Between militants and colleagues, 2 brave jawans
RAMGARH MAJRA/SILIGURI: Two BSF constables stood between a busload of 44 unarmed colleagues and a couple of Pakistani militants hiding in a maize field, who peppered their vehicle with bullets on the Jammu-Srinagar highway in Udhampur on Wednesday.
One of them was 23-year-old Rocky from Ramgarh Majra village in Yamunanagar and he didn’t let his colleagues down as he and fellow constable Subhendu Roy of West Bengal matched fire with fire, killing one of the militants and forcing the other to flee.
Both died in the line of duty — taking bullets in their chests so that the colleagues could live.
“That’s typical of the man … After every encounter with militants, he’d update the youth in our village on WhatsApp. The word terrorist used to charge him up for action. ‘I live only for my country’, he’d say,” recalled Manoj, a teenager from Ramgarh Majra where the martyr was cremated on Thursday.
BSF chief Devendra K Pathak, who travelled to the ambush site after the attack, said the lone armed trooper inside the bus, constable Rocky, retaliated very bravely and effectively to stop the militants from entering the bus.
Rakesh Sharma, the BSF IG (Jammu frontier), recounted how Rocky didn’t allow a militant carrying a grenade to enter the bus from the main door despite being gravely wounded.
“He fired and killed the terrorist. The grenade exploded outside the bus. His gallant act saved many lives. Constable Subhendu also tried to confront the terrorists. But the intensity of firing was such that he could not survive the onslaught,” he said.
The 37-year-old constable Subhendu from a remote village in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district died on the day he joined duty after leave for two months. A father of two daughters, he had left home for Udhampur on Sunday. “I want the government to hand over the terrorists who killed my brother to me and I will decide what I will do with them,” said younger brother Krishna Pada Roy, a CRPF jawan posted in Bihar, awaiting the martyr’s mortal remains.
The body of Subhendu, who was with the BSF for the past 15 years, will reach home on Friday.
In Ramgarh Majra, Rocky’s family lives in a small, two-bedroom house. His father, Prithi Pal, tills half an acre and his mother, Angrejo Devi, does manual jobs to support the family.
He was the lone person from the village to get a government job in the past 15 years.
Rocky’s younger sister, Neha, remembered how he had put her in a private nursing college. “During our last chat on telephone on Monday, he teased me by asking about my marriage plans. He wished to see the other siblings married first,” she said.