India’s Most Fearless

by Aroor, Shiv

  ‘Each one of us who knew him will find our own way to overcome the loss. Grief will fade away and when it’s gone, only one thing will remain—pride,’ he wrote.

  ‘To be honest every day is a struggle for his parents and for me,’ says Indhu. ‘It should not come as a wonder that some days are tougher than others. For his parents, he was the son who loved them to bits; he had pet names for all of us and we yearn to hear him calling us by those names. We yearn for a sighting of his dimpled smile that could warm our now frozen hearts. It has not been easy and it is not going to get any easier. The trick is to conceal the struggle and will yourself through a day as happily as you can because that is what he would want. The toll it has taken is no joke and can be seen in my daughter too. She often hides Mukund’s pictures because she is worried that either I or his parents will feel sad. It proves that she has definitely taken after him in terms of concern and love and that is the silver lining in an otherwise cloudy situation.’

  Mukund’s favourite quip over drinks would always be that he had already won the toughest battle of his life—convincing his traditional parents to accept his love for and intention to marry a woman from outside his community. In August 2009, aged 26 and barely 3 years into the Army, Mukund and Indhu were married.

  ‘It wasn’t easy getting married,’ recalls Indhu. ‘There are words that were thrown at both sets of parents by some relatives and the community that were difficult to stomach, but we were selfish in our love and had parents who stood by us irrespective of their misgivings. My parents took a little longer because they were giving away their precious daughter, but what held me through it all is the faith that we had in each other and his acceptance and understanding that I couldn’t do without my parents. I knew he would wait and I knew his ideals were the same as mine. It took us 5 years to convince my parents and then tie the knot. To have lost all that in a few moments is never going to be easy to come to terms with. There are days when it gets really difficult to accept that the man who said that he will stand beside me and show the world how our relationship will survive whatever life throws at us is no longer with me.’

  Three years after they got married, in December 2012, Maj. Varadarajan would arrive in the Kashmir valley to become part of the 44 Rashtriya Rifles.

  Folklore surrounding Maj. Varadarajan’s memory remains.

  If unit officers had something tricky to discuss with their CO, they would get Maj. Varadarajan to articulate it to the boss. ‘He would give it an operational twist and leave me with little choice but to agree to whatever was put forth to me,’ recalls Col. Dabas.

  Apart from being an outstanding operations man, Maj. Varadarajan is remembered for his ruthless wit. Everyone in the unit knew that if Maj. Varadarajan was looking particularly happy, somebody was certainly having a miserable day.

  The young officer missed his parents, Varadarajan and Geetha, tremendously. He knew he could not speak to them every day, but when he did, he would devote an hour if he could to his mother.

  Maj. Varadarajan had dreamed of shifting his parents to a brand-new apartment in Chennai. The purchase had been finalized a month before his death. After he was gone, and as the family grieved, it would be the first thing that Indhu ensured.

  Indhu will never forget her last conversation with Mukund that April morning when he departed on his final operation.

  ‘We had just had a silly fight a few days ago and the fight was, as always, about how I needed more time with him. We got over it the same day as both of us would rarely leave a fight unresolved. On the morning of 25 April, we had a short and ordinary conversation. He asked for Arshea and spoke to her over the speaker and we told him that we missed him. He told me to take Arshea out and enjoy the day, do some shopping and cheer up, and that he loved us too. He hadn’t been getting much rest, often coming back early in the morning after patrolling and calling me to wish me a good day before getting a few hours of sleep before he had to be up and about again. We said our goodbyes a little earlier than usual that day because I knew he was busy and needed some rest. Ironic, isn’t it?’

  Col. Dabas’s WhatsApp profile picture is not his own. And his status message reflects the image: ‘Mukund and Vikram. Salute.’ He hasn’t found the heart to change those settings for more than 3 years. And they remain a constant reminder of 2 of the finest soldiers the SF Colonel had known—2 soldiers he thinks of every day, 2 young men he will remember all his life.

  ‘I think of them every single day. They were lost on my watch,’ says Col. Dabas. On the Colonel’s study wall are framed pictures of Maj. Mukund Varadarajan and Sepoy Vikram Singh.

  Indhu remains in touch with her husband’s battalion.

  ‘The army never leaves anyone behind and we are a family more than just a group of people tied together by a common profession. They have been with me with words of comfort and all forms of support. I am confident that they will stand by me as I will stand by them in the future as well,’ she says.

  ‘Death on the battlefield is the ultimate privilege for a soldier. We don’t go there to die. But if it happens, we have to turn it around into a celebration,’ says Col. Dabas.

  ‘Only soldiers who have bled together in combat will understand that.’

  8

  ‘Medical Science Cannot Explain This’

  Lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad

  9 February 2016, 1226 hours

  Of the 10 soldiers presumed dead in #Siachen, one has survived. Lance Naik Hanamanthappa is critical. Pray for him. What a miracle!

  The late-night flash on social media by newspaper correspondent Rahul Singh galvanized a country that had spent a week in mourning. TV news channels broke out of their regular recorded late-night programming. Across the Internet, a ripple of disbelief churned into a tide.

  Was this even humanly possible?

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi was nowhere close to turning in for the night. Two hours earlier, at his Race Course Road residence, he had received a call from the then Army Chief, Gen. Dalbir Singh. The conversation lasted barely a few minutes. And when it ended, it was not necessary for the Prime Minister to say it. He knew that the Army, already grieving over the loss of its men, would do everything in its power to save the superhuman they had pulled out alive after 6 days of being buried under more than 25 feet of snow—6 days at temperatures of –40 °C under a terrifying block of blue, unforgiving ice.

  From the moment it happened, the Prime Minister had demanded a daily briefing of the rescue operation 20,500 feet high on the northern glacier near Siachen.

  Siachen Glacier, Jammu and Kashmir

  2 February 2016

  The 10 Army men, including 8 from the 19th battalion of the Madras Regiment, had hiked up to Sonam Post just 2 months before. Sonam, one of the highest permanently manned military posts in the world, sits way up on the Saltoro Ridge that overlooks the Siachen Glacier to the east and Pakistan-occupied territories to the west. Named for Havildar Sonam, an intrepid Ladakhi soldier who braved unspeakable weather and Pakistani fire to occupy the point in 1984, the Sonam Post offers soldiers a magnificent position of advantage, but is also fully exposed to what is literally the worst weather on earth. Not to speak of insidious crevasses and devastating avalanches similar to the one that came crashing down on the 10 Army men early on 3 February.

  While some of the men were on observation and guard duty, the others were in their tents. And none of them even saw it coming. An enormous block of ice shattered the ridgeline above them and came rumbling down the mountainside, completely burying the post.

  The men at Sonam Post had arrived in the Siachen area in October 2015. Including nursing assistant Sepoy Sunil Suryawanshi of the Army Medical Corps, the team comprised team leader and head of the post, Subedar Nagesha T.T., Havildar Elumalai, Lance Havildar S. Kumar, L. Nk Sudheesh B., Sepoy Mahesha P.N., Sepoy Ganesan G., Sepoy Rama Moorthy N., Sepoy Mustaq Ahmed S. and L. Nk Hanamanthappa Koppad. The men had been hand-picked in December to take position at Sonam.
The choice was not random. Col. Um Bahadur Gurung, CO of 19 Madras, had chosen them for what everyone on the glacier knew was the most demanding deployment possible. Soldiers deployed for high-altitude warfare are frequently the most resilient men. The 10 chosen to pitch their tents at 20,500 feet for a few months represented the cream of the crop.

  Politics and tragedy have occasionally thrust Siachen into the national discourse. But away from the diplomatic aggression over the northern glacier areas, it remains the Army’s enduring regret that few truly understand what it means to even operate in such terrain, far less engage in combat. It is not without reason that Siachen has earned the epithet ‘frozen hell’.

  Soldiers deployed to high-altitude posts do not only have to be rigorously trained in the art of warfare in the most devious, unforgiving terrain imaginable, but they also need to be highly skilled in survival and sustenance. In addition, every man has to be psychologically conditioned so he does not run the risk of losing his mind at those altitudes. The training regimen and deployment schedules for India’s glacier units have been tailored over time to account for the worrying effects that spending long periods at those heights can have on men.

  ‘They were all incredibly brave men,’ says Col. Dinesh Singh Tanwer, who, as 2IC of 19 Madras when the avalanche struck, operated from the operations room established at Siachen base camp established under the base commander Col. Hari Haran, about 90 minutes away from Sonam Post by helicopter.

  ‘These guys were the best of the lot. Motivated and fit. When you go to the glacier, the fear of the unknown overpowers all other fears. We know where the enemy is, but we don’t know where avalanches will come from, or where the crevasses are. We can’t take anything for granted,’ he says.

  The monstrous visitor at Sonam Post on the morning of 3 February was a slab avalanche, the most sinister kind. Formed by an enormous 800x1000-metre block of snow fracturing away from the mountain, it had buried the post up to 25–30 feet deep in mere seconds. Where the tents once stood, now there was nothing but scattered debris of blue ice boulders harder than rock. The wind dropped suddenly, as it ironically always does after an avalanche, filling the thin air above Sonam Post with a cold silence.

  That was all Maj. Vipin Kumar, the Company Commander posted a short distance below Sonam Post, heard on his radio set. The Major, who would get a radio report from the men at Sonam Post each morning at 0400 hours, had heard nothing that morning. He was not immediately worried. The sub-zero temperatures frequently paralysed equipment, and radio sets sometimes needed to be warmed up artificially before they would work again. Over an hour later, there was still no word.

  Then, at 0515 hours, a feeble voice cracked through the radio.

  ‘Saab, hum dab gaye hain (Sir, we have been buried).’ It was Havildar Elumalai.

  Originally from Adukumparai village in faraway Tamil Nadu, Elumalai was now buried under a wall of snow 20 feet deep. He had miraculously been able to reach for his radio set and transmit the news.

  Maj. Vipin knew instantly what had happened.

  Exactly a month before, on 3 January, 4 Army men had perished in a similar avalanche on the Siachen Glacier. Havildar Dorjey Gason, Havildar Tsewang Norboo, Rifleman Jigmat Chosdup and Rifleman Mohammed Yusuf had died instantly. The voice from Sonam Post, however, suggested there was hope.

  The Major did not waste another moment. He immediately formed a rescue party before alerting his CO, Col. Gurung, who was at the Kumar Post at an altitude of over 15,000 feet. He in turn relayed the message up the chain of command via the Siachen Glacier’s Independent Infantry Brigade, on to the 14 Corps in Leh, the Army’s Northern Command Headquarters at Udhampur and finally to the Army Headquarters in Delhi.

  An early riser, Army Chief Gen. Dalbir Singh was about to go for a morning run when he received word about the avalanche. Cancelling his exercise routine, he immediately began to get ready to dash to his headquarters at South Block. Ten Army men at this lofty military post had been deluged in a terrifying flood of ice. The government leadership needed to be notified immediately. It was the first thing he needed to do.

  As Maj. Vipin and his men gathered troops from other posts and headed straight for Sonam, lower down at Siachen Base Camp, a makeshift coordination centre was set up under the unit’s 2IC, Col. Dinesh. Soldiers at the base camp had been preparing for their own induction into high-altitude posts. Everything would now have to focus on the tragedy at Sonam Post.

  Two hours later, Maj. Vipin and his team arrived at the site. It would take them whole moments to digest the scene.

  The enormous debris field from the avalanche had gorged on every visible aspect of the post. There was nothing left to see. It was a scene of devastation the men would never forget.

  Helicopters soon brought in more personnel, this time doctors and ace Army mountaineers. They arrived bearing metal detectors, excavation equipment and specially trained avalanche rescue dogs. By noon on 3 February, a team of nearly 50 personnel were at the site of the tragedy.

  This in itself was an enormous logistical challenge. Sonam Post, which was suitable for no more than 10 men, was now not only completely destroyed and buried, but had 50 men who could not leave any time soon. In coordination with Col. Dinesh’s team at Siachen Base Camp, the rescue teams needed to organize tents, water, medicine and rations for themselves. There could be no oversights at this juncture.

  ‘We had to plan very carefully. These men were about to engage in hard labour at 20,500 feet. If we made errors, we could easily suffer further casualties,’ says Col. Dinesh.

  Accompanied by dogs and machinery and with prayers on their lips, the men began digging through the vast icy sheet of debris at Sonam Post in temperatures that forced them to take frequent breaks just to be able to flex their fingers and limbs. If frostbite or altitude sickness set in, it would not just damage the rescue effort, but would also place an exponentially bigger burden on the base camp to rescue the rescuers themselves.

  By 1455 hours on 3 February, the media got wind of the disaster that had struck Sonam Post. Having just reported the deaths of 4 Army men a month before, the newsflashes sounded grim.

  At 20,500 feet, the rescue effort continued till sundown. The night brought fresh snowfall and winds of unspeakable ferocity, forcing the large rescue team to hunker down into their tents. There was no question of searching through the night. The men spent an uncomfortable night, their tents buffeted by a howling draft, fully aware that every hour they spent unable to search was an hour closer to the end for the 10 soldiers buried under several feet of ice. If the end hadn’t already arrived for them, that is.

  At first light on 4 February, the men set to work again. Shortly after 1100 hours, the Army Headquarters in Delhi put out the first of several updates on a rescue effort that would, in a matter of days, mesmerize the entire country.

  The men saw and heard nothing as they continued to dig and scour through the icy debris on 4 February. Trained not to yield to despair even in the most hopeless conditions, the rescue teams could not help but be sceptical about the men surviving a full day under all that ice. Was this really a race against time any more, or simply an exercise to find 10 corpses? It did not matter. The Indian Army never leaves its men behind.

  Then, when they were least expecting it, a radio set with one of the rescuers crackled, a broken voice emerging from it.

  It was Sepoy Rama Moorthy N.

  Like Havildar Elumalai the previous day, the sepoy from Gudisatana Palli village in Tamil Nadu had managed to find his radio and make a call. The rescue team had not been able to raise a sound out of Elumalai since they arrived on the scene, making them fear the worst, but not slowing them down. The call from Rama Moorthy exploded through the rescue team at Sonam Post, dusting every bit of despair from their shoulders.

  The men doubled up, focusing every resource on trying to pin down Rama Moorthy’s location under the ice.

  ‘He stayed in contact with us for 2 hours, but he was unable to t
ell us exactly where he was,’ recalls Col. Dinesh, a steady sadness in his voice. ‘He tried very hard, but he couldn’t direct us. He could have been upside down for all we knew. Both he and the teams knew his radio set would be out of batteries soon.’

  Shortly before 2100 hours that night, Sepoy Rama Moorthy went silent.

  A team from the Siachen Battle School had arrived that day too, carrying special sensor systems that were capable of seeing through walls of ice. The new team had also brought tree cutters to slice through the ice with greater efficiency as they raced against time. By the time Rama Moorthy’s radio transmissions died out from under the snow, the rescue team had swelled to 110 strong. A team of 50 civilian porters had also been employed to help transport equipment to the site.

  The voice from below had acted as a booster dose of hope to the rescue team. But the silence that followed threatened to drag them down again. Search operations continued till late that night and for the following 2 days. For over 48 hours, the men saw nothing and heard nothing. Every pair of ears over the debris field strained to pick up any sounds. Some men put their ears directly to the ice, hoping to hear something, anything from below.

  By the evening of 7 February, 5 days after the avalanche, the team had dug 3 40-feet-deep holes straight through the avalanche remnant.

  ‘We were fighting to pinpoint any location that could give us a clue about the men below,’ recalls Col. Dinesh. ‘Then at 1800 hours on 7 February, we saw something.’

  A team suspended on one of the shafts had spotted a cable sticking out from the side of the hole. It was a communication cable. In 5 days of digging, it was the first physical object the team had found below the devastation.

  ‘It was obvious we had to follow the cable,’ says a mountaineer member of the rescue team at Sonam Post. ‘Digging further vertically was very difficult. The shaft was unstable too. We lowered barrel-halves above us so the shaft wouldn’t cave in with us inside.’