The Indian Air Force (IAF) has reportedly traced the family of one of its Junior Commissioned Officers who died in a plane crash in Himachal Pradesh 52 years ago.
Warrant Officer S. Bhattacharjee was among 102 Armed Forces personnel in the IAF’s ill-fated AN-12 aircraft that went missing over Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh on February 7, 1968. The disappearance of the aircraft remained a mystery until 2003 when members of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute found a body identified as that of Sepoy Beli Ram who was on that flight.
Alina Bareh, a homemaker in Meghalaya’s West Jaintia Hills district, was taken by surprise on May 2 when a caller told her that she had been identified as one of the family members Warrant Officer Bhattacharjee had been survived by. She was told his body was recovered from the Dhaka Glacier at an altitude of 5,240 metres in Himachal Pradesh two years ago.
“Some IAF officials paid a visit on May 7 and said tracing the family was their basic job. They said they would get back but we haven’t had any official communication. We don’t know if the body is in Delhi or anywhere else. How can we believe without seeing the body?” Ms. Bareh, 55, said from her residence at Mission Compound in Jowai town, about 75 km from State capital Shillong.
But she said her mother, the late R.T. Bareh, would often tell her and her two brothers about their father and how he was captured and imprisoned by enemy forces. At the time of the crash, she was three years old and Warrant Officer Bhattacharjee in his forties.
Delay explained
Officials at the Eastern Air Command near Shillong declined to speak on the development. But a member of an association of ex-servicemen in the northeast said Meghalaya’s matrilineal system — children take the surname of the mother — could have led to the delay in finding Warrant Officer Bhattacharjee’s survivors.
The Meghalaya unit of this association had helped IAF connect with the survivors of the 1968 crash victim.
The AN-12 BL-534 in which the Warrant Officer and 101 others perished was on a flight from Chandigarh to Leh in Ladakh but had to turn back after experiencing bad weather. It lost contact over Rohtang Pass.
There were several attempts to search for the debris of the aircraft after a team of mountaineers found the body of Beli Ram in 2003. An Indian Army expedition team recovered three more bodies in August 2007.
Warrant Officer Bhattacharjee’s body and some parts of the aircraft were recovered in July 2018. An expedition by the Dogra Scouts under the Western Command, joined later by an IAF team, in July-August 2019 yielded more bodies trapped in snow and major portions of the aircraft.
