BENGALURU: In 1971 , Indian air force pilot Harish Sinhji was shot down and taken prisoner . his children look back at the letters he wrote as a POW .

It was on December 5, 1971 that Flt Lt Harish ‘Harry’ Sinhji was captured over Haveli near Suleimanke in Pakistan. A pilot of squadron 29 of the Indian Air Force, the MiG 21 aircraft that Sinhji was flying got shot down. Having ejected from the aircraft, with a large gash on his foot, the first sight that he would see, and one that he remembered for the rest of his life, was of seeing ‘golden-coloured fields of cotton’. He would write about the capture, his life as a PoW, the escape plan and the adventure, as an annexure, in former Air Chief Marshal PC Lal’s book, My Years with the IAF. The straight-forward account of the escape attempt would inspire Mumbai filmmaker Taranjiet Singh Randhawa to make the soon-to-be-released film, The Great Indian Escape – Khulay Asmaan Ki Oar.

If he were still alive, ‘Harry’ Sinhji would have, over a glass of brandy, told the tale of of how he and his mates Dilip Parulkar and MS ‘Gary’ Grewal attempted escape in August 1972 from the PoW camp in Rawalpindi. “We, 10 cousins, would sit around him and listen to the story. There would always be one newcomer for whom the story would be all new and for whom the details had to be given again. The rest of us would not ever tire of the story. He would tell it so beautifully that we could imagine it,” recalls daughter Kaveri Sinhji.

This retelling was a staple of her summer holidays. “For dad, the escape wasn’t just a story. It was all fact. I remember him telling me about their overnight journey from the crash site to the PoW camp – they were blindfolded, hands tied. Somewhere along the way, the Pakistani officers untied one hand of the prisoners and gave them hot tea, a tandoori roti and a cigarette. Dad remembered the incident to that level of detail till the end,” says Vikram, Sinhji’s younger son.

Since his passing in 1995, Sinhji and his story remain alive for these siblings, through the letters that he wrote from prison to his parents and his many brothers and sisters. The aged, almost-in-tatters letters contain mundane details of his life, philosophical musings and wry humour that give an intimate peek into an extraordinary experience.

Writing to his mother from the prison after his capture, Sinhji says, “I was shot over Pak territory on the 5th and have been here since. I have, luckily, no injuries except a scratch on my hand...

I am sure you must be imagining gruesome things about me being tortured and my nails being ripped off and me being crucified and what not. Let me assure you that contrary to that we are being treated extremely well here.” Another excerpt from the letter reads, “The food is nice. We’re given cigarettes, and (this will gladden your heart) – no alcohol!!”

As he was engaged, Sinhji would also use the spare time to write letters to his fiancée, Jyotirmayi, who was in Indore. “My mom and dad were engaged before he went to war but they hadn’t seen each other. My dad felt that he’d rather get to know her through letters,” says Kaveri. What was interesting about the communication was that while Sinhji, being a true blue Bengalurean, wrote in English, Jyoti would reply in Hindi. “Dad would show my mum’s letters to his prison mates to get them translated, and they would make a big joke out of him,” laughs Kaveri.

“Jyoti, I give you my assurance that I will marry you. The marriage, though, will take a few years as I am financially not in any position to even think of marriage. Also, I would like to put in a lot more service because, unavoidably, a pilot’s efficiency goes down after he has wife and children to look after…” reads one letter. Sinhji was only 26 at the time.

The IAF PoW camp in Rawalpindi housed 11 Indian Air Force officers. In addition to Sinhji, the other PoWs included wing commander BA Coelho, squadron leaders AV Kamat and DS Jafa, flight lieutenants Tejwant Singh, AV Pethia, MS ‘Gary’ Grewal and JL Bhargava and flying officers Hufrid Mulla Feroze, VS Chati and KC Kuruvilla.

As his letters and other records show, the 11 PoWs whiled away their time playing carroms, cards, chess, seven stones and volleyball, reading books and writing letters. But after a few months of this routine, and no repatriation in sight, Parulkar decided to put his escape plan in action. While Parulkar chose ‘Gary’ Grewal as his second mate, Sinhji was never there in the picture.

IT IS MY DUTY TO ESCAPE

“When my dad initially told Dilip and Gary that he wanted to join them, they both said ‘No’. Anybody could go, but not him. They said, ‘We are not taking you because you will become a liability. You look like a boy, you speak English. It’s clear that you are a south Indian!’ Also, dad couldn’t swim and their plan was to try to cross the Jhelum,” says Kaveri. Ultimately, the two would agree to take Sinhji on because “he wouldn’t take no for an answer”, says Kaveri. “Dad apparently told them, ‘It is my duty to escape, it’s your duty not to stop me.’”

BREAK FREE

The escape would take months of planning and was carried out on August 12, 1972. The three jailbirds escaped through a hole made in the wall of cell no 4 where they were put up. The decision to dig a hole in the wall was taken when the initially idea of escaping through the window of the cell was foiled.

“First, they tried to open the window frame. But that was noticed and the Pakistani jail officials sealed up the whole window,” says Kaveri. That didn’t deter the PoWs. They just moved on to the next plan: digging the wall. Gary and Parulkar took up the job of scraping the wall, and it would take them five months to get the job done.

They tore curtains and parachutes to make backpacks, fashioned water bottles and even magnetized a needle to make it a compass. Sinhji along with Chati would be on the lookout, ready to signal at any sight of trouble. “They dug a hole every day for five months. Finally, there was a hole in the plaster,” says Kaveri.

The night of the escape was brutally cold and with Pakistan’s Independence Day just two days away, security at the camp was minimal. “They got out through the hole. The watchman was right there but it was so cold that the watchman had wrapped himself from head to toe and they walked past him! They climbed under the barbed wire and jumped over the wall,” narrates Kaveri. A matinee show that had just got over gave them the perfect cover to head along to Peshawar and from thereon to Landi Kotal to eventually reach Torkham, which was on the Afghanistan border.

While the journey to Peshawar went almost without a hitch, the three escapees would finally get caught at Landi Kotal. Two things worked against them. One, the three pilots didn’t know that Landi Khana, a railway station that was open during British rule, was shut. Two, they caught the notice of a tehsildar’s clerk who mistook them to be Bangladeshi refugees looking to flee Pakistan.

“Just at the last post before the Torkham border, the three of them decided to buy skull caps from one shop. And it’s when they went to that shop that they got caught because, unknown to them, all the Bangladeshi refugees who were looking to run off would go there,” laughs Kaveri.

Following the capture, the three IAF officers were brought back to Rawalpindi and put in solitary confinement for 30 days.

Freedom would come to Sinhji and the remaining PoWs end of November when President ZA Bhutto announced their repatriation. The PoWs received a heroes’ welcome at the Wagah Border on December 1, 1972. There was adequate media coverage of the return but the story of the near-escape remained unknown for a long time.

A STORY LOST

“I feel it was a story that was lost to the realms of history and the military archives because it was not successful. Had it been successful then, it possibly would have been famous. Even today, only few personnel, that too those in the senior cadres, know about it,” rues Vikram.

Kaveri says that war changed her father. “After the 1971 war, dad began feeling that war is just politics and that two countries are a line drawn by somebody. For him, his one year stint at the prison camp showed him that the food he enjoyed and the people and friendships he had made there were real.”

Sinhji, recipient of the Sword of Honour in 1985, voluntarily retired from the IAF in 1993 as Group Captain. That was after he had spent three years in Iraq training Saddam Hussein’s air force.

Interestingly, after the escape, the three pilots never met again.

Source: Annexure B, My Years in the Airforce by PC Lal

