The army officer who has risen above odds and crippling injury

Outlook India The Spine Is Intact
The army officer who has risen above odds and crippling injury by Shreevatsa Nevatia on S.K. Razdan

Maj Gen Razdan in the lawns of his house in New Delhi

In March this year, when Outlook caught up with Brigadier Sunil Kumar Razdan, he was sitting in his garden patch, absorbed in tugging and releasing makeshift weights tied to the bark of a tree. “It’s a small pulley,” he explained, “with stones at one end, and a stupid chap at the other.” Even as you chuckled your way past his self-deprecating humour, it was clear this was a demonstration not just of an exercise routine, but of an extraordinary tenacity, worn like a humble matter of routine. It helped to explain why this brigadier had recently been approved for the rank of a major-general, making him the first wheelchair-bound officer to serve at this level in the history of the Indian army.

At the time of that meeting, seven months ago, Razdan’s fate still hung in the balance, even though he had been approved for the two-star rank. His eventual promotion depended on whether or not a vacancy arose for a major-general’s post before he retired. Unsentimentally, he explained, “I am supposed to superannuate in October 2010. If a vacancy comes before then, well and good, otherwise I just go home.” As it happened, a vacancy did open up, and the brigadier is now a major-general, but with as stoic a manner, as even a tone, as before. He says, “Any new task demands dedication and a greater excellence. If you stop looking to better yourself, you stop growing. You still need the fire in your belly.” And of that, he has always had plenty. Literally.

Razdan was born on October 8, sharing his birthday, he laconically informs you, with Liz Taylor and the Indian Air Force. But this date also has a deeper significance for the paraplegic officer. It was on this day that he found himself engaged in an operation that would change his life irrevocably.

Wife Manju recalls Razdan as an avid biker who once did Delhi to Agra on a Bullet in just two hours.

Razdan, who belongs to the 7th Parachute Battalion, was posted in Jammu and Kashmir during the early 1990s, a time when cross-border infiltration was seeing a steady rise. On October 8, 1994, came the news that nine militants had abducted 14 women, aged between 14 and 30, and were holding them captive in Damal Kunzipur. It found Razdan heading towards the area with a unit of 20 soldiers, where a 12-hour hike later, he found the women incarcerated in a four-storey house. He managed to evacuate them safely through a kitchen window, but was unable to save himself from the attack of a militant, who emptied a rifle into his stomach at point-blank range, the bullets going right through his gut to his spine.

Mr Greyhound One from the family album
Somehow, he still found the energy to be part of the 16-hour gun battle that followed, and only after the nine militants were killed was he finally airlifted from the spot. As he lifts his shirt to reveal the most brutal of scars, his voice surprisingly remains steady. “I was operated on thrice over,” he says, “and was in hospital for a year. During the time I spent there, it dawned on me that I would never be able to walk, and that I had to come to terms with my reality.”

A devastating thought for anyone. For Razdan, for whom physical activity was integral to his life on and off duty, it must have been something akin to death. A long-distance runner since his adolescence, he had been nicknamed ‘Greyhound’ by peers. He was also an almost obsessive biker, his wife Manju recalls. “I remember him going from Delhi to Agra on a Bullet motorcycle. The journey only took him some two hours.” How did he cope with disability? “If one door shuts on you, many windows open up,” he says simply.

The year 1996 brought Razdan a Kirti Chakra, the country’s second-highest peacetime gallantry award. Meanwhile, what Razdan, with characteristic humour, calls his “bad habit of reading” stood him in good stead, enabling him to bring academic rigour to his now desk-based duties. A few years down the road, he found himself posted to the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) headquarters, where he was tasked with making the operations, logistics and administration of the armed forces more efficient and effective. General Vijay Kumar (retd) of the 45th Cavalry Regiment, who worked in an office right opposite Razdan’s at the IDS headquarters, says, “When his posting order came in all those years ago, the general reaction was: why are we getting a guy in a wheelchair? Today, the overwhelming reaction is that Major-General Razdan should not go anywhere, he must stay with the IDS. That’s how tremendous his work here has been.” Sure enough, that is where he will stay, until he retires two years from now, focusing on issues such as insurgency and welfare.

As we chat with him, 19-year-old Paarth Razdan listens attentively, and then breaks his silence to say, “Whenever I feel that something cannot be done, I just think of the pain and struggle my father has overcome, on a daily basis.” Paarth’s 22-year-old brother Ishan will start training to become an air force pilot on January 1 next year, while Paarth himself would like to join the army after completing his medical education. In a voice strikingly free of bitterness and regret for what his father has been through, he says: “The kind of respect you are able to command as a member of the armed forces is unparalleled.”
The Spine Is Intact
He deserves the best wheel chair like the one below and not the low technology one provided by the Army as in picture above!


National Award will be given to a Website having the best accessibility features for persons with disabilities. Will any Military Websites Qualify?
PIB: International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3rd December