How Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon defended Srinagar's sky in 1971

The numbers are what make the action hard to believe. Six Pakistan Air Force F-86 Sabres, from No. 26 Squadron, came in to hit the airfield; two Indian Gnats were on readiness to answer. The moment Sekhon's leader lost sight of him, it became one Gnat against six Sabres — six-to-one odds. The Gnat weighed only about four tonnes and carried two 30 mm cannon; it was slower than the Sabre in a straight line but turned tightly and was a small, hard target. Sekhon took off literally through the bomb bursts, his wheels leaving a runway that was being cratered around him — an act the Param Vir Chakra citation calls out for its 'immense risk to life'. In roughly the next three to four minutes he closed on a pair of Sabres, secured hits on one and damaged a second, then held off the other four at heights of a few hundred feet, weaving through the valley. His terse radio transmissions — reporting he was behind two Sabres, that he thought he had got one, that he would not let them go — were logged by the control room and are quoted to this day. The fight ended when his Gnat was struck and crashed into the hills. He was twenty-six.

Flying Officer Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon — the twenty-six-year-old Gnat pilot of No. 18 Squadron at the centre of the action; commissioned in 1967, the son of an air-force airman, and the only IAF man ever to win the Param Vir Chakra. Flight Lieutenant Ghummman — Sekhon's flight leader on readiness that morning, who took off just ahead of him but lost visual contact in the smoke and dust of the bombing, leaving Sekhon to fight alone. No. 26 Squadron, Pakistan Air Force — the Sabre unit that flew the six-aircraft strike on Srinagar; skilled opponents flying a proven fighter, several of whose pilots duelled Sekhon at low level. The Srinagar ground crew and controllers — the technicians who kept the Gnats armed and fuelled under attack and the operations room that logged Sekhon's last calls; their readiness discipline let a jet get airborne at all through a live raid. No. 18 Squadron, the 'Flying Bullets' — the wider unit whose job was to hold the valley's sky, and for whom Sekhon's stand became a defining story. Around these few people the whole episode turned, decided in minutes over one runway.

Sekhon's courage is not in dispute, but the exact score of that dogfight is, and honesty means saying so. The Indian citation and Sekhon's own last radio calls credit him with hits: he reported getting behind two Sabres, striking one and damaging another, and the Param Vir Chakra award records that he 'secured hits' before he was shot down. Over the years the popular retelling has often hardened this into 'Sekhon shot down two Sabres', sometimes even more. Pakistan Air Force accounts, on the other hand, acknowledge a hard fight over Srinagar but dispute that any Sabre was actually lost to him that morning. Air-combat claims are notoriously difficult to confirm: aircraft that are hit can still limp home, gun-camera film is incomplete, and both sides have reasons to round up or down. What the records agree on is firmer and more important than the tally — that a lone pilot took off into a live bombing raid at six-to-one odds, damaged the enemy, and fought to the end at treetop height. The Param Vir Chakra was given for that conduct, not for a confirmed number of kills. The heroism is documented; the box-score is genuinely uncertain, and it is fair to leave it that way.

Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon was born on 17 July 1945 in Isewal, a village near Ludhiana in Punjab. His father was himself an air-force man, a warrant officer, so the boy grew up around aircraft and knew what the uniform cost. He was commissioned as a pilot in June 1967 and had been flying fighters for only about four years when the 1971 war came. He was newly married. His body was never found in the mountains where his Gnat went down, so his family had no grave to visit — only a citation and a memory. That absence is part of what makes his story land so hard in Punjab and in the air force. His name did not fade: statues stand in Ludhiana and in Delhi's memorial parks, a decommissioned Gnat is displayed in his honour, and airmen still recite his last radio calls at the squadron. For his village, an ordinary boy from Isewal becoming the air force's single highest-decorated hero turned him into a permanent local point of pride. The human weight of the story is not in the machines or the tally but in this: a twenty-six-year-old who could have stayed on the ground chose, in seconds, to fly into fire so that others behind him might live.

In 1971 the defence of Srinagar came down to two small Gnats on readiness and the reflexes of the pilots strapped into them. Radar warning was thin, reaction time was measured in the seconds it took to sprint to a cockpit and firewall the throttle, and a raid could be overhead almost before the sirens finished. Sekhon's stand was heroic precisely because the system left so much to one man's nerve. The valley's air defence today would be almost unrecognisable to him. Srinagar is now a hardened air base with modern multirole fighters, layered radar coverage, surface-to-air missile batteries and networked early warning that can see threats building long before they cross the ridges. A lone scramble into a bombing run is no longer the last line it once was. But the change is not only in the hardware. Sekhon's fight is taught precisely because technology never fully removes the human moment — the decision, under fire and against the odds, to take off anyway. The Gnat has gone to museums; the standard it set, of a pilot who would not let the enemy pass, is still held up to every new cadet. Then it was one man and one runway; now it is a system built so that no one has to stand quite that alone.

Sekhon's action changed no borders. The 1971 war was decided far to the east, at Dhaka, where Pakistan's army surrendered two days after his last flight. Militarily, one Gnat over one airfield was a footnote. Yet the country chose to give this footnote its highest honour, and that choice says something about what India decided to value. The Param Vir Chakra is rarely awarded and almost always to men who held a position they could have abandoned. Sekhon holds a unique place because he did it in the air, alone, in seconds, with no cover and no realistic chance — the only airman ever to earn the medal. His story endures because it isolates the purest version of duty: not a campaign, not a strategy, but one person's instant decision to take off into a raid that was meant to destroy him on the ground. That is why cadets still study those few radio calls, why his village keeps his name, and why the air force treats a short, losing dogfight as one of its defining moments. The big picture is not about the tally of Sabres or the map of Kashmir. It is about a standard of conduct — that when the sky over your people is under attack, you go up, whatever the odds — and about a nation choosing to remember the man who lived that standard to the end.