Indian Helicopters Dropped 29 Men Onto the Saltoro Ridge on 13 April 1984, and the Army Has Held the Passes for 42 Years

At 5:30 on the morning of 13 April 1984, a Cheetah helicopter lifted off from the Indian base camp below the Siachen Glacier with Captain Sanjay Kulkarni of the 4th Battalion, the Kumaon Regiment, and one soldier aboard. It flew to Bilafond La, a pass on the Saltoro Ridge. The pilot was unsure of the snow’s firmness, Kulkarni told the Tribune, and asked the two men to jump out.

Kulkarni, who retired as a lieutenant general, told the author Nitin Gokhale three decades later what he did first. “I remember throwing a 25 kg atta bori (gunny sack full of flour) to test the depth and hardness of the snow. It was quite hard.” Four men jumped one by one from the first two helicopters, he said, at around 6 a.m. By his guess the temperature was minus 30 degrees Celsius.

By noon, in Gokhale’s count, 17 sorties flown by Squadron Leaders Surinder Bains and Rohit Rai had put Kulkarni, one junior commissioned officer and 27 soldiers down at Bilafond La. Brigadier V. N. Channa, who commanded the sector, described the job to Gokhale this way: “No one had fought on the glacier at altitudes in excess of 18,000 feet. No one in the world had a clue how to fight a war on the glacier.” Indian troops have been on the Saltoro Ridge since that day.

The mail run of 1978

The operation began six years earlier, with a sack of letters. In September 1978 the Army’s High Altitude Warfare School at Gulmarg sent an expedition onto the Siachen Glacier under Colonel Narendra Kumar, and the Air Force was asked to supply it with fresh rations and mail. Wing Commander Manmohan Bahadur, then a flying officer fresh out of helicopter training and posted to Leh, wrote down what happened in a piece first published by Air Headquarters in 1998.

At the Division headquarters the pilots were told why the expedition was going, he recalled: “it was to show the flag on a territory, rightfully ours, but opened to foreign expeditions by Pakistan.” Pakistan, the briefing added, had begun to show the area as its own on maps. India’s name for this was “cartographic aggression.”

The Chetak helicopter had no skis, so the crew hovered over the camps and pushed rations through the sliding door. On a later sortie, Bahadur wrote, they lowered the rotor tip cover on a string with a note in Hindi: “We are coming back in ten minutes. Please write your letters and put it in the bag.” Ten minutes later they hauled up the bag and found an eye-drops carton with a scrap of paper inside. “We do not have paper to write on, so please get us some writing material.”

On 6 October 1978 Squadron Leader Monga and Bahadur landed a Chetak at around 15,500 feet beside the expedition’s Advance Base Camp and took two casualties aboard. The Press Information Bureau records it as the first IAF helicopter landing on the glacier.

Kumar kept going back. Born in Rawalpindi and commissioned into the Kumaon Regiment in 1953, he led expeditions onto the glacier through the late 1970s and early 1980s and lost four toes to frostbite along the way, according to the PTI obituary of December 2020. His maps, plans, photographs and video helped the Army plan the operation. PTI reports that his report on the glacier’s strategic importance led Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to approve the launch of Meghdoot. It also quotes an Army officer who said a German explorer once showed Kumar, at Gulmarg, an American map that placed Siachen in Pakistan. The Army had named its battalion headquarters on the glacier, at about 16,000 feet, Kumar Base while he was still serving, which PTI calls a rare honour.

A race both armies knew they were in

By 1983 each side suspected the other. Indian Defence Review’s Amit Paul writes that in August 1983 Pakistan extended its claim in a protest note to everything west of a line joining map point NJ 9842 to the Karakoram Pass. In late August or early September a patrol of Ladakh Scouts and 4 Kumaon, code-named Polar Bear II, met Pakistan’s Special Service Group on the glacier near Bilafond La. The Indians had no orders to engage and went back. The Pakistani troops, Paul says, citing the books of Lieutenant General Jahan Dad Khan and General Pervez Musharraf, camped on the glacier for about ten days before bad weather and short supplies turned them round.

Indian intelligence meanwhile picked up cancelled leave at Pakistan’s Northern Areas command, troop movement towards Khapalu, new communication lines beyond Skardu and orders for cold-weather gear from European makers, Paul writes. Pakistan, in his account, finalised a plan in December 1983 at a meeting chaired by General Zia-ul-Haq, and the local commander proposed 1 May as the date, since terrain and weather would keep helicopters and troops off the high ground until then. Kulkarni gave the Tribune a blunter version: “We chose April 13, auspicious Baisakhi day, and they fixed some day in May.”

India’s planning was quick. A two-sided war game called Walnut Cracker, held at the corps headquarters in Srinagar on 26 March 1984, settled the decision to drop troops by helicopter. Army Headquarters gave final approval on 31 March. For the Air Force the operation began on 3 April, when Flying Officers Kurane and R. R. Srinivasan flew reconnaissance sorties over the planned camps and landing zones.

Why Baisakhi

Two officers have told the story of the date, and both land on the same festival. Brigadier V. N. Channa, who commanded the sector and made the final call, told Gokhale he wanted a day when nobody would expect a battle. “People are in a joyous mood. Their guard is down. It was also the most unlikely date to launch a military operation.” He added: “I would concede that it was risky. Some called it suicidal.”

Major General Amarjit Singh, then Major General General Staff at Northern Command, told Indian Defence Review that the Army was waiting for imported clothing expected by the second week of April, and that “we instinctively decided on 13th April” because it is Baisakhi, the Sikh New Year.

The imported kit came late. Kulkarni said it arrived on the evening of 12 April, “barely hours” before launch, and included thermal coats, ice axes, goggles and tents bought in Europe. The weapons were the standard 7.62 mm self-loading rifle. Porters, all local Ladakhis, were paid 50 rupees a day, about what Everest expeditions then paid.

Seventeen sorties and a note tied to a stone

The Air Force had six Cheetah helicopters at Thoise under Wing Commander Sandhu and two Mi-8s under Wing Commander K. K. Sangar, according to Gokhale and Paul. The Press Information Bureau’s account of the operation says the Air Force’s An-12, An-32 and IL-76 transports carried stores and troops to high airfields, from where the helicopters flew men and loads “far above the limits set by the helicopter manufacturers.” The Bureau counts about 300 troops on the glacier’s peaks and passes soon afterwards.

The Sia La drop planned for 13 April was cancelled when the blizzard closed in. On 17 April, when the sky cleared, the pilots flew 32 sorties, a record in Gokhale’s telling, and a platoon of Ladakh Scouts under Major Ajay Bahuguna was put down about five kilometres from Sia La and walked the rest.

Colonel Paramvir Yadav, whose column was walking up to link with the Bilafond La troops, told Paul that on 16 April a small red bag came down from an Mi-8 over his men. Inside, wrapped round a stone, was a handwritten note from Wing Commander Sangar: “Dear Paramvir, Keep it up. We are with you every day/night for every assistance.” Yadav says he has never met Sangar and has kept the note.

Three days without a radio

The platoon at Bilafond La got no such help for three days. Kulkarni told Gokhale that within three hours of landing he had to evacuate his radio operator, a sepoy with high altitude pulmonary oedema (fluid in the lungs), although the man was trained, acclimatised and fit. “The blizzard hit us even as the two-man tents were being set up,” he said. “We remained out of contact for three days.” A second man died within 48 hours. “Of this lot, 21 of us, I remember got severe frost bites.”

Gokhale writes that sending troops onto the glacier in winter “now seemed murderous” to the staff at Northern Command. “There were many who stared at me with the ‘I-told-you-so’ look,” Channa told him, but he was sure the storm would pass, and it did, three days later. He credits the silence: “The radio silence worked wonderfully.” The Pakistanis, he says, learned of the post only because Kulkarni switched on his radio to report the death.

When the weather opened, a Pakistani helicopter flew over the platoon. “When the Pakistanis saw us, they turned,” Kulkarni recalled. “Now they had no chance.”

Lieutenant General M. L. Chibber, the Northern Army Commander, wrote in an official note immediately after the launch, as Gokhale quotes it: “The two main passes were sealed off. The enemy was taken completely by surprise.”

Quaid Post, 1987

Both armies spent the following years trying to dominate each other by taking height, Ajay Singh writes, and Quaid Post was one of the posts that changed hands. It stood on a pinnacle near Bilafond La, named after Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and from there Pakistani Special Services Group commandos could look down on Indian positions and the helipads that supplied them.

In May 1987 Second Lieutenant Rajiv Pande led a 13-man patrol of the 8th Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry up the ice wall below the post to fix ropes for a later assault, Ajai Shukla wrote in Business Standard in 2011. Pakistani sentries heard them and opened fire. Nine Indian soldiers died, Pande among them. Four survivors got back and reported that the ropes were in place.

The assault force took 25 days to assemble, since the Cheetah, Shukla notes, can carry only one passenger at those heights and blizzards were frequent. On 23 June 1987, 64 soldiers under Major Varinder Singh started up. All night they searched in waist-deep snow for Pande’s rope, and fell back. The next night they found it, and climbed past the bodies of Pande’s patrol, still roped together. Pakistani defenders opened fire halfway up. The Indian rifles had jammed solid in minus 25 degrees, “cold arrest” in Shukla’s words, and the men sheltered in shell craters through a day of fire. Each casualty needed four comrades to carry him down.

On the morning of 26 June, with Brigadier Chandan Nugyal promising every gun in range, Varinder Singh chose a daylight assault. “By any measure, we should have dropped from exhaustion,” he told Shukla. “But Pande had to be avenged.” A blizzard turned noon to darkness. In Ajay Singh’s account of the final minutes, Naib Subedar Bana Singh and four riflemen assaulted the main bunker, their weapons jammed again, and threw grenades into it. Singh shut the door. Hand-to-hand fighting followed, and some Pakistani defenders jumped off the ridge. The Indians turned the Pakistani machine gun round and cooked rice on the stove the Pakistanis had kept lit beneath it to stop the gun from freezing. It was their first real meal in three days.

“We had no strength to celebrate,” Varinder Singh said. “At 21,000 feet, nobody does the bhangra, yells war cries, or hoists the tricolour.”

Bana Singh received the Param Vir Chakra, India’s highest gallantry award. The citation, as reproduced by All About Sikhs, says he volunteered for a task force to clear an intrusion “at an altitude of 21,000 feet,” that the post was “virtually an impregnable glacier fortress with ice walls, 1500 feet high, on both sides,” and that he inspired his men by “indomitable courage and leadership.” Quaid Post was renamed Bana Top.

The accounts disagree on details. Shukla and Singh differ on how many of Pande’s patrol were killed (nine, and ten) and on the post’s height (21,153 feet, and 22,153), and the citation gives 21,000 feet and an ice wall of 1,500 feet where Singh says 1,200.

The cost of staying

On 27 August 2012, Defence Minister A. K. Antony told the Lok Sabha that 846 armed forces personnel had died on the Siachen glaciers since 1984. Business Standard, reporting the figure, noted that the government counts deaths from the climate and terrain as battle casualties, with enhanced compensation for the families, and that altitude sickness, avalanches and crevasses had killed more men there than fighting had.

Bahadur, writing in 1998, put the temperatures the helicopters fly in at as low as minus 60 Celsius, with landings on “match box sized” helipads and a few seconds to half a minute on the ground. At the Amar helipad, 19,500 feet, a technical team under Flight Lieutenant Sreepal changed a Cheetah’s engine on the pad on 3 July 1990, while Sikh Light Infantry soldiers moved the aircraft to make room, according to the IAF History account of 114 Helicopter Unit.

After the defence secretaries’ talks of May 2005, the Indian analyst Gurmeet Kanwal wrote for the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies that supplying a brigade-group-sized force by air drops and helicopters costs “both sides around $200 to $300 million annually.”

Where India and Pakistan disagree

The Line of Control that ran through Kargil in 1999 stops on the map at NJ 9842. The 1949 Karachi Agreement, which fixed the ceasefire line after the first Kashmir war, took it to that point and then said it ran “thence north to the glaciers,” according to the Pakistani scholar Ishtiaq Ahmad. The Simla Agreement of 1972 did not draw the line any further. Pakistan draws it straight from NJ 9842 to the Karakoram Pass, which puts the glacier on its side. India draws it along the Saltoro watershed, which Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam describes as a line of almost 110 kilometres from near NJ 9842 to Indira Col.

Ahmad, writing in a Pakistani journal in 2006, holds that when India placed a platoon each at Sia La and Bilafond La in April 1984, even though that was not a violation of the Line of Control as such, “it was surely a breach of the Simla agreement.” He adds that published Indian accounts leave little room for doubt that the Pakistanis were “caught napping.” Pakistan’s position in later talks, Kanwal writes, was that Indian forces must first go back to their pre-1984 positions. India’s position is that the positions both armies hold must be marked on maps before anyone withdraws. In May 2006 Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Pakistan had not been agreeing to authenticate positions “for quite some time.” The Daily Star’s report said Islamabad feared that writing positions down would amount to accepting India’s claims.

Ahmad also cites Indian writers, among them Pravin Sawhney, who reject the official Indian argument that the operation pre-empted a Pakistani bid for the glacier. Channa told Gokhale that General Musharraf’s book says India did pre-empt Pakistan.

The joint statement issued after those talks welcomed “the successful continuation of the ceasefire since November 2003.” The Daily Star’s AFP report put military experts’ estimate at 7,000 Indian and 4,000 Pakistani troops on the glacier.

On 13 April 2026, the 42nd anniversary, the Indian Air Force wrote that it “continues to sustain operational readiness in the Siachen sector.”