Dhankhar decorates 35 BSF personnel for bravery, meritorious service

New Delhi, May 24 (PTI) Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar on Wednesday decorated 35 Border Security Force (BSF) personnel, including two for displaying bravery in thwarting a cattle smuggling bid along the India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal, for rendering commendable service.

The personnel of the border force were felicitated during an investiture ceremony and the annual ‘Rustamji memorial lecture’ that was delivered by Dhankhar at the Vigyan Bhawan here.

The lecture is organised in the memory of the BSF’s first chief and founding father K F Rustamji, who was the director general of the force during 1965-74. He died in 2003.

Head Constable Sundar Singh was decorated with the police medal for gallantry (PMG) for his daring bid in intercepting Bangladeshi cattle smugglers in January 2021, while Constable Anand Oraon neutralised a similar illegal activity by Indian smugglers on the same front in August 2019.

Both the operations were undertaken under the Kolkata-headquartered South Bengal Frontier of the force.

Among the other awardees were deputy inspectors general (DIGs) Sandeep Chanan and Kanwaljeet Singh, commandants Sanjay Kumar and Diwakar Kumar, and second-in-command rank officer Varunendra Pratap (VP) Singh.

V P Singh joined the BSF as an officer in 1997. He has worked in all the sensitive and important border formations along Pakistan in Jammu, Punjab and Gujarat, apart from the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir.

He is currently posted with the ‘G’ or intelligence wing of the force at its headquarters in Delhi. He has also served in the counter-insurgency theatre along the India-Bangladesh border and the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti during 2014-15.

The nearly 2.65 lakh-strong BSF is the country’s largest border guarding force with the ITBP, SSB and the Assam Rifles being the others. It is primarily tasked with guarding Indian borders with Pakistan on the west and Bangladesh on the east, apart from rendering a variety of duties in the internal security domain of the country, including the conduct of anti-Naxal operations.