Arjan Singh, the only officer ever to be named Marshal of the Indian Air Force, died after suffering a cardiac arrest at the age of 98 at an Army hospital in Delhi on Sept 16. 

Only Marshal of IAF, hero of 1965, Arjan Singh shaped the force.Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who visited Arjan Singh in hospital on Saturday, mourned his death. “We remember his outstanding service to the nation,” he said.

THE sole Marshal of the Indian Air Force, Arjan Singh, passed away at the Army’s Research and Referral Hospital on Saturday evening, hours after he had been admitted there following a cardiac arrest. He was 98.

An officer who shaped the IAF in its early years as well as during some of its most difficult junctures, Arjan Singh had the honour of leading the fly-past of more than a hundred IAF aircraft over the Red Fort on India’s first Independence Day, August 15, 1947.

In 2002, on the occasion of Republic Day, he was granted the honorary rank of Marshal, the highest military rank attainable, which before him only two Army chiefs, K M Carriappa and Sam Manekshaw, had achieved.

Born on April 15, 1919, in Lyallpur (now in Pakistan) to a family of soldiers, Arjan Singh joined the nascent IAF in 1938 after completing his education from the Government College at Lahore. He was commissioned from the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell in the UK in December 1939. As a Pilot Officer posted in Karachi, he participated in operations against the tribals in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).