Today was when 25-year-old Captain R Harshan of the 2 Parachute Regiment had promised his parents he would be home to spend his long pending vacation with them and his two siblings in Thiruvananthapuram, far from the killing fields of Jammu and Kashmir at the country’s other end.Harshan had rung up and talked to his parents on Monday night. He tried calling his younger brother Manu, an engineer in Chennai on his mobile, the same night. Manu will now forever rue that he could not pick up or return that call.Today noon, Harshan was brought home in a casket, killed in a firefight with Lashkar-e-Toiba militants in Kupwara early on Tuesday morning , a bullet through his neck. When the ceremonial guns fired and the saluting officers retreated, his father K Radhakrishnan, a local lawyer, was holding numbly to a relative watching the flames rearing up.“I had known him all the four years that he had been in 2 Para. I had not met another officer like him in any Special Forces formation. So quiet and so soft spoken that we often have to really prod him to speak up, yet so good at his job that he was handling the entire training of his formation by himself,” says Lt Colonel S Srivastava, second in command of Harshan’s battalion who brought the body to Thiruvanantapuram.“He was completely committed, almost obsessed with his missions. He had led so many anti-terrorist strikes before. He was a lot more than a colleague to me, how could God do this to someone like him, “ Col Srivastava choked.Among the thousands who came to pay him homage today were some of his old schoolmates, recalling the quiet, almost shy, youngster who outdid them in almost everything. Harshan had passed out of the Sainik School in Thiruvananthapuram’s Kazhakootam in 1997 as the school captain and the Best All Round Cadet, moving on to the National Defence Academy.A bachelor, Harshan was very attached to his family, and even had a special reason for planning to come home today. His elder brother Vyasan, an Indian Revenue Service probationer in Nagpur, had cleared the mains of the Civil Services examination and Harshan wanted to celebrate that. He had made sure that Vyasan and Manu would take a few days off and be with him at their parental home, when he arrived. They were, today.The Kerala Government today announced a compensation of Rs 5 lakh to Harshan’s family, and a government job to his next of kin. It offered the same to the kin of Naik Ratheesh Kumar, another soldier who was killed in anti-terrorist action in J&K.
