During tenth air raid, when Prem’s plane was hit by retaliatory firing of Pakistan’s ground forces, he flew back to Amritsar but couldn’t survive.
The partition of subcontinent in 1947 was one of the catastrophic and darkest incidents of history, which not only shed the blood of hundreds of thousand humans, uprooted millions of people making them to leave their ancestral abodes, but also planted a seed of never-ending enmity between the two newly created state-nations. And, it was the seed of enmity that brought two countries – India and Pakistan to the wars, during which most of the soldiers had to fight against the country of their origin – their motherland, as a result of the cruelty of history.
Prem Ramchandani was one of those who had migrated from Sindh to India along with his parents, joined Indian Airforce and during the September War of 1965 between India and Pakistan, had to drop bombs on his own motherland Sindh. He became the Martyr of History’s Cruelty, as after raining the bombs on Karachi, his plane was hit by retaliatory fires from Pakistan’s ground forces.
Prem Ramchandani was born in Sindh on 19th October in the year 1941 and was just seven year to suffer the pains of partition and transaction as the family shifted to Bombay [Mumbai] in the year 1948. During the college education at Jai Hind College he decided to join Air force of India.
He passed the entrance and after completing the college education was sent to famous Jodhpur Airforce College for training and completed his training at Hyderabad [Andhra Pradesh] and joined Indian Air force as the fighter pilot.
Prem was commissioned as the flying officer on the 22nd June 1963 and got posting with the 3 squadron “Cobras” which had motto “Lakshya Vedh” [destroy the target with precision]. He was given service No. 7442 and charge of air craft “Mystere”. His courage, brave action and intelligence soon made him popular and trust worthy with fellow pilots and officials.
In the 1965 war with Pakistan he was assigned task of keeping the Karachi under the air raids of Indian force. Amritsar was the base airport for his activities. In the four days – from 18 to 22 September he completed nine attacks and returned back to base camp. Unfortunately after the tenth attacked his plane trapped in the rage of firing by ground forces of Pakistan and as a result his plane got damaged and encircled with flames of fire. Prem was with option of pressing the eject button to save the life but as this brave Sindhi son was not willing to respire last on ‘enemy land’ so kept on flying and jumped only after the plane was about to reach on Amritsar airport.
He was taken to Amritsar Military Hospital in precarious condition. Doctors tried hard for saving the physical life for this great fighting soul but on the 26th September 1965 death emerged as the winner. His body was taken to Mumbai and on 27th September Agani sanskar was done in the traditional Hindu way with due national honor.
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Source: Bharat Rakshak, Quora and Wikipedia
