New Delhi: India has a long history when it comes to leaders dying in a plane or chopper crash beginning with Subhas Chandra Bose. Of course, the news of his death is not confirmed to this day.
The death of the country’s first Chief of Defence Staff, General Bipin Rawat on Wednesday will also be written in the annals of history.
Let us take a look at this sad chapter of Indian aviation when leaders/politicians died in a crash.
Subhas Chandra Bose: August 18, 1945, in present-day Taiwan.
Mohan Kumaramangalam, Congress: He died in an Indian Airlines plane crash in 1973 near New Delhi.
Sanjay Gandhi: The younger son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was killed when a glider he was flying crashed soon after taking off from the Safdarjung Airport in Delhi on June 23, 1980.
Surendra Nath, Punjab governor: Along with nine members of his family, he was killed when the government’s Super-King aircraft crashed into high mountains in bad weather on July 9, 1994, in Himachal Pradesh. Nath was then acting Himachal governor also.
Madhavrao Scindia, senior Congress leader and a former union cabinet minister: He was killed in a Cessna aircraft crash on September 30, 2001, while travelling to Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh to address a public rally.
Arunachal Pradesh education minister Natung: He was killed in a helicopter crash in May 2001.
GMC Balayogi Lok Sabha Speaker and Telugu Desam leader: He died in a chopper crash on March 3, 2002, in Andhra Pradesh. Balayogi was in a Bell 206 helicopter. An official probe ruled that the crash was caused when the pilot, unable to continue due to poor visibility, mistakenly landed on a pond thinking it was a land surface.
C Sangma, Meghalaya community development minister: He, three legislators and six others were killed in a helicopter crash in September 2004.
O P Jindal, Haryana’s then power minister and industrialist, and state agriculture minister Surendra Singh: They were killed when the chopper carrying them developed a technical snag and went down near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh on March 31, 2005.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy: The chopper of the senior Congress leader, popularly known as YSR, crashed in a forest while flying in a Bell 430 to Chitoor district in Andhra Pradesh. His body was traced 27 hours after the helicopter went missing on September 3, 2009.
Arunachal Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu: Five days after the helicopter that he was using went missing, Arunachal Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu was found dead in Luguthang, near the China border on May 4, 2011. A government official and a relative of Mr Khandu identified his body.
Not far from home, across the border, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the sixth President of Pakistan died in a plane crash in 1988.
