Bipin Rawat, India’s chief of defence staff, is killed in a helicopter crash

IT WAS A short daytime flight, ferrying a grandee from an airbase to a nearby defence college. But the Mi-17 V5 carrying General Bipin Rawat, India’s chief of defence staff, and 12 others including his wife, did not make it. The Russian-built helicopter slammed into a wooded slope just a few minutes short of the Defence Services Staff College at Wellington in the Nilgiri Hills, a tea-growing region in southern India. The general himself had studied at the all-services officer training institute, and was due to give a lecture that afternoon. Only one passenger, a decorated fighter pilot, appears to have survived the crash.