India’s Most Fearless

by Aroor, Shiv

  Emerging from within the operations room was the Corps Commander, Lt. Gen. Dua. The no-nonsense General had a broad smile on his face as he approached the two officers. Maj. Tango straightened up immediately, saluting the senior officer.

  As the Major and Lieutenant General shook hands, a waiter appeared bearing a tray with glasses half-filled with the rich amber of Black Label whisky.

  ‘Bring the bottle,’ the General ordered the waiter, ‘these men eat glasses’—a fact Maj. Tango confirms as being true.

  The waiter disappeared, quickly reappearing with a full bottle of Black Label. Lt. Gen. Dua grabbed the bottle, ordered Maj. Tango to open his mouth and began pouring. Then Maj. Tango, a full 5 ranks junior to the 3-star officer, returned the favour. It was only after the officers had had a chance to recover from the well-earned whisky celebration that an operational debrief took place.

  Maj. Tango was now the secret centrepiece of the Indian military’s modern history. An Army Dhruv helicopter arrived at the Srinagar Corps headquarters a few hours later, flying him straight to Udhampur, the headquarters of the Army’s Northern Command. There he would meet Lt. Gen. Deependra Singh Hooda, the officer who vetted the final targeting options before they were presented to the Army Headquarters and government.

  More whisky followed. Maj. Tango and his men hadn’t eaten for a whole day. In his mind, he remembers thinking, ‘Koi khaana de do. Saare daaru pila rahe hain (Could we get some food too, please? Everyone’s giving us only alcohol).’

  In January 2017, 5 men from the 3 teams were decorated with the Shaurya Chakra, while 13 received Sena Medals for gallantry during the assaults. The COs of the two Para-SF units involved were awarded Yudh Seva Medals for their planning and leadership from Srinagar during the operation.

  Maj. Tango went on to receive the highest decoration of the lot—a Kirti Chakra. His citation read:

  By his decisive thinking, professional approach, warrior ethos, exemplary leadership and courage beyond the call of duty, Maj. Mike Tango ensured the execution of the task flawlessly with clockwork precision and eliminated 4 terrorists in close quarter combat.

  Life changed drastically for Maj. Tango after the surgical strikes.

  ‘Life has changed completely. It’s more restricted now. But I cannot stop being an SF officer. That’s who I am,’ Maj. Tango says, referring to his inevitable status as a ‘person of interest’ for Pakistan and the terror groups his men smashed on the intervening night of 28–29 September.

  Maj. Tango, 35 years old at the time this book was written in 2017, knew from the age of 6 that he wanted to be in the military. He remembers sitting wide-eyed on the edge of his parents’ bed at their Mumbai home, watching the 1980s film, Vijeta, in stunned silence.

  ‘I used to watch the movie once every day for months. I couldn’t pull myself away from it. I knew I had to be in the military,’ Maj. Tango says. ‘My parents freaked out so much that they taped over the Vijeta tape.’

  Over the next 12 years, Mike Tango’s obsession with a future in the military would only intensify. In 2000, he joined the National Defence Academy (NDA) in Pune after failing to crack the test twice. While the Indian Air Force was a teenaged Mike’s first choice, inspired by his memories of Vijeta, he would have to settle for the Army. He was not disappointed. He had just taken his first steps into the military, and that was all that mattered.

  Over the next few weeks, Mike would be mesmerized by stories from J&K shared with him by a member of his directing staff, an officer from another elite Para-SF unit. Mike had already decided that he wanted to be in the infantry, clear in his mind that he would not fit into any other combat arm. And by the time he had finished at the NDA, it would be nothing but the SF. The young cadet’s new ideal was cemented as he joined the Indian Military Academy (IMA) in Dehradun. His platoon commander at the IMA was from his future unit in the Para-SF. There would be no looking back for Mike Tango.

  In 2004, Mike Tango was commissioned into the Army’s Para-SF as a Lieutenant. The initial 6-month probation phase was a finely crafted period that would be the final boot camp before true SF operations. Over 3 months, Mike and other young officers were put through tests of mental toughness, integrity and honesty.

  ‘In probation, everyone is assessing you. Are you a team leader? Are you a good support guy? Physically, everyone who joins the SF team is tough. They attempt to break you mentally,’ Maj. Tango remembers.

  None of the mental tests would of course preclude or replace physical trials. That would intensify dramatically during SF probation.

  ‘The attempt is to try and break you, to find your breaking point, to see where you give up. The point is of course not to. But everyone has a breaking point,’ says Maj. Tango.

  The officer remembers occasionally considering giving it all up and quitting service during his probation. Sleep deprivation and stress tests had brought hell, in his words, to daily existence. Maj. Tango will never forget being thrown into a gutter or being ordered to dissect rotting carcasses of animals. It would dawn on the young officer that the seemingly sadistic rituals of probation were all part of the indispensable toughening-up that made the SF special.

  ‘You can’t freak out in a bad situation. No matter what happens, you have to deal with what’s in front of you. That’s what probation teaches you.’

  A special memory remains of being dragged out of his bed at 0200 hours and being ordered to write a persuasive 1000-word essay on how the menstrual cycle of a former Pakistani leader affects the monsoon in West Bengal.

  ‘The attempt is to throw anything at you and see how you deal with it. There are no options. You deal. Or you’re out.’

  Mike completed his 6-month probation in just under 4 months. He was dispatched quickly to the Kashmir valley to begin what would be an explosively active decade in the state. By October 2004, just a few months into service, the young officer had managed to prove beyond doubt that he would be a successful SF warrior. But the unit had decided that the young officer, high on his abilities, needed to suffer just a little bit longer. And so an elaborate plan was hatched by his seniors. It began with a summons to north Kashmir’s Lolab Valley on Dussehra, 2004, and orders to embark on a mission fabricated to end without success. When Mike returned to the field headquarters that evening, he was roundly castigated.

  ‘I was shouted at very harshly and told I wasn’t fit for the SF,’ Mike recalls. ‘The next day in Srinagar, I got an even worse shelling by my Team Commander and CO. They said I lacked aptitude. I was shocked and angry. I had trained so hard for this.’

  The prank was a meticulous one. Mike’s seniors had even procured a movement order posting him out of the SF to a regular infantry unit.

  ‘I was given a movement order to 18 Mahar Regiment and ordered to proceed immediately to a transit camp. I packed my bags and was on the verge of tears. I had never been so low.’

  Just as Mike was leaving, a waiter from the officers’ mess jogged up to him, informing him that the CO wanted to meet him one last time. Mike remembers being in no mood to meet his seniors, and simply wanting to leave as quickly as possible. Fighting back a tide of frustration, he decided to follow the waiter to the mess.

  Mike’s CO stood there, grim, staring, silent. A perplexed Mike was ordered to do 50 push-ups right then and there. Furious and in disbelief, Mike knew he could not disobey a direct order, so he fell to the ground to do as he was commanded. But as he rose to his feet, Mike saw his CO holding a brand-new maroon beret in his hand. The young officer had just earned the most iconic symbol of the Special Forces.

  ‘I was beyond exhilarated. What followed was our traditional drink in the SF—every kind of alcohol mixed in a jug with our rank badges in there too. We drink it all in one go, and then the rank badges are pipped. I woke up two days later.’

  Mike would see his first live firefight less than a year later in June 2005. Intelligence had just arrived about suspicious movements in Bandipora. Arriving on the scene with his squad,
Lt. Tango and his men spotted the 3 ‘suspects’, all in burkas. Their masculine voices while speaking on a mobile phone and the chance sighting of an AK-47 between them blew their cover. Mike and his men positioned themselves in a cordon around the suspects.

  ‘It was the first and the last time my hands shivered before action. It happens only that first time. Never again,’ Mike recalls.

  He would go on to raise a covert/pseudo ops (operations) team for the Para-SF—a subunit dedicated to deep cover and intelligence gathering from the general population. It would allow Mike to begin understanding the level of intelligence in infiltration Pakistan had managed in the Kashmir valley, and how difficult it would be to conduct SF missions there. Not once during the 7 years he spent in covert operations did he imagine that he would one day be ordered to cross the LoC.

  The Indian Army’s September 2016 surgical strikes caused an immediate global sensation, facilitated and then fanned by a second stroke of history sanctioned by the Modi government—an official announcement. Just hours after Maj. Tango and the other 2 teams crossed back over the LoC, the Army was given orders to hold a press conference to formally declare that the attacks had taken place, unheard of in special operations concerning Pakistan.

  The honour of officially revealing the surgical strikes fell on the Army’s Director General Military Operations, Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh, at a joint press conference with the spokesperson of India’s External Affairs Ministry. In front of a shocked crowd of media persons at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Bhawan, the officer detailed the audacious mission:

  Based on receiving specific and credible inputs that some terrorist teams had positioned themselves at launch pads along Line of Control to carry out infiltration and conduct terrorist strikes inside Jammu and Kashmir and in various metros in other states, the Indian Army conducted surgical strikes at several of these launch pads to pre-empt infiltration by terrorists. The operations were focused on ensuring that these terrorists do not succeed in their design to cause destruction and endanger the lives of our citizens.

  During these counter terrorist operations significant casualties were caused to terrorists and those providing support to them. The operations aimed at neutralizing terrorists have since ceased. We do not have any plans for further continuation. However, the Indian Armed Forces are fully prepared for any contingency that may arise.4

  Four Pakistani terror launch pads had been annihilated. If the assault mission itself enraged Pakistan, at least Islamabad was not compelled to respond politically. But the audacious Indian press conference pushed the Pakistan Army, headed at the time by Gen. Raheel Sharif, into an embarrassing corner from which signature Pakistani obfuscation ensued. Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Asif, called India’s claim a lie, while its military declared that only 2 Pakistan Army soldiers, Lance Havildar Jumma Khan and Naik Imtiaz, had been killed, and that too in a ceasefire violation.

  On 20 March 2017, 6 months after the surgical strike, Maj. Tango received his Kirti Chakra from the President at Rashtrapati Bhawan. The Army had made efforts to play down the award ceremony’s obvious links with the September mission across the LoC.

  ‘By now they probably know who I am and where I am,’ says Maj. Tango, then adds:

  ‘But in the Special Forces, we don’t really know fear.’

  Note: In the interests of security, certain details have been masked in this account, and no sensitive operational details have been revealed. Some names in this chapter have been changed to protect the identity of Special Forces officers who operate in hostile territory.

  2

  ‘They Didn’t Know We Were There’

  The June 2015 Surgical Strikes in Myanmar

  Imphal, Manipur

  5 June 2015

  A light breeze scattered the smell of burning flesh that morning as the bodies of 18 Army jawans lay charred and mangled in the remains of their convoy. The soldiers, all from the Dogra Regiment, were headed to their base after an operational deployment when their trucks were ambushed at 0830 hours, just over 100 km from Manipur’s capital, Imphal. The surprise attack had been swift and unforgiving. As the 11 survivors were plugged with morphine drips and helicoptered out of the site soon after, they knew 2 things for certain: this was one of the most expensive insurgent attacks in the restive North-east in decades, and that revenge would be a faraway castle.

  On that second point, though, it would take less than a week for them to be proved more wrong than they had ever been before.

  As the Army choppers with the grievously wounded survivors coursed through the air towards a base hospital in Manipur, in the country’s national capital a team of India’s toughest fighting men was making final preparations to depart for the strife-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The commandos from the Army’s secretive Para-SF carried a fearsome reputation, and were looking forward to the UN peacekeeping duties they had been recently assigned in a country where daily brutality had made the Congo War Africa’s deadliest in modern times.

  In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Indian commandos would replace the coveted maroon berets of their Parachute Regiment with the blue headgear that sets UN peacekeepers apart from other soldiers. The UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known by its French acronym MONUSCO, accounts for the Indian Army’s largest footprint on foreign soil. A fourth of the over 19,000 peacekeepers serving at MONUSCO, the world’s most costly peacekeeping mission with an annual budget of $1.25 billion, come from India. In June 2015, a Para-SF team of about 100 men was to join a battalion-strength force of about 500 men that was on its way to North Kivu, a province blessed with a bounty of minerals in its earth, but which now had rivers of blood flowing through it as a result of war.

  The Indian soldiers were ready for their African assignment. They would be part of an Indian brigade headquartered in North Kivu’s capital, Goma, a fighting force controlling an area of 62,400 sq. km, encompassing a breathtaking landscape dotted with lakes, volcanoes, mountains, savannas and rivers. UN postings are sought after in the Army, and units go through rigorous screening before peace missions are assigned to them. There was no question of the men from the elite Para-SF unit not making the cut. In fact, they had been hand-picked to tackle the barbarism that had come to define daily life in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  Just as they were about to leave from the Palam Air Force Station in Delhi, they got a call—from their home base in Jorhat, Assam. In the brevity that defines communication between commandos, the men were informed about the ambush in neighbouring Manipur. In 5 minutes, they had the story and fresh orders.

  The soldiers did get on a plane that day. But it was the C-130J Super Hercules from the Indian Air Force’s 77 ‘Veiled Vipers’ squadron, which carried them at full throttle over 2350 km to Manipur. Everything had changed. Plans for the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been instantaneously put on hold.

  The commandos knew what had happened, but would be briefed about their new mission only the next day. The Indian Army had been wounded—and deeply. Death on duty was nothing new, but the audacity of the ambush threw a blanket of unusual, simmering rage, not only over the Dogra battalion that had been targeted, but the entire security establishment as well as the government at the Centre.

  The Army was breathing fire.

  It soon emerged that insurgents from 3 outfits active in the state were behind the ambush: the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K), Kangleipak Communist Party and Kanglei Yawol Kanna Lup. The Army’s Dogra unit had wrapped up its 3-year field tenure in Manipur and was in the process of relocating to a sprawling military station in the country’s north when it had been attacked.

  The insurgents had managed to slip back across the porous border with Myanmar to safe camps in the jungles along the border. Their hasty hit-and-run retreat wasn’t surprising. In the past too, insurgents had been lulled into the comfortable routine of mounting attacks and f
leeing across the border to safety. What they hadn’t accounted for was that the blood spilt on that highway on 5 June would take the Army on a course of planning it had refrained from trudging on before.

  A path down which there would be no turning back.

  Lt. Col. Oscar Delta, 35 years old, was at Leimakhong, the Manipur headquarters of an Army Mountain Division, when news of the highway bloodbath came in. As with the death of any soldier or innocent in his area of responsibility, Lt. Col. Delta felt the blood run to his face. He closed his eyes for a moment, collecting his thoughts. Three words repeated themselves over and over in his mind.

  18 soldiers. Killed.

  Lt. Col. Delta couldn’t remember a more savage action by insurgents in his military career, if not his entire memory. As the 2IC of his Para-SF unit, Lt. Col. Delta was well-known to the insurgent groups responsible for the ambush. They knew what he looked like. They were aware of what he was capable of. And they had just drawn blood, terrible amounts of it, in Lt. Col. Delta’s own backyard.

  ‘To say it was a big blow doesn’t describe it,’ Lt. Col. Delta, now a Colonel, remembers. ‘When you lose 18 men like this, you have to figure out how you can hit back and what options you have. My first instinct was to launch an operation immediately with my team, hunt down those responsible and blow their brains out.’

  A part of a commando’s conditioning and training is how to keep his emotional responses in check. Emotions can be the enemy of every mission. Successful special operations require execution unclouded by sentiment—the knee-jerk quality of anger or sorrow. Suppressing the urges that welled up inside him after the ambush would be among the hardest things Lt. Col. Delta had ever done.

  In the Army for 14 years at the time, he had spent a good part of it chasing and killing insurgents in the hilly jungles of the North-east. Among the many medals pinned to Lt. Col. Delta’s chest is a Shaurya Chakra awarded to him for exceptional gallantry in action in 2004—over a decade before the Manipur attack. That year, a young soldier under his command was killed in an ambush laid by insurgents. Delta, then a young Captain, led a group of crack commandos that hunted down the insurgents and killed 8 of them.