A tale from Indian Army and a saga of inspiration.
In a counter-insurgency operation in Manipur, Capt Divakaran Pillay led the charge against militants.
He was shot multiple times in the attack, but that’s when he displayed a rare strength of character.
He was rescued, but that was not the last time he would find himself in this nondescript village.
Major A V D Pillay was a soldier’s soldier. His father had served in the army. And he expected his son, Divakaran, to be no less. His family had a cherished tradition of bearing arms, now for the Indian Army, and in centuries past, for the kingdom of Kerala. His family had shed blood for the motherland. The Pillays were Nairs, a fighting clan, and were expected to do no less.
In a school play, 12-year-old son Divakaran was given the part of a primeval Naga warrior. When young Pillay entered the stage, he did not look the part. A Naga going to war is a fearsome thing to behold. He roars like a lion. Major Pillay’s son squeaked. He neither looked Naga, nor Nair.
In a family tradition where young adolescent boys were expected to bear arms and fight the enemy, Major Pillay’s son fell woefully short.
And so, young Divakaran was packed off to spend an entire night at a graveyard.
As we sit in his office in New Delhi, Col Divakaran Padma Kumar Pillay speaks about the fear and sheer trepidation of that night. The loneliness, the sounds, the howling wind, the haunting expectation of graves creaking open at night and corpses crawling out would have seen grown men run away in sheer terror.
“Gaurav, I almost died out of sheer fear that night. But I did not quit”, says Col Pillay.
When Major Pillay came in the morning to take young Divakaran home, something had irrevocably changed in the boy. He stopped shuffling and he looked into people’s eyes when he spoke.
It was in 1994 that Manipur, and with it the rest of the North East, had descended into violent chaos. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), an extremist Naga outfit, controlled much of the regions bordering Manipur and Nagaland, collecting taxes and defying the Indian state. Efforts at peace had failed, with an increasingly belligerent and intransigent NSCN quickly increasing the levels of violence. They used a complex mix of perceived wrong, tribal loyalties and fear to keep the people in line.
India was forced to use its final argument. It sent the Indian Army to the North East to establish the writ of the state.
Capt Divakaran Pillay had specific intelligence that insurgents were planning to blow up a bridge to hamper the movement of security forces. His orders were clear – locate, engage and neutralise. For four days he led his platoon through sweltering jungle, a fruitless and frustrating search that yielded nothing.
On the morning of the fifth day, he had contact.
As the platoon approached a nondescript village called Longdipabram in Tamenglong district, insurgents opened with murderous fire. Capt Pillay responded. The militants had the upper hand; they could fire where they wished, unmindful of collateral damage.
In counter-insurgency, sometimes avoiding collateral damage and civilian casualties means taking a bullet to your chest. It’s a catch-22 situation.
Capt Pillay approached a hut in which the militants had found safe haven. As he kicked open the door, a three-round burst from an AK 47 caught him in the elbow and arm. Another single shot slammed into his chest. The militant’s AK jammed. He threw a grenade at Capt Pillay. Weak with shock and loss of blood, Capt Pillay kicked the grenade milliseconds before it exploded. The explosion took away a piece of flesh from his leg. Miraculously, the thick door had absorbed the shrapnel.
Another militant hit him on his shoulder and then on his spine. Both the shoulder and spine were fractured. As Capt Pillay lay bleeding, close to death, the encounter raged around him. Many militants were killed. In the cross-fire, two children were seriously injured.
His platoon radioed for CASEVAC (Casualty Evacuation) by helicopter. The army responded quickly and the helicopter soon landed to evacuate the wounded officer.
Capt Pillay has always been different, sometimes a little stubborn to straightjacketed army men. He was known to speak his mind with brutal honesty.
When the pilot came forward to help him into the helicopter, Capt Pillay did two things, which only those who knew him intimately could have expected.
One, he told the pilot that he still had some strength in him and could cling on to his life a little longer and that the children should be evacuated in his place. Two, he ordered his men that if he died, they would carry out no reprisals. The village was under the protection of Capt DPK Pillay of 8 Battalion, The Brigade of the Guards.
Before fainting from shock and loss of blood, Capt Pillay heard wails of gratitude from the women and the old men of the village who rushed out and fell at his feet.
For this unique and heroic deed, Capt Divakaran Pillay was conferred the Shaurya Chakra by a grateful nation.
In 2010, the local Brigade Commander, a friend of the now Col. Pillay, sent a patrol to find out about the village in which this famous encounter had taken place. It was through this army patrol that the villagers found out that their saviour was still alive. They immediately requested for a reunion. So, Col Pillay went to meet the villagers in that small village in Manipur.
He was accorded not just a hero’s welcome. He was welcomed like a village elder. Through his remarkable heroism and generosity, a Keralite had found family in Manipur. The little girl who was shot in the stomach and whose life he had saved by getting her airlifted, was now married and a mother of two. The young boy was now a strapping young man.
During the reunion, Col Pillay saw a familiar-looking man in the crowd. That man was among the few who had attacked him, almost killing him on that fateful day. Col Pillay called out to him and hugged him. In that instant, all was forgiven, all was forgotten.
As the story of his visit to the village spread, the national media made Col Pillay a celebrity. And, true to his character, Col Pillay used this fame to devastating effect. He was now in touch with ministers and senior bureaucrats. So, he used his influence with the Minister of State for Defence for a 23km-long black top road that would connect Longdipabram to District Headquarters at Tamenglong. The Border Roads Organisation (BRO) would construct this road. But Col Pillay was not done yet. He realised that the road would fall into disrepair after a few years because the BRO did not have the mandate to maintain roads that were not on the border.
Col Pillay went on a liaison overdrive and a charm offensive. He called and met the high and mighty of Lutyens Delhi. Everyone had heard stories of the young Captain who had courted certain death to save two innocent children. Many people shut the doors to his face. But good things happen to good people. Or at least they happen to people who are both good and terribly stubborn.
On 7 October 2016, I received a phone call from Col Pillay.
“Gaurav, Mr Nitin Gadkari has approved a 100km long National Highway, connecting Tamenglong to Peren in Nagaland. And Longdipabram will be a reference point in the NH,” he said excitedly.
Seventy years after independence, a nondescript village in some remote corner of the North East that no one had heard of suddenly found itself right on a National Highway.
He has three sons, all school-going fine young lads. Over Dunkin Donuts burgers, they introduced themselves – Vikramaditya, Siddharth and Harshvardhan. They are taught Kalaripayattu, the ancient martial art from Kerala by their fathers.(UPSC Prelims Question-2014)
Little Harshvardhan knows what to do in case terrorists attack his house. He knows what he can use as a weapon in case of an emergency.
These boys are shaping up just fine. They have an illustrious father to look up to, a father who understands what it is to wield power with kindness, and who understands that in forgiveness there is courage.
Capt Divakaran Pillay was willing to die to save two children he did not even know. He forbade vengeance on non-combatants. He used his fame for helping people who were strangers. He embraced a man who tried to kill him. This is not just the story of Capt Divakaran Pillay.
This is the story of the Indian Army.
-Written by Major Gaurav
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.