Six Sabres Attacked Srinagar Airfield on 14 December 1971. One Gnat Took Off Into Them, and Its Pilot Is Still the Only Airman Awarded the Param Vir Chakra

At 0730 Pakistan time on 14 December 1971, six F-86 Sabres crossed the mountains into the Kashmir Valley after a 25-minute flight from Peshawar. Wing Commander Sharbat Ali Changazi, leading, came up on the radio with “Leader pulling up, contact with the target.” Four of the six carried two 500-pound bombs each. The other two, flown by Flight Lieutenants Salim Baig Mirza and Rahim Yusufzai, were there to look out for interceptors.

Air Commodore Kaiser Tufail of the Pakistan Air Force reconstructed the raid in a 2005 book, Great Air Battles of Pakistan Air Force. Given how familiar the crews were with Srinagar, he writes, it seemed like another milk run. On the runway below, Flying Officer Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon of No. 18 Squadron, Indian Air Force, was rolling in a Folland Gnat as the first bombs fell. India’s Official History of the 1971 war, published by the Ministry of Defence, has him “still on the runway when the Sabres attacked.”

He did not come back. On 26 January 1972 came the announcement of the Param Vir Chakra, India’s highest award for wartime gallantry, and Bharat Rakshak’s service record cites the Gazette of India of 29 January 1972 for it. In the Air Force’s 92-year history he is the only recipient, the Tribune noted in December 2024.

An airfield with no fighters until the war began

Srinagar was thinly defended, the citation explains, because of “the international agreement dating back to 1948.” No air defence aircraft were based there until hostilities with Pakistan began. Pilots arriving with the Gnats were therefore, in the citation’s words, “unfamiliar with the terrain” and “not acclimatised to the altitude of Srinagar,” in the cold and the biting wind of a Kashmir winter.

No. 18 Squadron, the Flying Bullets, was an Ambala squadron, and Sekhon had been posted to it there on 1 October 1968, according to his service record. Under Wing Commander P. Raina, the Official History lists it at Srinagar.

That history also gives the dates of what the detachment faced. At last light on 3 December, between 1740 and 1745 hours, the Pakistan Air Force struck the airfields at Amritsar, Srinagar, Avantipur and Pathankot at the same moment. Those fields were so close to the border that there was “insufficient warning” to scramble interceptors. On 6 December, as dusk fell, Mirages and F-86s attacked Amritsar and Srinagar, six aircraft to each base. On 9 December four F-86s bombed Srinagar at 0950 hours and left six small craters in the runway, which were repaired by nightfall.

Tufail, writing from the other side, confirms the pattern. Daily Sabre attacks had caused some damage, he writes, but runway repair gangs kept the airfield from going out of service for good. He adds that Sabres dropped leaflets on the garrison engineer at Srinagar, warning him that his house would be bombed if he repaired the runway.

Sekhon’s unit had a reputation to keep up. He and his colleagues fought “successive waves of intruding Pakistani aircraft” from the outbreak of war, the citation says. On 22 November, before the war formally began, Gnats intercepted three Sabres over Boyra, north-east of Calcutta, and all three were shot down, the Official History records. Both air forces had met before, in the 1965 war, and the valley itself has been disputed since 1947 and 1948.

Two Gnats and a cloud of dust

On the morning of 14 December Sekhon was on readiness duty. Swarajya, in a 2017 account, names the leader of his two-Gnat section as Flight Lieutenant Baldhir Singh Ghumman and says both pilots were on two-minute standby, strapped in and ready. It adds that Sekhon, who was tall, only just fitted into the Gnat’s small cockpit.

He could not take off at once, the citation says, because of the dust thrown up by the aircraft that had just left the runway. Baig, the Pakistani escort pilot, puts the delay at two to three minutes after his leader got airborne, in a passage that draws on All India Radio interviews with the Srinagar base commander and squadron pilots. By the time the runway was fit to use, the citation adds, six Sabres were overhead and strafing the airfield.

Sekhon took off anyway, “inspite of the mortal danger of attempting to take off during an attack.” In Tufail’s telling he singled out the first Sabre pair as it re-formed after its bombing run.

The calls on the radio

Tufail’s chapter reproduces calls from several cockpits and the control tower. Changazi was the first to see the attacker. “Gnat behind, all punch tanks,” he called, the order to drop external fuel tanks. Flight Lieutenant Amjad Andrabi, just pulling out of his own bombing run, saw the Gnat firing from no more than 1,000 feet behind another Sabre and called “Break left” as he swung round to get behind it.

What followed, Tufail writes, was a classic tail chase: a Sabre, then the Gnat, then another Sabre behind it. Sekhon described the position to his controllers in one sentence that Tufail quotes: “I am getting behind one but the other is getting an edge on me.” With two more Sabres watching from above and his own leader out of the fight, he was in Tufail’s words practically up against four.

Andrabi got in close behind the Gnat and fired steadily, but his rounds missed. Then came the call “Three is Winchester!” Winchester is fighter slang for out of ammunition, and Tufail says Andrabi had used up 1,800 rounds. Andrabi pulled away to join his leader. Sekhon used the gap to straighten out and jettison his own tanks. Lighter, the Gnat turned tighter than before and was soon in a menacing position behind the Sabres.

The escorts above, Tufail says, watched “in astonishment.” Andrabi’s shouted calls for help brought the escorts down into the fight, and Tufail gives his chapter the title of his verdict on the Gnat pilot, a hard nut to crack.

The three seconds that decided it

Baig, flying as No. 5, dived into the fight and settled behind the Gnat from about 1,000 feet. In his own account, written for Defence Journal and reproduced by Bharat Rakshak, he fired a burst of about three seconds from his Sabre’s six machine guns. He hit the Gnat square, he writes, and thick black smoke began to pour from under its fuselage.

Levelling its wings, the Gnat turned for the airfield, as if to say the fight was over, and Baig stopped firing. Tufail writes that the base commander and senior pilots in the control tower heard Sekhon’s last call, to his leader: “I think I have been hit. Ghuman, come and get them.” Baig, again citing the Indian radio interviews, says the tower had advised him to head for base. Then the canopy flew off the Gnat, which rolled onto its back and went into the ground. At that height the ejection seat could not work fully, Tufail says, and he reads the canopy going as a last-minute attempt to eject.

Wreckage of the Gnat was found in a gorge a few miles from the base, near the road from Srinagar town. Bharat Rakshak’s service record lists the aircraft, Gnat E-257, as lost at Srinagar to an F-86. Swarajya reports that the recovered part of the wreckage carried no fewer than 37 bullet marks.

The raid ended there. In the citation’s words the enemy aircraft “fled from the scene of the battle without pressing home their attack against the town and the airfield.” Baig says his formation joined up, kept watching for other fighters, and flew home to Peshawar. He wrote that Sekhon “put up a brave fight,” and that the Param Vir Chakra was the Indian equivalent of Pakistan’s Nishan-e-Haider. Tufail closes his chapter on the same note: Sekhon “had kept the field single-handedly to the very end.”

The citation as printed

On its page for the award, Bharat Rakshak, which names the Gazette of India of 29 January 1972 as its source, prints the citation’s main passage this way:

Flying Officer Sekhon was on readiness duty at the time. However, he could not take off at once because of the clouds of dust raised by another aircraft which had just taken off. By the time the runway was fit for take-off, no fewer than six enemy aircraft were overhead, and strafing of the airfield was in progress. Nevertheless, inspite of the mortal danger of attempting to take off during an attack, and inspite of the odds against him, Flying Officer Sekhon took off and immediately engaged a pair of the attacking Sabres. He succeeded in damaging two of the enemy aircraft. In the fight that followed, at tree top height, he all but held his own, but was eventually overcome by sheer weight of numbers. His aircraft crashed and he was killed.

It closes:

The sublime heroism, supreme gallantry, flying skill and determination, above and beyond the call of duty, displayed by Flying Officer Sekhon in the face of certain death, set new heights to Air Force traditions.

Shorter is the Official History’s account. “Then began an unequal contest between the solitary Gnat and half a dozen Sabres over the airfield,” it says, and it calls him the first individual from the Air Force to be awarded the Param Vir Chakra.

Who hit what

The records disagree on one point. According to the Official History, Sekhon “shot down one Sabre and managed to set another on fire.” As Bharat Rakshak prints it, the citation says he damaged two. A plaque on his Ludhiana statue, as the Tribune reported it in 2004, gives hits on one aircraft and another set on fire. Tribune pieces of December 2024 and July 2025 say he shot down two. A footnote in Tufail’s chapter, from the Pakistani side, says “none of the Sabres was hit during the dogfight.” Baig’s account describes the fight in detail and mentions no damage to any Sabre.

All of them agree on the outcome: the Gnat was lost and the raid broke off. Day by day, the Official History shows the Pakistan Air Force still coming. A raid on Srinagar at 1300 hours on 15 December hit a Vampire parked inside a blast pen. On the afternoon of 16 December raids on Srinagar and Avantipur killed five Air Force civilians at Srinagar and again slightly damaged the runway. A cease-fire followed on 17 December. For the wider war, and the reason a Gnat detachment was in Srinagar at all, see the piece on 1971.

A son of Issewal, near Ludhiana

Sekhon was born on 17 July 1945, according to the Official History, his service record and the Tribune in July 2025. Other Tribune pieces, Swarajya and the Bharat Rakshak citation page give 1943. His village was Issewal, in the Dakha area of Ludhiana district. His father, Tarlochan Singh Sekhon, was a warrant officer in the Air Force, and Swarajya reports that the boy was passionate about fighter planes from childhood. His mother was Harbans Kaur, whom a cousin, Daljit Singh, described to the Tribune in November 2025 as a courageous woman who encouraged her son to serve.

He was commissioned on 4 June 1967. Swarajya reports that he had been married only a few months when tensions rose on the eastern front in March 1971.

Issewal, the Tribune wrote in 2003, had given 54 war heroes to the country, and a sepoy from the village, Sarup Singh Sekhon, died in the same war. Air Marshal Manjeet Singh Sekhon, retired, who was also born in the village, told a gathering there that Nirmal Jit was “aggressive and yet a very wonderful person.” A villager, Sukhpal Singh Issewal, told the Tribune in 2025 that a function is held every 14 December, and that people still remember how the young pilot’s aircraft used to fly over the village and bring everyone out to look.

What stands for him

Ludhiana’s district administration holds a wreath-laying every 14 December, which the Tribune reported at the district administrative complex in 2024. Back in 2004 the brass plaque on his statue, which stands with that of Major Bhupinder Singh outside the mini secretariat, had gone missing, the Tribune reported, and the administration suspected theft for scrap. A marble plaque went up on the eve of Vijay Divas, Victory Day. The Air Force installed a statue of him at the government senior secondary school in Issewal in 2021, and his ancestral house still stands in the village, kept by a caretaker. A marathon was held across 46 air bases in his memory in 2025.

On 17 July 2025, which the Tribune called his 80th birth anniversary, the Indian Army announced on X that it had preserved his room at Badami Bagh Cantonment in Srinagar as “PVC Abode,” “a museum dedicated to his legacy,” with his photographs and uniform. No. 18 Squadron now flies the Tejas from Naliya.