As Prem Bhutani set out to watch the film ‘Ikkis’ (Twenty-One), memories of the 1971 India-Pakistan war began flooding into his mind like scenes from a motion picture.
Some fifty-four years back, when the war was fought, Bhutani was a student at IIT Delhi. One of his classmates was Mukesh Khetarpal, whose brother Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal’s bravery became the stuff of legends.
After Arun Khetarpal died on the battlefield at the age of 21, Mukesh’s classmates from IIT went to his family home in Naraina in Delhi to pay their condolences. The film ‘Ikkis’ is based on the valour of the brave officer Arun Khetarpal.
Arun’s family had migrated to Delhi from Sargodha, a city which went to Pakistan after the Partition in 1947, when the country was splintered into two.
His early childhood and education was at St. Columba’s School, Delhi.
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The capital was not just a city for Arun but a home and a repository of memories also. His brother Mukesh once recounted that on a cold evening in 1971 before the war began, Arun arrived home. At the dinner table, their mother, Maheshwari Devi said, “Fight like a lion, Arun. Do not return like a coward.”
Arun smiled and then left by the Jammu-Tawi Express for Jammu.
What followed on the battlefield is well known. 2nd-Lt Arun Khetarpal, a tank commander in the Indian Army, managed to knock out 10 Pakistani tanks before he succumbed to injuries.
Khetarpal’s extraordinary courage in the face of a larger formation of enemy tanks, won him the Param Vir Chakra (PVC), India’s highest wartime gallantry award, posthumously. His mother received the honour from President VV Giri at the Republic Day parade in 1972.
His bronze statue was later installed at the National War Memorial near India Gate, a source of pride for Delhi-wallas. Noida’s Arun Vihar was also named after him.
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What is not known is Arun Khetarpal’s father, Brigadier ML. Khetarpal, too, served in the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army and fought in the same 1971 war. His grandfather served in the British army during the First World War. His great-grandfather was also a soldier who had served in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army.
In 2001, his father Brig. Khetarpal visited Pakistan, where he met Brigadier Khwaja Mohammad Nasir of Pakistan’s 13 Lancers. Brig. Nasir revealed that it was his firing which eventually destroyed Arun’s tank.
Brig. Nasir told Arun’s father, “Your son was very brave; he was the reason for our defeat.” He sent photographs of Arun’s tank and wrote that Arun had stood “like an unbreakable rock.” “His bravery gave the Khetarpal family, us the IITians, and India as a whole a sense of intense pride and patriotism,” Bhutani recounted.
His earnest request is that all those who watch the movie ‘Ikkis’ remember how a 21-year-old Delhi lad transformed himself into a lion, whom even the enemy respected,