by Shiv Aroor
Rishi had studied engineering in college in Kerala and had been employed as an assistant engineer with the Kerala State Electricity Board upon graduating. A year later, he took a special selection board examination to join Air India as a direct entrant. Posted to Mumbai international airport, he would quickly grow restless, his boyhood dreams of combat and weaponry luring him to IMA, Dehradun. For the first time since his studies had ended in Kerala, he finally felt he was on the path to fulfilment. In 2010, he would be commissioned into the Army’s Mechanised Infantry, a regiment raised to provide combat mobility to infantry troops, functioning with armoured vehicle units.
Over the next five years, he would serve in the deserts of Rajasthan, and then be dispatched to the Congo to join India’s UN Peacekeeping Force. On a month’s break in India, he and Anupama got married. When he returned to India after the mission in Congo, he finally had the opportunity to go down the path he had his heart set on—one that led to the Kashmir Valley. He quickly opted for the RR, arriving in Srinagar in early 2015.
‘I told my CO, if you are sending me somewhere, please send me to the ground, and not as staff,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I just want to be with my weapon. With men in the field. My mother had told me, if you want to join the Army, then you have to lead men. Even if you are wounded, you have to lead them. Her words are always with me. Maybe that’s why I called her the night of the incident.’
Dispatched to Tral to command a company, Maj. Rishi was soon immersed in the daily tensions of counter-insurgency and anti-terror operations, a universe away from the life he had chosen to leave behind.
‘I never thought for a moment about my old life. I feel very strongly for this country, and my weapon is an addiction for me. When you hear bullets fly, when a firefight begins, the rush you feel is incomparable. I always look forward to the next operation.’
That is probably why, a year into his duties with 42 RR, his then CO, Col. Vikram Kadyan, would frequently slap his back and say, ‘Kabhi toh darr liya kar (You should be a little afraid sometimes), you should be afraid of something.’
For all the combat he would be immersed in, Maj. Rishi knew he was in one of the most complicated and difficult places in the country. Before he joined the Army, he had watched the Kashmir conflict fester endlessly, its intensity ebbing and flowing. On the inside and dealing with them first-hand, the complexities were amplified in all their terrifying detail. If fighting terrorists was the job he had signed up for, he knew that an even more difficult duty was to win the hearts and trust of the Kashmiri people. He had been sent into a notoriously hostile hotbed of militancy and terror—Tral, the south Kashmir stronghold of the Hizbul Mujahideen, and a place well known for the implacably anti-Army stance of its people.
‘I loved Tral from the moment I set foot there,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘There is something magical about that place.’
With a stance that was low on aggression and high on cheerful friendliness, Maj. Rishi embarked on patrols with his men in the villages of Tral, taking every opportunity to befriend residents or help them with their everyday problems.
In late 2016, patrolling soon took Maj. Rishi and his men to Tral’s Dadasara village, home to Hizbul Mujahideen’s most infamous commander at the time. After they had searched Burhan Wani’s family home, his father, Muzaffar Ahmad Wani, a high school principal, stepped up to Maj. Rishi.
‘His father offered me Zamzam ka paani 1 and made me drink it with him,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘It was a very humbling experience. We were there to get information about his son. And we spoke to him about it. But relations remained decent.’
Over the next few months, ‘Khan’, as Maj. Rishi came to be known among local residents, would become that friendly face in the fauj , an officer whose Hindi was tellingly inflected with a Malayalam accent, but who refused to give up on his efforts to improve at the language, even learning bits of the local tongue.
‘We established a very good rapport with the people of Tral,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘Operations continued, but there was never an attack on my camp. When we patrolled, stones were never pelted at us, like they are in certain other locations. We knew there were tensions, but we were succeeding in convincing perhaps a few that we had good intentions and wanted to keep everybody safe.’
In medical camps, like the one he had organized the morning of his fateful encounter, Maj. Rishi would frequently treat children who would line up with a common winter ailment—burns on their hands from spilling boiling tea.
‘I would treat the children and make friends with them while extracting a promise that they would not join militancy. These were just friendly chats, but I know that we were making a connection. I was holding those little hands and treating them. I knew the same hands were highly unlikely to pick up a rock against me. These are really good kids. They have a lot of honour.’
In early 2016, a huge protest erupted at a village in Tral. Hundreds of residents from nearby villages joined in to agitate against power outages in the area. This was an area that came under Maj. Rishi’s operational responsibility, even if he had no control over the corruption-ridden civil utility supply system.
‘I was advised not to go to the protest area because people there were very agitated,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I remember thinking they had every right to be agitated if they had been deprived of electricity for days on end. With my men, I went there right away. When the protesters saw me, an amazing thing happened. They removed the roadblocks, and they were dispersed by some seniors among them. I went up to the elderly men and told them I would not leave until I had solved their problem, whatever it was. When they told me about the electricity nightmare, I called the District Collector and requested him to urgently send an engineer to fix the problem. He arrived a short while later and sorted out the power situation. I needed the people to know that I lived among them and wanted to serve them.’
The friendships established this way would often lead to awkward, uncomfortable incidents. Many of the elderly men that Maj. Rishi had befriended, and whose trust he had earned, were parents of known militants. When intelligence inputs arrived about their presence in the area, Maj. Rishi would be forced to place those friendships aside, but always with dignity.
‘They knew I would never trouble them unnecessarily,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I would bother them at home only if there was a specific input. And they understood my compulsions. Sometimes they would voluntarily give me information, confirming that their militant son had visited but had departed to an unknown location. They were very cooperative with me all throughout. We never irritated them or harassed them.’
Restricted to Delhi as a result of his injuries, Maj. Rishi has had eight surgeries so far, each of them nearly 14 hours long. His face has had to be reconstructed with metal prosthetics, with a new jaw fashioned from bone drawn from his leg.
‘It takes almost two months to recover from each surgery,’ he says. ‘By the time I am strong enough to stand up, it’s time for the next surgery.’
The officer needs several more surgeries over eighteen months—and even then, it is uncertain if he will be declared fit for combat again.
‘Never have I slept for more than 5 hours,’ he says. ‘From that to this sedentary life, where there is anaesthesia everywhere I look.’
In August 2017, with a black band covering the lower half of his face, Maj. Rishi would receive a Sena Medal (Gallantry) on India’s Independence Day. But the future remains a cruel question mark.
‘I want to get back to Kashmir,’ says Maj. Rishi. ‘I need to get back into combat. I will try all my options, even the NSG. I need to get back on my feet, and with a weapon.’
The morning after the encounter, Maj. Rishi’s men and seniors received an unusual barrage of calls from residents across villages in Tral. Word had spread about his injuries. Each one of the callers asked if the young officer would survive. One of them, a teenager perhaps, had broken down on the phone.
‘Khan sahab ko wapas bhejo,’ he said, in falteri
ng Hindi. ‘Hum unko theek karenge (Please send Khan Sahab back. We will heal him).’
12
‘I Repeat! Fire in My Cockpit!’
Squadron Leader Ajit Bhaskar Vasane
Airspace over Gujarat
10 October 2011
It was the one place that fighter pilots in the area were forbidden from flying anywhere near. If they saw it on the horizon, standard operating procedure made it compulsory for them to swerve their jets away well before they got anywhere within a 2-km radius. Flying closer than that safety margin could mean serious career trouble. But when the site loomed into view that October afternoon in 2011, sitting in his MiG-29 at 10,000 feet, Sqn Ldr Ajit Bhaskar Vasane knew he had only seconds to make a decision.
A decision nobody in the IAF had ever been forced to make.
The out-of-bounds site to the young pilot’s left was easily the most dangerous place to fly an aircraft. It was the world’s largest crude oil refinery, the Reliance Industries complex outside Jamnagar in Gujarat’s Gulf of Kutch. An aircraft crashing anywhere in the sprawling 7500-acre facility could result in a devastating inferno, the likes of which had never been seen in India. And with over a million barrels of petroleum churned out from the site every day, a fiery visitor from the sky had the potential of sending destructive shock waves throughout India’s economy as well as the world’s volatile oil markets.
Sqn Ldr Ajit’s mind was racing. A paralysing choice had just presented itself to him. He needed to get back to base in Jamnagar as quickly as humanly possible. Before he lost control of his jet. But his cockpit maps had confirmed that the shortest flight path back wouldn’t just require him to violate the 2-km safety restriction, it would actually take him directly over the refinery. If he obeyed protocol and flew just outside the 2-km radius, in the increasingly likely event that he lost control of the jet, there was still every chance that it might helplessly careen out of the sky and drift straight into the refinery complex. The third option was to risk himself and the aircraft and fly a long circuitous flight path away from the refinery and back to base.
As he struggled to decide, Sqn Ldr Ajit wondered if the aircraft would hold on. If it would stay in one piece. If he would stay conscious. Because, despite over 600 flight hours logged in a decade of flying fighter aircraft, he had never been strapped into a more hostile cockpit.
Nine minutes earlier, at 3.30 p.m., Sqn Ldr Ajit had roared into the air in his MiG-29 from the Jamnagar Air Force base, the country’s westernmost military air station. A second MiG-29 with his wingman, Sqn Ldr Rohit Singh, lifted off seconds later in pursuit. Climbing into a perfectly clear sky, the two pilots from the IAF’s 28 Squadron were out to perform a supersonic intercept mission, a simulated confrontation to rehearse how they would respond 1 if a Pakistani military aircraft were to violate Indian airspace.
The two fighter pilots throttled up on their jets to position themselves 80–100 km apart from each other in a patch of designated training airspace at a height of 30,000 feet, where Sqn Ldr Ajit would simulate a hostile air intruder and his wingman would rehearse an aggressive interception, and if necessary, a shoot-down. All electronically, of course. If this were a real-life interception, Sqn Ldr Rohit would likely fire, as a last resort, a Russian Vympel R-73 heat seeking air-to-air missile at the unwelcome intruder. That morning, both MiG-29s in the air were armed with missiles, but there would be no firing—the brutal air drill was purely to hone the flying reflexes of the pilots, and the time-tested standard operating procedures, in the event of a hostile air intrusion.
Back in Jamnagar, a young Flight Lieutenant from the squadron manning the air traffic control cleared the two pilots to begin their manoeuvres. The 28 Squadron, operating a pack of eighteen MiG-29s, is codenamed ‘The First Supersonics’ for being the first squadron to be equipped with a fighter that could break the sound barrier, the MiG-21, in the late 1960s. The MiG-29 could easily throttle up to over twice the speed of sound, but the two pilots would be keeping their velocities in check. The IAF does not permit supersonic flights over populated areas as the deafening ‘boom’ that fighter jets produce when they break the sound barrier can shatter glass panes on the ground and cause panic.
Sqn Ldr Ajit pointed his jet west to fly a long, curved loop 120 km from Jamnagar and back towards the mainland to simulate the intrusion. He squinted as he pulled up, bringing the aircraft head-on with the sun, flooding the cockpit with blinding light. The pilot adjusted his oxygen mask and pulled down the integrated tinted visor on his helmet, crucial to protecting the eyes during such flights.
Suddenly, the MiG-29’s head-up display (HUD), a pane of glass sitting on top of the aircraft’s ‘dashboard’, which superimposes aircraft instrument readings and mission data onto the pilot’s viewpoint, flickered and blanked out. As the name suggests, an HUD allows a pilot to keep their ‘head up’ without having to lower their gaze at maps or instruments on the cockpit panel. The HUD going blank wasn’t, by itself, a catastrophic emergency. But what had caused it was something unheard of. Something that had never been documented or reported before on any MiG-29 anywhere in the world.
At 30,000 feet, Sqn Ldr Ajit called out to the young Flight Lieutenant at Jamnagar base air traffic control.
‘Finback 1 reporting fire in the cockpit,’ Sqn Ldr Ajit said over the radio, keeping his voice as casual as possible. It was important not to cause panic if there was no need to. Except, if there was ever a cause for panic in the cockpit, this would be it.
The stunned radar controller wasn’t sure if he had heard Finback 1, Ajit’s radio call sign, correctly.
‘Finback 1, did you just say fire? Can you confirm it?’
Sqn Ldr Ajit replied, ‘I repeat, there’s fire in the cockpit.’
‘This is not engine fire?’
‘No, I repeat. It’s cockpit fire,’ said the pilot. ‘Turning urgently back towards base. Need guidance and permission to descend.’
‘Finback 1, base 08085 [80 degrees and 85 km away]. Let’s get you out of there, Sir. Let’s get you home.’
Flying 60 km to Sqn Ldr Ajit’s left and on the same radio frequency, his wingman, Sqn Ldr Rohit, heard the terse radio exchange. With permission from the ground, he immediately swerved his jet rightward to get closer to his friend, to see if he could help from the outside. As he banked towards Finback 1, he wondered just how he would be able to help at all.
When the HUD had flickered off, Ajit had immediately spotted the reason—a small fire right below it. At first, he thought he was hallucinating. It could be a symptom of hypoxia from decreased oxygen supply owing to a possibly faulty oxygen supply system. The condition can have deadly consequences—a fighter pilot’s mind can blank out completely, for instance. They could even begin to imagine things or experience spatial disorientation, rendering them incapable of taking informed decisions in an unforgiving environment.
‘A fire in the cockpit? No way,’ remembers Sqn Ldr Ajit about that day. ‘I was certain that classic hypoxia was messing with my mind. I thought someone had just lit a matchstick in the cockpit and offered me a cigarette.’
The fire had started small, about the size of an index finger, but was quickly growing. Ominously, it was filling the cockpit with thick, black smoke. But the most obvious danger flowed through the MiG-29’s shuddering airframe—over 4000 litres of fuel in a series of tanks in the fuselage and wings that could easily ignite if the fire spread. It would take just a small lick of flame in one of those tanks to destroy the aircraft in seconds.
Sqn Ldr Ajit knew that the first thing he needed to do was check his oxygen supply. He could still breathe through the thickening smoke, but not for long. And it was imperative that he rule out hypoxia, so he could get busy dealing with the emergency at hand. The drill had to be followed. He tilted his head to the left to check the oxygen regulator in the side console. There was no malfunction visible. The system appeared to be generating a steady supply of oxygen. So this wasn’t hypoxia. This was a real fire in the cockpi
t, and it was spreading fast.
‘Good news, I wasn’t hallucinating,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘Bad news, I was now positive I had a proper fire in the cockpit and had to do something about it before it was too late.’
In seconds, the fire spread to the visor attached to the HUD. The thick dark smoke swirling within the cockpit carried with it the odour of burning plastic. Worse, the smoke was depositing a layer of soot on the aircraft’s glass canopy, blocking out the pilot’s frontal visibility.
‘The time lag between spotting the fire and taking recovery action was less than 60 seconds,’ says Sqn Ldr Ajit. ‘It’s a different matter that that one minute seems almost eternal when you’re in the air. Ask any fighter pilot. They’ll tell you that 60 seconds in an emergency is longer than a year on the ground.’
Guided by the radio controller at Jamnagar, Sqn Ldr Ajit had carefully manoeuvred his jet and was cruising in the direction of the base. Deprived completely of outside visibility, he was now peering through the thick smoke at the clouded cockpit instruments. He would have to fly the fighter plane with a burning cockpit for another nine minutes if he was to make it safely back to the base, where preparations for an emergency landing had begun.
Hearing about the emergency, more officers had rushed to ground control at Jamnagar. But there was little they could do. Sqn Ldr Ajit chuckled over the radio as he updated the team on the ground. Both he and the men on the ground knew the next few minutes could either end in a messy disaster, or give the IAF a new entry for its flight safety manual. Either way, there was no advice, no precedent. And no earlier record of such an emergency that he or the ground team could fall back on. The pilot knew this was entirely on him.
