NEW DELHI: India’s senior-most military official Bipin Rawat and his wife Madhulika Rawat were laid to rest with full state honours on Friday, including a 17-gun salute, two days after he and 12 others died in a helicopter crash in southern India.
The flag-wrapped coffin of India’s defence chief was towed through the streets of New Delhi on a gun carriage draped with flower garlands. He and his wife were cremated together on the same pyre, with a 17-gun salute fired as their daughters set it alight.
India accorded him full military honours for his funeral, with the gun carriage bearing his remains towed by an armoured vehicle and escorted by lines of security personnel.
Locals lined the route waving the Indian flag and chanting “Hail Mother India” or “Rawat will remain as long as there is a sun and a moon.” The procession and ceremony were broadcast live by multiple television channels with anchors calling Rawat “a true soldier” receiving the “final salute”.
Earlier in the day, India’s air force said it had opened a tri-service inquiry into the crash near a military staff college in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. There was only one survivor.
“The inquiry would be completed expeditiously & facts brought out,” the air force tweeted. It advised against “uninformed speculation” until the completion of the probe “to respect the dignity of the deceased”.
The crash
General Bipin Rawat, was killed along with his wife and 11 military personnel when their helicopter crashed on Wednesday. Rawat was India’s first chief of defence staff, a position created for him, and an outspoken, polarising and popular officer, seen as close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The 63-year-old was travelling with his wife and other senior officers in the Russian-made Mi-17 chopper, which crashed near its destination in southern Tamil Nadu state.
Footage from the scene showed a crowd of people trying to extinguish the fiery wreck with water buckets while a group of soldiers carried one of the passengers away on an improvised stretcher.
Rawat was headed to the Defence Services Staff College (DSSC) to address students and faculty from the nearby Sulur air force base in Coimbatore. The chopper was already making its descent at the time of the crash.
