On September 15, their units received telegrams asking them to be relieved. All four, and 185 others from across several states in India, then underwent a three-month rigorous training in Gwalior. Their tryst with glory came on Tuesday when they whizzed across the Rajpath on motorbikes, doing everything except riding them ordinarily.
For everyone who saw the Republic Day parade, the BSF motorcycle team, Janbaz, was a spectacle. Six hours and more than 20 kilometres away from the austerity of Rajpath, Gurpreet Singh and his team sat cleaning their 350cc Enfield bikes in front of a dozen small cloth tents in Chhawal, their temporary address.
For all of them, the stunts were a success and they are relieved, but they will soon be dispersed and cut off from their passion — bikes.
“When you do these stunts in front of so many, who are cheering all the while, you forget whatever little fear that lives in you. I love it and that makes it all the more interesting,” said Amit Kumar, second in command to Singh, who leads the team.
It was Kumar’s first stunt at the Republic Day.
The Janbaz motorcycle team of BSF was started in 1990, Singh said. The Army already had one such team then but the Janbaz team had to be disbanded soon after a few accidents. “In 1992, it was re-organised,” he said. “Since then, we have been doing good stunts and improvisations.”
The team holds the world record for riding a 350cc motorcycle for 325 metres with 40 men positioned on it, and another one for riding as a 26-man-pyramid on three bikes and covering one kilometre in 1 minute, 16 seconds.
The teammates said the musical event in which 16 of their bikers crisscross at a very fast speed leaves a few aching and hurt by the end of the evening. “We do not recount the stories of accidents that take place during practice,” Singh said.
When the 189 men in white overalls perched on the bikes amazed everyone on Tuesday, the act was too smooth for people to look beyond the dazzle. But in front of the small dark tents, dressed in their skull caps and khaki informal, they looked quite vulnerable besides the 34 shiny, big bikes.