India’s top military officer, General Bipin Rawat, was killed in a helicopter crash in the southern state of Tamil Nadu on Wednesday. Which the Indian Air Force (IAF) has confirmed. In addition to Rawat, the country’s Chief of Defense Staff, or CDS, his wife and 11 others were also killed. The aircraft with which the group was en route to a military training institute crashed shortly after takeoff.
on images by local television stations and social media shows the wreckage burning as rescuers carried bodies away. The fate of the 63-year-old army chief, who served with the Indian armed forces for four decades, was then uncertain for several hours.
As the first Chief of the Armed Forces, a post created in 2019 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Rawat was responsible for the integration of the three branches – the Land Forces, Air Force and Navy. Until then, they operated independently of each other. The project involved a major reorganization of the command structure, which also encountered opposition within the military apparatus.
“General Rawat made a huge contribution to the modernization of our armed forces,” Modi said in a comment. The prime minister said he was “dismayed” at the death of an “excellent soldier and true patriot, someone of great strategic insight.” Defense Minister Rajnath Singh called Rawat dead in a tweet “an irreparable loss to our armed forces and the country.”
troubled areas
Rawat, descendant of a family that produced several generals, started his career in 1978 as an infantryman. He subsequently held several posts, often in troubled regions of the country and in the frayed border areas. In the 1980s, he was a colonel of a battalion along the fought-over demarcation line with China in the northeast. Throughout his career, he continued to see the main danger for India in China.
The general also specialized in fighting smaller enemies, in uprisings and asymmetrical conflicts in the north and east of the country, an article by NDTV on. In 2015, for example, he ordered precision strikes on rebels from the state of Nagaland, who had fled to neighboring Myanmar.
He did not want to hear from his NCOs what problems they saw, so he once explained his working method to a journalist from the news website The Print: “Tell me rather how we deal with it.” According to the Hindustan Times he disliked appearances in the upper echelons of the armed forces and retired from golf to set an example for his subordinates.
The cause of the accident is still unclear. The Indian Air Force has launched an investigation. The fourteen passengers in total were in a DMi-17V5, a Russian-made military helicopter used to transport army commanders and politicians. One passenger, an officer, survived the crash. He was taken to a military hospital. The bodies of the other victims are expected in the capital Delhi on Thursday, according to the Indian news agency ANI.
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