PATNA: Residents of Basilpur village in Bihar’s Siwan district on Wednesday bid adieu to a soldier, Rambabu Singh who died early on Tuesday morning after receiving fatal injuries during an operation in Jammu and Kashmir late on May 12.
They felt pride over the supreme sacrifice made by son of the soil for the sake of the nation’s sovereignty.
“We are proud of our son of the soil for his supreme sacrifice for the sake of the nation’s sovereignty. His sacrifice will never go in vain. He laid down his life for the sake of ‘Bharat Mata’. The entire village is proud of him,” Ganesh Prasad Singh, a resident of Basilpur village, told this reporter over the phone soon after the body of Rambabu arrived on Wednesday afternoon.
The shocking news, however, came barely five months after Rambabu’s marriage. Rambabu (28) married Kumari Anajali Singh, a resident of Dhanbad in neighbouring Jharkhand, on December 14, 2024. Anjali is now carrying a pregnancy of about four months. She rushed to her in-laws’ house in Siwan after hearing the shocking news.
Anjali said that she had her last conversation with her husband over phone at around 10 am on May 12. “He promised to call me again in the evening as he was getting late for his duty. Thereafter, I got engaged in routine work. In the evening, I was eagerly waiting for his call. I rushed to the mobile phone when it rang up,” she said.
But it was not her husband’s call. A man on the other side wanted to get details about her husband. “As I am educated, I suspected the man on the other side to be a cyber fraud trying to collect details about my husband. I disconnected the phone call before the man on the other side could know more about him,” she recalled with tears rolling down her cheeks.
It was, in fact, a call from the Indian Army headquarters that later informed Rambabu’s elder brother, Akhilesh Singh, a loco pilot in Dhanbad. Rambabu’s father-in-law, Subhash Chandra Singh, said he had visited his native village in Siwan in April. He was recently transferred to Jodhpur from Jammu and Kashmir, where he was posted as an operator in the S-400 air defence system.
But he could not join his new place of posting due to heightened tension between India and Pakistan after the Pahalgam terror incident. “I hope the government will take care of my daughter’s well-being and provide her a government job, apart from the compensation,” he said, adding that he was proud of his son-in-law’s sacrifice.
Rambabu’s uncle Nishikant, said, “Rambabu was eager to join the Indian Army from his childhood, and he worked hard to fulfil his dream. He had joined the Indian Army in 2018. His father Ram Vichar Prasad, a former panchayat up-pramukh, died about two years back.”
The mortal remains of the soldier were consigned to flames at the village ghat with full state honours. Slogans like ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Shaheed Rambabu Amar Rahe’ rent the air. A large number of people, including senior officials of the Siwan district administration, took part in the funeral procession.
Earlier, the leader of the opposition in Bihar assembly Tejashwi Prasad Yadav visited Patna airport and paid floral tributes to the departed soldier. A BSF sub-inspector, Mohammad Imtiyaz, a native of Saran district, laid down his life during an operation in Jammu and Kashmir.