Northern Railways fireman Chaman Lal acted to save a diesel goods train at Gurdaspur when Pakistani aircraft attacked on 13 September 1965.
Diesel Train at Gurdaspur
On 13 September 1965, during the war with Pakistan, a goods train carrying diesel stood at Gurdaspur railway station. Chaman Lal, of Northern Railways, was its fireman. Pakistani F-86 Sabre aircraft attacked the train.
The President's office later recorded that he prevented the destruction of the wagons and valuable stores and saved the lives of hundreds of people. His award was posthumous. The accounts available for this article do not describe the steps he took.
Tea at Rashtrapati Bhavan, 2015
Fifty years on, on 22 September 2015, President Pranab Mukherjee hosted veterans of the 1965 war at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Asha Rani attended on Chaman Lal's behalf.
Published records do not agree in every detail. One widely copied list of recipients describes the incident as a train fire, while the President's office describes an air attack. The Defence Ministry's portal files the award under Republic Day 1965, a date before the attack, so that label cannot be the date of the award itself.
What the citation recorded
The official citation could not be read for this article. The Defence Ministry's portal leaves the citation field blank in the archived record. The Rashtrapati Bhavan account of 2015 records that he prevented the destruction of wagons and stores when his goods train was attacked at Gurdaspur, saving many lives at the cost of his own. This is a summary, not the official wording.
Cover image: Robert Prummel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized for this page. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ashoka_Chakra_India_De_drie_medailles_van_voor_1967.jpg