BHOPAL
: In his long military career spanning over 40 years and traversing the length and breadth of the country, Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat’s wife Madhulika
Rawat
never accompanied him on official tours, “except where necessary” — her anguished brother
Yashwardhan Singh
(55) said as the family struggled to come to terms with the tragedy on Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, this time, she was with him,” he added.
Madhulika Rawat belongs to the Sohagpur royal family in MP. Her father Kunwar Mrigendra Singh was a two-time Congress MLA from Kotma constituency in Shahdol in 1967 and 1972.
File: CDS Gen Rawat with his wife Madhulika (PTI)
Gen Rawat and Madhulika married in 1986, said Yashwardhan, her younger brother. Rawat was then a Captain in the famed 5/11 Gorkha Rifles —the unit his father had served in, and which he would later command.
Gen Rawat regularly visited his in-laws’ in Shahdol, about 500km east of Bhopal, and he spent some delightful days there in 2012 with his mother-in-law
Prabha Singh
and other relatives. He shared a strong bond with his mother-in-law.
Prabha is 82, and the family didn’t tell her about the crash during the hours the fate of the General and her daughter
wasn
’t known. The octogenarian, however, couldn’t shake off her uneasiness and came to know anyway.
“We switched off the television in my mother’s room so that she wouldn’t get news of the accident,”
Yashwardhan
said in Bhopal on Wednesday evening as he and some relatives prepared to leave for Delhi by a special plane arranged by the Army. “Officials are also reaching Shahdol to coordinate with my mother and she will probably be leaving for Delhi on Thursday,” he added.
“We received information from the Army when we contacted them in the evening. I had gone to the Shooting Academy in Bhopal with my daughter, Bandhavi Singh, who is a national shooter. It was in 2012 that my brother-in-law and sister last visited Shahdol. Around 10 days ago, we had a nice conversation and he promised to visit us in January 2022,” Yashwardhan, 55, told TOI.
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