Havildar Tukaram Patil

New Delhi, Oct. 17: The gloves came off and the soldier fell to his death.

Twenty-one years after Havildar Tukaram Patil fell into a crevasse in Siachen, his remains were found this week as rain lashed the northern glacier where it almost always snows.

In August, an army patrol of the 12 Madras, the same unit that found Tukaram’s remains, had come across a frozen hand that stuck out of the snow. That belonged to another soldier, Havildar Gaya Prasad, of the 15 Rajputs battalion, who had fallen into another crevasse in December 1996.

Three years earlier in 1993, Tukaram had died. The poignancy of Tukaram’s death, and the discovery of his remains, cannot be understated.

His mother told the current commanding officer of his unit, the 4 Maratha Light Infantry, Col D.N. Singh, that she had lost another son, also in Siachen.

Col Singh, now posted in a high-altitude sector in Arunachal Pradesh, had called her to inform her of the discovery of Tukaram’s remains.

Tukaram’s brother was also a havildar but with a separate unit, the 6 Maratha Light Infantry. He fell to his death in 1987, six years before Tukaram fell to his, in the central glacier. (The Siachen area is divided by the army brigade responsible for its security into the northern, central and southern glaciers). The central glacier experiences more avalanches and has more crevasses than the two other sectors.

In 1987, the year Tukaram’s elder brother died, the 6 Maratha Light Infantry lost as many as 26 soldiers, recalled a brigadier who was serving at another post then and is now an instructor at the Siachen Battle School. Brig. Ishwar Singh Thapa is a mountaineer.

It is 30 years since “Operation Meghdoot”, the military operation that led to the securing of the heights by the Indian Army. In three decades, Siachen has become warmer — the glacier is melting faster than it used to — and it rains where it should be snowing. Since 2003, at least the guns have fallen silent. Indian and Pakistani troops have not been shooting at each other in 10 years on the “Actual Ground Position Line” (AGPL) along the Saltoro Ridge that flanks the glacier.

The rain and the melting snow, the army expects, will cause bodies of more soldiers to surface. The total number of “missing, believed to be dead” in Siachen is a fluid statistic. Soldiers have been found, alive, after they were reported missing. Bodies are still being retrieved after more than two decades.

In his village in Vasigaon in Maharashtra’s Sangli district, his neighbours have built a memorial in Tukaram’s name.

Brig. Thapa recalled the circumstances of his death as he had heard then. Tukaram was part of a “link patrol” — roped soldiers — who were returning to the “Bila complex”, a fortified army post, at 17,000 feet from “drop zone”. High altitude posts are “air maintained”, meaning the soldiers survive by rations and stores that are para-dropped from aircraft.

While returning from the drop zone, Tukaram’s patrol found that one of the crates had fallen about 200 metres away from their route. Tukaram offered to retrieve it. He probably unhooked himself from the “link” that kept him roped to the others in the patrol. He trudged through the snow and as he picked up the nylon of the parachute to which the crate was hitched, the snow under his feet gave away.

His comrades shouted to him to keep holding the parachute even as he dangled over the crevasse. They got to the nylon chords and were slowly pulling him back when the gloves – mittens, really – gave away. The nylon had cut through the thin wool.

That was on February 27, 1993. The army had 21 years less experience in the heights. Soldiers are now issued a different quality of gloves.

The rope was still in Tukaram’s remains around the waist. There were two letters in a breast pocket of the uniform. One was from home. The other was a document that certified he was medically fit for being posted in Siachen.