India's Most Fearless 2

by Shiv Aroor

  That August of 2012 was special for another reason. Sqn Ldrs Ajit and Rajeev had a baby boy eleven days before the Shaurya Chakra announcement. Little Rishan hasn’t heard the full story yet. His mother says she will ensure he does, though, and soon.

  Back in Jamnagar, Air Force specialists had finally managed to get to the bottom of the mysterious cockpit fire on Finback 1. A team from the IAF’s base repair depot in Maharashtra established that the source of the fire was a short circuit involving a use-and-throw component in the HUD system. The lesson was a major reminder of how every single component on an aircraft—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—could literally bring it down if it failed to do its job.

  The findings were shared with MiG-29 bases across the country. Three months after the Jamnagar incident, in January 2012, a similar fire broke out in a MiG-29 cockpit at the Adampur fighter base while the jet was still on the ground for safety checks. The repeat incident forced the Air Force Headquarters in Delhi to order a comprehensive safety audit of the MiG-29 fleet to fix the problem. No such incident has been reported in the last seven years, but maintenance crews remain alert nevertheless.

  In 2007, four years before Sqn Ldr Ajit’s close call in the air, the Indian government decided to upgrade its entire fleet of MiG-29s with new engines, radars, weapons and modernized cockpits. The upgrade programme of seventy-eight aircraft is now nearing completion, though the IAF is still fighting a troubling decline in its combat aircraft strength. The IAF remains the only air force in the world still operating old MiG-21 jets, and is hoping to retire them soon with the arrival of the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft Tejas, the Rafale from France and new fighters that it hopes will be built in India.

  Even as successive governments try to modernize the Air Force, pilots don’t have a choice but to wait for better and safer aircraft in the interim.

  Posted as a flying instructor at an air base in the country’s east, Sqn Ldr Ajit—now a Wing Commander—frequently flies with trainee pilots, men who’ve heard about the Jamnagar incident and almost always ask him about it. His reply is brief and almost always the same: ‘Fly with all you have.’

  13

  ‘Not a Sound until They Enter the Kill Zone’

  Major Preetam Singh Kunwar

  Near Badori, PoK

  23 May 2017, 10 a.m.

  The six men stepped out furtively, one by one, separated by a minute each, from a bunker built into the side of a hill. The advancing summer had turned the blanket of ice into rivulets of snowmelt, but the remnants of a harsh winter still clung stubbornly to the terrain. The six men had draped shawls over their phirans to keep warm; they wore camouflage fatigues and combat boots underneath. They stood for 10 minutes on a ledge cut into the mountainside, talking and sipping steaming hot tea from glasses passed around by one of them. Behind them, to their right, rose the towering Badori mountain, 3700 m high, with a couple of Pakistani Army posts that used its height for an unmatched view of the Uri sector. And 5 km ahead was the place the men were headed to next.

  The LoC.

  A small, rectangular gadget, an eyepiece, sat on a short tripod less than 2 feet high as an Indian Army soldier on his stomach peered through it. He scanned the area before him slowly, focusing the lens until he had the sharpest picture he could get from that distance. On an LCD screen, the six men appeared as dark, fuzzy blobs, flickering as the thermal imager captured their movements, a flourish of warm, dark pixels against the cold white of their surroundings. The soldier lowered the imager and looked straight out over the LoC. If those dark figures really were who he thought they were, then they were at least a month early. The soldier quickly picked up his communications console and sent a coded message to his base, which was then relayed to other Army units operating in the area. What it said was: ‘Six men in view near Badori. Five kilometres inside. Suspected infiltration team. Maintaining surveillance.’

  The soldier was part of a reconnaissance unit at a forward post in the Uri sector, manned by men from the 4th Battalion of one of the Army’s most decorated infantry regiments, the Garhwal Rifles. In the 1962 war with China, 4 Garhwal Rifles fought overwhelmingly large Chinese forces in the North-east, inflicting significant damage and earning themselves a rare battle honour. They would thereafter be known as the Nuranang Battalion, in honour of a fearsome, courageous battle that the men from the unit fought in Nuranang in Arunachal Pradesh. Fifty-five years later, the unit was watching over a critical length of the frontier in Jammu and Kashmir. And at an enormously tense time.

  Eight months earlier, Indian Army Special Forces units had crossed 1 the LoC in Uri and neighbouring sectors to strike at terrorist infiltrators. The mission was, in part, an act of revenge against Pakistan-sponsored terror groups for a commando-style attack by the LeT on the Indian Army’s Uri Brigade headquarters, in which nineteen soldiers were killed. The revenge mission resulted in thirty-six terrorists and two Pakistani Army personnel killed across four infiltration launch pads. Over the next eight months, through a typically cruel winter, the Indian Army nursed no illusions that the surgical strikes would put an end to the flow of terror. It was only a question of when the infiltrations would begin again. And the six dark, pixellated figures that flickered on the soldier’s thermal imager confirmed that it was finally time.

  At his unit’s Alpha company base in Uri’s Rustom post, thirty-four-year-old Maj. Preetam Singh Kunwar listened carefully to the incoming message. No one from the unit had had any rest for weeks. Ten days ago, intelligence networks had begun to buzz 2 with the possibility of infiltration just over 10 km away, along the LoC in the Chakothi area, where a parallel operation to intercept infiltrators had begun. The sighting of six more infiltrators near the Badori mountain proved one thing—the final week of May 2017 was about to see the first big burst of infiltrations since the 2016 surgical strikes.

  ‘The surveillance detachment had observed five to six people,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘They alerted everyone over radio and line communications about these men. Our CO, Col. Samarjit Ray, then asked the same surveillance detachment at the LoC to check if the people were still there and whether the suspicious movement was still on. The jawan had first observed that movement at 10 a.m. on 23 May and reported it to everyone in the area. He was ordered to stay put and keep his sights fixed on those men.’

  At noon, another report came in from the surveillance unit at the LoC. The thermal imager was able to paint a slightly more detailed picture than before, but it still couldn’t give precise information on what the six men were doing. The soldier reported that it wasn’t possible to tell if the men were carrying weapons or equipment, but that they were repeatedly moving in and out of a dhok , a mountain hut constructed by local shepherds.

  ‘Bande uss dhok ke andar-bahar jaa rahe hain (The men are going in and out of the dhok),’ the soldier reported.

  At 12.30 p.m., the CO, Col. Samarjit, sent out a communique to the unit’s company commanders, including Maj. Preetam at Rustom, ordering them to be on maximum alert. The Rustom post sat on top of a snow-blown mountain, with other posts on spurs on the ridgeline ahead of it.

  ‘Col. Ray told us there was something fishy on the other side,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘He told me to gather as much information as I could about what was happening across the LoC.’

  The first person Maj. Preetam called was a source across the LoC, asking him to check as quickly as possible who the six men in the shadow of the Badori mountain were, and to get back with any information about their movements. While he waited, the officer also activated his local sources and intelligence units, a network significantly weaker in that area than the one commanded by the Pakistani Army and the terror groups it armed. Asking a source in PoK about the specific presence of a certain group of men always ran the risk of alerting the other side and compelling them to change their plans.

  An hour later, Maj. Preetam’s PoK source called back, telling him that the group of men had crossed the Haji Pir pass, a veritab
le gateway for infiltrators looking to cross the LoC and make their way into the Kashmir Valley. Half a century earlier, in the 1965 war, Indian forces had captured this very pass, situated between the Poonch and Uri sectors, but had returned it to Pakistan following the Tashkent peace negotiations the following year, a decision that is widely rued even today by Army veterans and strategic thinkers. It is through the Haji Pir pass that the lion’s share of Pakistan-sponsored terrorist infiltrators reach the LoC.

  ‘I was told that a group had crossed the pass, but there was no way of knowing what their intent was,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘This intelligence input was corroborated by other agencies and my people on the ground on both sides. We didn’t need to wait long for another input to come in.’

  That night, the surveillance unit at the LoC kept its thermal imagers trained on the location they had been monitoring. For the second time that day, the six figures emerged from their mountain dhok. The moment the new input was relayed back to base, the CO felt all doubts vanish about what was afoot. Immediately, he sent out orders to tighten the entire anti-infiltration grid, which included a sprinkling of forward bases and patrolling teams that would now step up their readiness to the maximum level.

  ‘We set up extra anti-infiltration posts, sent out more patrols and placed more ambush units out there than usual,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘There was little sleep that night. Every man in the sector wondered if this was going to be the infiltration that would break the eight-month lull that followed the surgical strikes.’

  The following morning, 24 May, CO Col. Ray arrived at the Rustom post. In the operations room, he met Maj. Preetam and another young officer, the commander of the battalion’s Ghatak 3 platoon. On a laptop screen, Col. Samarjit showed the two officers a video clip from the thermal imager used by the surveillance unit the previous day.

  ‘The CO asked me what I thought,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘I said those people had no business being in that area in the month of May, as infiltration groups usually assemble at their staging areas only after June, when the snow has melted. He agreed. He also informed us that fresh intelligence had come in indicating that the infiltrators could take any of a number of routes to cross the LoC. So all units in the area needed to stay awake at all costs.’

  Already in a high-pressure stand-off on a daily basis, in May 2017, the Army units in Uri were being tested to their limits of preparedness. The loud political narrative in Delhi surrounding the surgical strikes had painted a picture of an Army that Pakistan messed with at its own peril. On the ground in Uri, soldiers and officers knew that the swell of public attention meant that it was even more imperative that not a single infiltration attempt be allowed to succeed. The daily dance of life and death at the LoC had become tinged with an element of prestige, fuelled by political pronouncements of how the Army had been given full tactical freedom to avenge any ‘misadventures’ 4 by Pakistan.

  Maj. Preetam decided to leave his base and lead a reconnaissance party to the LoC. Before departing with eight men from his company, he again checked in with his network of sources, both local and in PoK. Everything he heard only confirmed what was, by this time, beyond any real doubt—that the six pixellated figures captured by the Army soldier’s thermal imager the previous day were set to be the first terrorist infiltrators since the 2016 surgical strikes.

  ‘I had been the company commander in that area for over eighteen months, and I knew it like the back of my hand, be it the terrain, the likely infiltration routes or even the phases of the moon,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘I checked with my men and assessed which areas were vulnerable and needed to be covered better. We had a shortlist of such patches, the nallahs that had to be covered to prevent infiltration. The entire 161 Infantry Brigade (under which the 4 Garhwal Rifles Battalion operated) was on high alert.’

  At 3 p.m. on 24 May, Maj. Preetam and his squad rolled out from their post, arriving 4 hours later at a point 500 m from the LoC, immediately spreading out to get a wide view of that stretch of frontier.

  ‘If the infiltrators were on the foothills of Badori, this was one of the routes they were likely to take,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘There were two-three nallahs in this area. I had eight other men in my squad. We were fully equipped.’

  The squad had arrived armed for a big fight. They carried AK-47 assault rifles, MGLs, UBGLs, night-vision goggles, grenades, Motorola radio sets and enough rations and ready-to-eat meals to sustain them for a few days. As the sun set, they pulled on their night vision goggles, which allowed them to peer across the LoC to a distance of about a kilometre.

  ‘We had positioned ourselves on a spur to cover the maximum area possible,’ says Maj. Preetam, who was using his night-vision goggles to keep a close watch on the two nallahs that flowed in across the LoC in the kilometre-long stretch that he and his men were now keeping tabs on. ‘We sat there through the night on 24 May, but didn’t see a thing.’

  Switching between surveillance and quick naps, Maj. Preetam’s squad watched the LoC till the sun rose. Early in the morning of 25 May, a radio message came in from the surveillance unit that had first detected the infiltrators two days earlier.

  ‘Six persons detected leaving Badori foothills, moving towards LoC,’ the message said. ‘Movement being kept under observation to the extent possible.’

  The foothills of Badori sat at an elevation that allowed the Indian Army to get a glimpse of the infiltrators. But once they began to move, folds in the mountainous path and patches of thick foliage soon engulfed them. They were last sighted crossing a nallah on their side of the border.

  The Ghatak platoon had placed itself a short distance away along the LoC, on another likely infiltration route. Later that morning, Maj. Preetam, still scanning the stretch of LoC in front of him, called his CO back at the Rustom post.

  ‘I asked for permission to move closer to the LoC,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘I was now certain that I wasn’t going to be able to detect anything from where I stood. I needed to get a better view of the LoC stretch we were monitoring. Col. Samarjit said it’s fine, you and your squad can move ahead. But he had one major concern that he warned us about.’

  Tracts of land close to the LoC on both sides are infested with landmines, planted over the years by both armies as a deterrent to attempts to cross the LoC.

  ‘Move ahead if you have to,’ Col. Samarjit said over his Motorola handset. ‘But I’m telling you right now—I don’t want any landmine casualties. Operation shuru hone se pehle hi mine casualty ho jaaye (Mine casualties even before the operation)—that’s not happening. Make sure each of you treads the ground very carefully.’

  Maj. Preetam and his men were wearing anti-mine combat boots, reinforced footwear with a multilayered composite armoured sole built to dissipate the blast of a landmine and spread it outwards. But these were heavy and didn’t exactly lend themselves to rapid movement.

  ‘The boots affect mobility, no doubt,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘They definitely slow you down a bit and are nowhere near as comfortable as our regular combat boots.’

  The landmines pose a real threat. The Army has maps of where these mines are, but the shifting of soil has meant that mines might have moved many feet over the years and could be lethal to infantry troops. A landmine had struck during the 2016 surgical strikes—a Lance Naik from the Special Forces suffered a serious leg injury in a landmine blast when his team was returning from across the LoC after the offensive operation. Two months later, in November 2016, a soldier of Maj. Preetam’s own battalion had lost his left leg in a mine explosion in that very sector. Maj. Preetam had seen it happen.

  ‘The minefield was an enormous challenge,’ says Col. Samarjit. ‘I made it clear I didn’t want any blood spilt before the operation began. It hadn’t even been a year since we nearly lost one of our boys.’

  ‘I cannot forget that sight,’ Maj. Preetam says. ‘My men were also aware of that incident. It never left our minds. So when the CO kept telling us to beware of the mines, he knew what he was
talking about.’

  The dilemma that morning was real. Maj. Preetam needed to lead his men closer to the LoC while crossing, quite literally, a minefield. They also needed to do it as quickly as possible. And with only eight men on the squad, he couldn’t afford 5 to lose a single man.

  Wondering how they could safely cross the mined stretch in the shortest possible time, the solution presented itself in the form of a six-foot log they found lying on the descent from their position.

  ‘My buddy soldier, Lance Naik Sukhpal Singh, saw that log and had a flash of inspiration,’ says Maj. Preetam. ‘It was basically a simple improvisation. He picked it up and suggested that we use it as a bridge to navigate the minefield.’

  Lance Naik Sukhpal quickly demonstrated what he had in mind to the rest of the squad.

  ‘We will not put the other end of the plank on the ground but place it on a small boulder or a helmet—like a small makeshift bridge,’ the soldier said. ‘And then we will walk across it to ensure we aren’t putting our feet on the ground.’

  The idea was clever, though complicated. But with no other option, Maj. Preetam ordered the squad to begin the breaching operation.

  Before they began, the officer placed an arm around Lance Naik Sukhpal’s shoulder, reminded of the time they had stared death in the face together. In 2011, while deployed in the Keran sector of the LoC in north Kashmir, Maj. Preetam, then a Captain, had saved young Sepoy Sukhpal’s life during an anti-terror operation. The act had only cemented an already close bond.