A mother's fight...

As the Indian Navy lurches from one tragic accident to another, through what many are calling its lowest phase ever, a retired teacher monitors each case closely from her home in the far Mumbai suburb Dombivli. "Is this the 'great' Indian Navy we spoke of with respect since early childhood?" asks Anuradha Paldhe, the mother of a young navy diver who died in mysterious circumstances 21 years ago.

The questions remain unanswered and the mother, who fought a long, hard battle for justice that led to the court ordering the navy to pay a compensation of Rs19.2 lakh, still mourns the son she named Amar, which means immortal.

The 67-year-old, who has written the book Sangharsh Eika Aicha: Naudalashi about her quest for the truth, is angry. Pointing to the television , which is running a story on how a civilian had died on March 8 in Visakhapatnam in an accident that hit India's nuclear submarine construction programme, she attacks the media for its coverage. "There must be a mother, a wife or children affected every time negligence claims lives like this. In the din of geo-strategic effects of mishaps, why do we seldom hear the human angle?"

As the anchor moves on to "more happening" political developments, Paldhe's had enough. She switches off the TV and tosses the remote aside.

Every such death must bring back memories of that fateful day ­— September 23, 1993 — when she got a telegram from the navy that her son, who had complained of harassment by his senior, was missing. She recalls the day in vivid detail. "I'd woken up early in the morning that day with an awful dream. Tired after my walk, I sit near a culvert when my frightened boy Amar comes up to me, sits down, hugs my knees with his face in my lap complaining someone's trying to kill him."

"Though uneasy, I tried to brush it off as a weird dream. But soon the telegram telling us of Amar being missing for two days arrived and my heart sank."

Later that evening, the navy's Mumbai office informed the Paldhes about his death. He had apparently died in a mishap involving a jump from a helicopter as a part of war games off the Visakhapatnam coast.

Amar's body had been found by a fisherman in the creek off Kakinada, a few nautical miles from Visakhapatnam, around 6am — the same time she had the dream. "He was very attached to me. His soul must have hovered around trying to tell me what happened," says the mother, fighting back tears. "What bigger misfortune can there be than mourning a son who I lovingly named Amar?"

The tricolour draped over her son's mortal remains is framed on the wall across and a photograph of the astonishingly good-looking swimmer looks down on the grieving mother, who sits surrounded by papers and photographs documenting a 21-year-old fight for justice.

She is sobbing uncontrollably by now. "You know I taught him to swim. Sometimes I wish I hadn't," says the shot-put and javelin throw champion of her times.

The navy claimed Amar died due to shock and haemorrhage due to multiple injuries and drowning. However, the post-mortem report, a copy of which is with dna, clearly mentions deep and serious ante-mortem (pre-death) injuries on his axilla (under the joint where the arm connects to the shoulder) and near his ear, contradicting what the operation in-charge and then chief of Western Command had told the Paldhes.

In fact, the Board of Inquiry report subsequently submitted by the Navy to the court admitted to the negligence by Amar's superiors. "Despite 14 years of regular follow-ups with everyone from Amar's superiors to then navy chief Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, the navy kept denying us access to this report and it was only a rap from the courts which led to us getting it," Paldhe reveals.

This report also led to more alarming questions about the circumstances of Amar's death. The junior-most in the team of four, he was not trained to jump off a helicopter, admitted the report which also underlined the absence of a life-jacket or a quick release belt. In a clear departure from the navy's own standard operating procedure, he was also allegedly taken directly for the war exercise only a day after he reported back from a 45-day absence without a mandatory medical exam.

The absence, it appears, was itself the result of harassment by the same superior who would keep humiliating him and even threatened to get him thrown out of the diving team because of his superlative diving, which allegedly threatened his favourites. "You Marathi boys are not supposed to be in diving," Amar was told repeatedly by the senior he names only as Rawat in letters to his mother.

Till he was a sailor, he was (as is the practice in the defence sector) used for running errands like an orderly. But once selected as a diver, he was singled out for such menial errands leading him to run away and come home. "I'll do everything asked of me as a favour but I can't be ordered around like a peon."

His parents sent him back, aware this meant punishment for desertion. "He faced imprisonment for a month but stuck to his stand about his superior's harassment and humiliation." The fact that the same officer Rawat was in charge of Amar's team during the war exercise which claimed his life has led to the needle of suspicion stopping at him.

"The way the navy stonewalled all our efforts to interact with Amar's team members and this officer only worsened our doubts of a cover-up," says Paldhe.

She remembers they were first told a rescue/search operation could not be launched as it was high tide. "When my brother S Patwardhan, who is a national swimming champion, pointed out that it was not high, but low tide at the time, they had no answers."

She pointed out how her brother was also the first to notice that the refrigeration had been switched off at the morgue. "This hastened the decomposition of the body which had already been in the water for so long. Despite our desire to bring Amar home one last time, we were left with no alternative than to cremate him there."

The Paldhes filed a suit in 1997 against the navy for compensation at a civil court in Kakinada. The navy said that a lot of time had lapsed. "But the court upheld that it was the navy's delay in giving us the papers that had led to the passage of time and admitted our case," remembers Paldhe.

In the next seven years she went back and forth to Kakinada. "In the beginning I went with my husband but later his health began failing and I'd be accompanied by my brother or younger son Pratap. There were several occasions when the date would be declared but the case would not find mention on the board. But since the bus travel takes so long, I'd already have crossed Pune and even Solapur when I found this out," she says.

The Kakinada court pointed numerous discrepancies in the Navy's version of the events and asked it to pay a sum of Rs19.2 lakh to the parents in 2004.
The Navy went in appeal to the Hyderabad high court, which finally upheld the Kakinada court's decision.

"The Navy puts out expensive ads to attract youngsters. But with this attitude, why would any mother send her child to be killed meaninglessly?" asks an angry Paldhe.
Her lawyer, Manjiri Ganu, is all praise for Paldhe's grit. "When we heard she wants to use money she got from the Navy for charity we decided to fight her case pro-bono."

The Navy is still dithering on action on the HC's decision. Repeated attempts for over a week to seek the navy and the defence ministry's reactions drew a blank.
Four years ago, Paldhe read a feature by psychiatrist Rajendra Barve in which he said: "Writing can help you drain out sorrow." And so, she put pen to paper and wrote a book about her struggles. Her students through a 40-year career as a teacher ensured 1,000 copies of the book ran out within weeks. Paldhe is now working on a reprint.

Paldhe says it her family, friends and students who have kept her going these two decades. "When Amar was leaving for Chilkha in Orissa for his training, I hugged him and was crying. He gently moved away and said he didn't like me crying. 'Be brave,' he said. Every time I feel like giving up, those two words charge me..."

Another 'missing' story
The family of sub-lieutenant Bipin Kumar, who drowned after being ordered to "jump into the rough
sea, without proper safety precautions'' off the Gujarat coast on December 29 last year, has reached out to Anuradha Paldhe. "Though his was a case of a training drill gone horribly wrong, the family pointed out how they were running from pillar to post for justice, and the navy had simply listed him as missing," Paldhe says.
Bipin's case is very similar to Amar's. "In complete disregard for norms, there were no divers on stand-by or any life-jacket. The divers hit the waters almost 20 minutes after Kumar failed to surface and his body remained untraceable,'' the inquiry into Bipin's death has said. Like Amar, Kumar too was a "strong swimmer."