The bicycle that was awarded to Lalit Chandra Baruah. Telegraph picture

Jorhat, May 3: This bicycle may not have age to justify its imminent inclusion alongside the ancient exhibits at Jorhat district museum, but has carved a niche in history as the only reminder of a night when a sleepy village shot to fame.

Turn its wheels back in time and there emerges a tale of a former Prime Minister gifting this bicycle to a resident of Tekelagaon here for helping to rescue him and others when his plane crash-landed in a paddy field there.

On the night of November 4, 1977 pilots of an IAF plane, Pushpak Rath, carrying Prime Minister Morarji Desai, his son Kantibhai Desai, the then Arunachal Pradesh chief minister P.K. Thungon and others, had to land in the paddy fields of Tekelagaon, 18km southwest of Jorhat town.

While all the five pilots in the cockpit died when the plane nose-dived to an emergency landing, those at the rear of the plane survived.

Among those who helped to carry the Prime Minister to safety was Lalit Chandra Baruah. In return for his services, the Prime Minister’s Office made arrangements for a cycle to be given to him and this was handed over to him on November 20, 1977. He was given a job in the Assam State Electricity Board and worked there till he died. The cycle was donated to the museum by his son-in-law for safekeeping.

Gautam Bordoloi, Jorhat district museum officer, said for the past seven years he had placed the cycle in a storehouse as the museum is yet to get a permanent place. The museum at present operates from two rooms of the Post-Graduate Teachers’ Training College and uses its unused hostel rooms to store the larger artefacts. “I don’t know why I received the cycle in the first place. However, after much thought I have decided that I will display the cycle in the newly-constructed museum on KB Road after inauguration, because it definitely has historical value,” he said.

Bordoloi plans to display it along with a plaque which tells its history so that people do not wonder about the significance of an ordinary bicycle in the museum full of invaluable artefacts.

“The son-in-law had told me that Lalit Baruah cherished the bicycle and cleaned and polished it everyday till the day he died,” Bordoloi said.

Bordoloi acceded to the request, knowing that in any other place, the cycle would have ended up as scrap metal. “Tekelagaon, which had become famous after the incident, has turned back into a sleepy village with few knowing or imagining the excitement which befell the village that night. Even the proposal to rename the village as Desai Nagar after the Prime Minister is long forgotten and the wreckage of the plane has been retrieved by the IAF. Maybe this bicycle is the only reminder of that fateful night,” he said.