Sepoy dies hero's death as brass battle perception of botch-up

Security forces atop the roof of a building at the Pathankot air force
station during an operation to sanitise the base on Sunday. (AFP)

SUJAN DUTTA, TT, New Delhi, Jan. 3: A veteran soldier working in the cookhouse turned a militant's rifle on the attacker himself and pulled the trigger as the stand-off in the Pathankot air force station continued for the second day.

Sepoy Jagdish Chand of the Defence Security Corps (DSC) displayed the masterly professionalism of the soldier, which contrasted sharply with the sloppiness of the decision-makers in New Delhi who were coordinating the action on the ground in Pathankot.

Even now, despite the intelligence they have, they are still not sure how many militants are inside the Pathankot base. The figure put out on Saturday in a tweet by Union home minister Rajnath Singh was five. The tweet was later deleted.

The air force officially said there were four. Now officials say "there could be two or more". This evening, gunfire and explosions could be heard from outside the base.

"We are sure that still there are at least two more terrorists as firing has come from two different places. But we are not sure whether there are some more. We will come to know the number of terrorists only after the completion of the operation and body count," Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said in Delhi.  "Operations are still on," Air Commodore J.S. Dhamoon, air officer commanding the base, said this evening.

Reuters reported that one gunman had been killed on Sunday but this was not mentioned in the official briefing in New Delhi. "The decision to blow up one of the administrative units was taken to neutralise the militant. It was also needed to make sure we destroy live grenades," Reuters quoted a source as saying.

Reinforcements from the army's 29 Division, armed with grenades, mortars and rifles, were being pushed into the air force station. Helicopters were circling above in combat air patrols to scan the ground below.

The terrain where the action has mostly taken place is full of tall grass and ravines, one officer told The Telegraph over the phone.

The government claimed credit for confining and "containing the terrorists", as Mehrishi put it. It had got advance notice of the attack early on January 1.

Mehrishi said it was because of the notice that security forces were able to protect the "assets of the air force" - the fighter aircraft, helicopters and remotely piloted planes in the air force station.

On January 1 at 3pm, national security adviser Ajit Doval had convened a briefing of the military and intelligence brass. They decided to despatch a unit of the National Security Guard from its headquarters in Manesar, just south of Delhi, to Pathankot. The NSG was pre-positioned inside the base.

Despite that, the militants could storm in. At last count today, seven soldiers, including an army lieutenant colonel deputed to the NSG, had been killed.

Sepoy Jagdish Chand did not have the luxury of such advance notice. He was helping in the cookhouse adjacent to the guards' restroom on Saturday morning when the militants stormed in and shot three of his comrades. Chand did not even have the time to pick up a rifle.

He chased and wrestled down a militant and twisted his hand to turn the barrel of the rifle on the killer and pressed the trigger. As he rose, the other militants shot Chand.

Chand is one of five DSC soldiers killed. The DSC is mostly staffed by retired soldiers and its primary task is to guard installations.

The two other soldiers killed were a commando of the air force's Garud unit, and Lt Col E.K. Niranjan.

Niranjan was leading the NSG's bomb disposal unit. The manner of his death was strange for an officer entrusted with such responsibility. In the early afternoon today, he approached the body of one of the militants with five of his men.

The officer knelt down to turn the body over when a grenade went off. The militant had taken off the pin of the grenade and held it down with his own body. The militant was an explosive even in death.

Niranjan was nearly decapitated. His men have been admitted to the military hospital in Pathankot with grave injuries.

Asked how the militants could enter the air force station despite the advance warning and the deployment of the NSG, home secretary Mehrishi replied: "We had alerted everyone in the Pathankot area but there was no way of knowing whether they were going to attack the air force or the army."

On the fatalities among the forces, Mehrishi said: "I don't consider it a lapse at all. In such situations where weapons are there, some injuries and some deaths will happen on this side also."

The casualties in spite of purported advance warning about an impending attack and the duration of the operation involving as many as 250 troopers have drawn comment.

A former Western Air Command chief, Air Marshall P.S. Ahluwalia, who had commanded the Pathankot air base, told PTI that the coordination between various security agencies "could have been better".

"The success or otherwise of any operation can be judged by the following - whether the terrorists were able to achieve their objective, minimal casualty to our own forces, no collateral damage, and attackers being neutralised in optimal time frame," Ahluwalia said.

"The terrorists were not able to achieve their objective and they could not reach their target. However, we have lost more men and this could have been prevented by effective coordination. Also, the time taken to neutralise the attackers has been way too long."

But some sources on the ground said the slow approach was to ensure "proper sanitisation". Sometimes efforts to catch attackers alive too can prolong an operation but it was not clear whether this was at play in Pathankot.

Because of its strategic location, at a "chicken's neck" between Pakistan's Shakargarh Bulge and the Himalaya connecting to Jammu and Kashmir, the region around Pathankot is thick with military installations.

It is about 30km as the crow flies from the border with Pakistan, through which militants had entered India in July last year too and taken over a police station in Gurdaspur. Seven persons were killed in that standoff too.

But more chilling are the parallels that the raid on Pathankot has with the attack by the Tehreek-e-Taliban and al Qaida on the Pakistan Navy's air station Mehran in Karachi on May 22, 2011. Eighteen soldiers were killed and two US-built P3C Orion surveillance aircraft were destroyed.