• Source:JND
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Actress Nimrat Kaur is proud as for the first time ever, 17 women cadets will graduate from the NDA on May 30. These 17 women, part of a pioneering group, are poised to make history as they graduate alongside nearly 300 male cadets in the National Defence Academy's (NDA) first co-ed batch. This milestone comes after the NDA opened its doors to female aspirants in 2022, marking a significant step towards gender inclusivity in the Indian military.

In a media statement, Nimrat Kaur said, “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had said, ‘You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women’. This is the face of a new India, where women lead from the front on our front lines, shoulder-to-shoulder alongside men. As a woman and an Army daughter, nothing makes me prouder.”

Remembering her father, Major Bhupinder Singh who laid down his life in Kashmir in 1994 and was honoured with the Shaurya Chakra posthumously, Nimrat told ETimes, “He was a young army major, an engineer posted on the border roads of the army in a place called Verinag (the first valley after the Jawahar Tunnel on your way to Srinagar from Jammu). Kashmir was not a family station, so we continued living in Patiala when he went to Kashmir."

Nimrat revealed that her father was killed in 1994 by the terror group Hizbul Mujahideen. “We were on our winter vacation in January 1994 and visiting our father in Kashmir, when the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen kidnapped him from his place of work and, after seven days, terminated him.”

“They had made some ridiculous demands of some terrorists to be released that he obviously did not agree to. He was just 44 when he died. We got the news and flew back with his body to Delhi, and I saw his body for the first time only in Delhi,” said the actress.