearing that he was en route and badly injured, she got dressed and rushed to the trauma ward to wait for him.
‘When I arrived, I saw Anupama waiting with the doctors,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘The doctor who examined me went blank when he saw me. I could tell from his face that he knew there was nothing he could do for me in Srinagar. My eyes were closing because of the blood, but I was conscious. The doctor repeatedly asked me, “Are you awake?” I couldn’t speak, so I signalled to him with a thumbs-up. I also took his hand to try and communicate that he was looking too worried.’
The doctors, some of the country’s finest and trained to bring back men very nearly from the dead, were on edge. The officer’s injuries suggested that he should, at the very least, be unconscious. Maj. Rishi was not only conscious, but lucid too. The doctors continued to speak with the Major, keeping him engaged and telling him to relax. They worried that if he became fully aware of the nature of his injuries—they looked far worse than they felt, apparently, at the time—adrenaline would jog his circulatory system and he would lose blood even faster.
After performing emergency procedures that night to contain the blood loss, the 92 Base Hospital was forced to recommend that Maj. Rishi be sent as soon as possible to the Army’s premier Research and Referral Hospital in Delhi. Late the next morning, the Major and his wife would fly to Delhi on an IAF An-32.
The same day, the United Jihad Council, the Pakistan Army’s purported umbrella outfit for unified command and control of anti-India militant and terror groups active in Jammu and Kashmir, issued a statement mourning the loss of the two terrorists. It said: ‘The two slain militants, Hafiz Muhammad Aaqib alias Aaqib Molvi and Saifullah alias Usama are the two shining s
tars of Jammu Kashmir who will always shine like gems. Their sacrifices will always be remembered.’
Like the crowds that gathered for Burhan Wani, large crowds would gather at the funeral of Aaqib too. The man who had killed him would see the pictures days later, when he was finally allowed to sit up.
‘For forty-five days, I could not speak a word,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I could not breathe through my mouth or nose—I had a tube in my throat. All my food intake was also through a tube. In a matter of weeks, I lost 20 kg. I was reduced to skin and bones.’
When Rajalekshmy saw her son at the Army hospital in Delhi a few days after he was admitted, she said nothing. Her daughter-in-law had requested her not to break down in front of her son.
The injury had brought to a violent stop Maj. Rishi’s tenure in the Kashmir Valley. But losing most of his face had, in his mind, destroyed something else too.
‘Somewhere deep inside, I had also wanted to be a model, and most of my loved ones knew that. Maybe that’s why Anupama ordered people not to cry in front of me. She was very strong. We had laughingly discussed how I would seek permission from the Army to do some modelling. But there I was, totally disfigured.’
One of Maj. Rishi’s first visitors was the Army Chief, Gen. Bipin Rawat, himself. The General had heard about the young officer’s courage—and condition—and wished to meet him in person.
‘When the chief came, my eyes were filled with tears, because I was in a situation where my chief was standing in front of me and I could not even get up and salute him,’ says Maj. Rishi.
As the General spent time with Maj. Rishi and his family, he was briefed about the officer’s story, starting with how Maj. Rishi had left a ‘safe’ career in civil government service to join the Army so he could literally fight for the country.
‘It sounds clichéd these days, I guess, but it’s true—I had dreamt of picking up a weapon and fighting for the country since childhood,’ says Maj. Rishi, who has had eight reconstructive surgeries since the incident, and is yet to fully recover. ‘Whenever the national anthem is played, I get goosebumps. I don’t know what that makes me, but I really wanted to protect this land.’
