The fighter aircraft blew up in a ball of flame and crashed. The pilot ejected safely, but when he landed with his parachute, he was immediately surrounded by Pakistani troops. It was September 22, 1965, and the officer was 27-year-old Flight Lieutenant K.C. Cariappa.
“I wasn’t sure whether I was in India or Pakistan. When our artillery opened up, one of the Pakistani soldiers said that your guns are firing at us. That’s when I realised that I had been taken as a prisoner of war (PoW),” recounts Air Marshal Cariappa (retd) in a telephonic interview from his home in Madikeri in Karnataka. He landed in Punjab’s Khem Karan sector, 5 km from the International Border, which had been occupied by the Pakistani Army.
The pilot spent the next few weeks being moved from one hospital to another because of a spinal injury and a damaged arm from shelling. As news of him being the son of then General K.M. Cariappa (who had retired as the Chief of the Army Staff and would be later conferred the rank of Field Marshal) spread, he was visited by Pakistan’s Army Chief General Muhammad Musa and one of Pakistan President General Ayub Khan's son, who gave him a P.G. Wodehouse book and cigarettes.
Ayub Khan, who had served under Cariappa Senior in the North West Frontier Province, offered to return the young captive. But that offer was politely rejected by General Cariappa, who said that all Indian PoWs were his sons. The young officer was shifted to the main prison camp at Fort Dargai, where all the other Indian PoWs were detained. As a captive, life was far from comfortable.
Talking about Wg Cdr Abhinandan Varthaman’s capture by the Pakistani military, he says that “the rules of the game have changed due to social media”, but there is a need to adhere to a “code of conduct”. “While there were horrible videos of his bloodied face circulating, these were also an acknowledgment of the fact that he was in Pakistani custody.” His were “kinder and benign years”.