Part IV: Across Borders
A Great Victory
How did we perform in December 1971? Well, we can generally say we did not do too badly. In fact, we did rather well: we won the war … It takes a war to make our people work together. Peace breaks them up into narrow sectional pieces. We must learn to rise above sectarian interests and work for what is best for our country.1Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal, My Years with the IAF (New Delhi: Lancer, 1986), p. 319–29.
– AIR CHIEF MARSHAL P.C. LAL
THE DOLPHINS SWIM AGAIN
As the guns fell silent in Dacca, the endangered South Asian dolphin, which inhabits the waters of the Meghna and the Ganga delta, surfaced again after months. The light winter mist across the Gangetic plains of the youngest country in the world, Bangladesh, concealed a tension that would remain for years. The four-day period, from 15 to 18 December 1971, saw some horrific killings, both by the Razakars and the Bengali nationalists as mobs exploited the vacuum created by the surrender. Hard-core elements of the Al-Badr, a fundamentalist Islamic group supported by Pakistan and comprising the Razakars (Pakistan Army loyalists), went on a killing spree of Bengali intellectuals on 15 December when they came to know that a surrender was imminent.
Many killers would remain at large in Bangladesh for years2Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (New Delhi: Hachette, 2011), p. 149, 160. Sarmila Bose writes of numerous intellectuals, doctors and professors being systematically killed by the Razakars and Al-Badr. till they were hunted down and prosecuted by the Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina Wajed after it was returned to power in 2013.3Ghulam Azam, the founder of the Al-Badr group, an auxiliary force which was set up to help the Pakistan Army identify and kill pro-independence Bengali activists, was sentenced on 15 July 2013 to ninety years in jail for crimes against humanity. See [www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20970123](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20970123) Bengali anger against the Biharis and Razakars surfaced as widespread mob killings, particularly in the jute mills of Khulna, disturbed the fragile peace till public order was restored in a few months.4Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (New Delhi: Hachette, 2011), p. 159.
Amidst the tension and uncertainty, there were heart-warming stories of bravery and compassion too. While Sheikh Mujib was spirited away to Pakistan and placed under house arrest in Karachi, his family was isolated under similar circumstances in a heavily fortified double-storey house in a Dacca neighbourhood. Had it not been for a brave and unarmed Indian Army major, Ashok Tara, a tense and stressed-out complement of Pakistan Army soldiers guarding the house may well have killed Sheikh Mujib’s family on the morning of 17 December. Having been awarded with a Vir Chakra as a company commander with 14 Guards during the Akhaura and Gangasagar battles, Tara had to use his persuasive skills to convince the young and nervous Pakistani guards at the house that the game was up and that Niazi had surrendered the previous day. The current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, was a spirited twenty-four-year-old with a babe in arms, and remembers the event with gratitude. Major Tara, an energetic seventy-two-year-old now, was feted with a ‘Friend of Bangladesh’ award by her in 2012.5Sujan Dutta, ‘Unarmed major who disarmed Pak soldiers and saved a future PM,’ The Telegraph, 28 June 2012, available at [www.telegraphindia.com/1120628/jsp/frontpage/story\_15666585.jsp#VHa6hnZkm-A](http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120628/jsp/frontpage/story_15666585.jsp#VHa6hnZkm-A)
STRATEGIC LESSONS
Many Western authors are reluctant to praise India for its strategic decisiveness and willingness to train the Mukti Bahini guerrilla fighters despite knowing that it risked a two-front war with Pakistan.6Arjun Subramaniam, ‘Brave Diplomacy amidst Genocide,’ The Hindu, 3 December, 2013 at
military strength and the ability to apply that strength efficiently in the chosen zone of war; predictions of how outside nations would behave in the event of the war; perceptions of internal unity and of the unity or discord of the enemy; memory or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war; perceptions of prosperity and of ability to sustain economically; the personality and mental quality of the leaders who weighed the evidence; nationalism and ideology; and the personality and mental qualities of the leaders who weighed the evidence and decided for peace or war.7Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 123.
On every count, India, Indira Gandhi and her team were well ahead of Yahya Khan, Bhutto and the fragmented Pakistani strategic leadership. Hoping for some irrational success, Pakistan struck first on the western front on 3 December 1971 and allowed India to supplement its operational superiority with the opportunity to occupy the moral high ground in the ensuing fourteen-day conflict.
The surrender of Dacca and the splitting of Pakistan remains the single most impactful strategic event of the war. Lieutenant General Shammi Mehta put the whole campaign in the east in the right perspective, albeit with a touch of drama and flair, so typical of the Armoured Corps, when he said:
The Indian Armed Forces had in 14 days, liberated a country from where it withdrew in 90 days, picked up 93,000 prisoners, and released them one year later at an average body weight of one-and-a–half times their original weight.8Interview with Lieutenant General Shammi Mehta.
Though the military victory was greeted with much triumphalism by the Indian media, the Indian Army conducted itself with great dignity when it came to treating the POWs, particularly from the Pakistan Army. Just as the Sikh and Gorkha soldiers of the 8th Indian Division of the British 8th Army had protected women and innocents in the captured Italian town of Taranto during WW II, the Indian Army intervened on numerous occasions to prevent marauding and furious Bengali mobs from lynching many Pakistani soldiers. Many senior Indian officers remembered the horrors of the Japanese POW camps of WW II and the brainwashing sessions of Indian Army POWs by the Chinese after 1962. Strict orders flowed down from Army HQ to ensure compliance of the Geneva Convention. Lieutenant General Thomas Mathew recollects that his Para units in Agra had to vacate their barracks and move to tents to accommodate the Pakistan Army POWs. Despite instructions from Army HQ not to mingle with the POWs, Mathew decided one morning to go to the barracks on an inspection visit – he was warned that there were many surly POWs, particularly from Pakistan’s Special Forces, and that there was possibility of some unrest should he decide to visit. As he marched through the barracks with his baton in hand, and with two escorts armed only with pickaxes, most of the POWs who had lined up beside their beds stood to attention in deference to a senior officer’s arrival, but not the few bearded Pakistani Special Forces soldiers. When ticked off by Mathews, some of them reluctantly complied, but one man burst out: ‘Why should I stand in attention when I am worried about my wife and children; I have not heard from them for three months.’ Mathews told him that he would find out and let him know. Find out he did by calling the director of military operations in New Delhi to help him out. The family was fine and a smile returned to the face of the burly Special Forces soldier of the Pakistan Army.
The defeat further shattered the martial myth of the Punjabi- and Pathan-dominated Pakistan Army as it crumbled in the face of a secular and diverse Indian armed forces and the non-martial Bengalis. The scars of the dismembering remain a debilitating legacy, particularly within the Pakistan Army, though the PAF and the Pakistan Navy took the defeat more objectively. This is reflected in much of the writing that has emerged from Pakistan on the 1971 war in recent times.9Shuja Nawaz, Hussain Haqqani, Sajad Haider, Kaiser Tufail and Agha Humayun Amin are amongst those whose writings emerge as objective and incisive. The slow normalization of relations between India and Pakistan since the 1971 war can mainly be attributed to the obsession of the Pakistan Army to ‘get even’ with India and avenge the loss of 1971.
India emerged as the clear regional power in South Asia after the 1971 war with Pakistan by demonstrating significant national will to tackle a crisis of enormous proportions. A concurrently well-executed political diplomatic and military strategy with clear objectives for much of 1971 allowed India to explore all possible options before resorting to military action in East Pakistan. By diplomatically engaging with Russia, western Europe and the US, and sensitizing them about the ongoing human tragedy in East Pakistan and the spiralling refugee crisis in India, the Indian government succeeded in conveying to the world that it wanted a peaceful solution to the problem. However, the speed with which it commenced military operations indicated its resolve and willingness to use military force in pursuit of its national interests.
If India was outmanoeuvred strategically at any stage, it was during the Simla Conference of 1972 where a wily Bhutto managed to convince Indira Gandhi of the need to delink a Kashmir settlement from the negotiations to release the 93,000 Pakistani prisoners held by India. This, he emphasized, was essential for the survival of his democratically elected government.10Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 98–99. The book has excellent chapters on the India–Pakistan relationship and is one of the most objective books on the Pakistan Army in the modern era. An internationally recognized agreement over Kashmir in terms of converting the ceasefire line into a clearly delineated and demarcated boundary may have sorted out the Kashmir issue once and for all. Hussain Haqqani, an astute strategic commentator, academic and former Pakistani ambassador to the US, offers telling comments on the Simla Agreement. He writes:
He (Bhutto) pleaded with Gandhi not to insist on including a final resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute in any bilateral agreement although, from India’s point of view, this would have been the ideal opportunity to impose a solution.11Ibid., p. 98–99. Also see J.N. Dixit, India-Pakistan in War and Peace (New Delhi: Books Today, 2002), p. 225–31.
In a moment of triumphant magnanimity, Indira Gandhi lost a golden opportunity to remove the ‘Kashmir’ thorn from India’s flesh. It also allowed Pakistan to keep the pot boiling till it reworked its strategies to wrest Kashmir from India. Continuing at the strategic level, Indira Gandhi’s understanding of ‘realpolitik’ meant that unlike her father, she was not unduly preoccupied with altruistic and idealistic aspirations of non-alignment; rather she embraced the concept by looking at it from a ‘balance of power’ perspective. The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace and Friendship of September 1971 must be seen in this prism.
Clear and congruent strategic objectives from both the PM and the defence minister, along with effective politico-military interfaces between the service chiefs and key interlocutors from the prime minister’s office resulted in a commonality of purpose. Capacity building was given top priority and the service chiefs enjoyed a fair degree of independence when it came to designing their concept of operations. Even though the Indian Army and its talismanic chief Manekshaw retained their importance as ‘first among equals’ in a predominantly land-centric armed forces, Indira Gandhi and Jagjivan Ram, her portly and jovial defence minister, realized the value of air and maritime power in a two-front battle. Due credit must go to their chiefs, Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal and Admiral S.M. Nanda, for transforming Indian air and sea power into powerful and flexible tools of military power, which had the ability to contribute significantly to a joint military campaign. This ensured that Manekshaw as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee had no other choice but to create joint war-fighting capability by amalgamating air and sea power into his overall theatre battle plans in both the eastern and western theatre.
STANDING UP TO THE US
There is little doubt that the metamorphosis and ‘hardening’ of Indian diplomacy took place in the run-up to the 1971 conflict. Recently declassified White House conversations of President Nixon with Kissinger reveal him as a self-serving president with little interest or empathy for the developing world in general, and South Asia in particular. Kissinger, on the other hand comes across as a brilliant, hard-driving and mercurial czar of US diplomacy – he understood the crisis, but chose to go along with Nixon on the path to restoring relations with China as that is where he felt lay the most tangible gains for US foreign policy.12See Arjun Subramaniam, ‘Brave Diplomacy amidst Genocide,’ The Hindu, 3 December 2013, available at
OPERATIONAL TAKEAWAYS
What then were the major operational takeaways from the 1971 war from an Indian perspective? While much of the current discourse on the 1971 war concentrates excessively on the meticulous military planning and orchestration at the highest level, particularly at Eastern Army Command Headquarters, it is the conversion of that plan into more than just successful operational outcomes that takes pole position. This was only possible because of the initiative and innovation by field commanders like Lieutenant General Sagat Singh, Captain Swaraj Prakash, Group Captain Wollen and Group Captain Chandan Singh. Had Sagat Singh not bypassed Akhaura, Bhairab Bazar and Sylhet; had Chandan Singh not responded as he did when it came to urging the Mi-4 helicopter crews to press on regardless as they transported men, logistics, ammunition and artillery guns across the River Meghna; had Wollen not asked his MiG-21 pilots to experiment with steep-dive attacks on Tezgaon airfield; and had Swaraj Prakash and Major General Uban not kept almost half a division tied down in the Chittagong sector, Dacca may not have fallen when it did.
For the first time after Independence, India made serious attempts at shaping the battlefield in the sector of its choice, the eastern sector, before engaging in full-scale operations. Whether it was covert operations by small teams of R&AW-trained Mukti Bahini operatives initially, or large battalion-sized incursions from November onwards, the psychological impact of the Mukti Bahini can hardly be disputed. Lieutenant General Shammi Mehta puts the overall contribution of the Mukti Bahini in the right perspective by praising them effusively:
One of the greatest contributions of the Mukti Bahini was in providing intelligence for manoeuvre. If I had to manoeuvre in a vacuum in Bangladesh, I would have ended up waging attrition warfare like in the western sector. During the initial stages of the war, we almost exactly knew where the enemy was thanks to the Mukti Bahini and later on, even if we did not, we could predict their moves thanks to the inputs given by the Mukti Bahini.13Interview with Lieutenant General Shammi Mehta.
In the western theatre, though, the Indian Army entered the war with a rather defensive mindset much to the chagrin of Lieutenant General Candeth, the commander of the Western Army Command. The concept of ‘Offensive defence’, which gained traction from Army HQ, had its merits as the war on the western front unfolded. It called for exploiting fleeting opportunities while retaining a defensive balance; dynamic generals like Pinto exploited this flexibility and tasted success in Shakargarh and Basantar with a refreshingly aggressive approach at every stage. Up north, an aggressive corps commander like Sartaj Singh managed to stabilize Chhamb and score victory after victory in northern Kashmir, Kargil and Turtok sectors. However, despite making good progress, an inspirational leader like Major General Zorawar Chand Bakshi was held back in a defensive role after making spectacular progress in the chicken’s neck area. Holding the west was imperative for the success of India’s two-front strategy.
General Shammi Mehta highlighted that in all of India’s earlier wars, attrition warfare ruled the roost without much success whenever two forces bashed against each other head-on without much success, inspired by what he calls the ‘hierarchical inheritance of Montgomery, the grand-dad of attrition warfare’. He points out that wherever the Indian Army tasted success in 1971, it was because of prosecuting manoeuvre warfare.14Ibid. Dispelling the widespread notion that only armoured corps officers possessed the mindset of a manoeuvrer, General Pinto, a hard-core infantryman, looked at manoeuvre as a state of the mind and not merely a movement of forces on the ground. He went on further to highlight that proactive and reactive strategies of warfare were merely an extension of manoeuvre and attrition warfare. Pakistan, he added, were purely reactive in 1971. When asked whether he was surprised that Pakistan did not use their idle armoured division (6 Armoured Division) against his 54 Division, he chuckled and said, ‘Had they done so, I would probably not be here talking to you.’ He was equally critical that India’s idle and sole armoured division (1 Armoured Division) was not rushed to his sector once he had made inroads. Closing the discussion on the battle of Basantar, he laughed his still infectious laugh and said, ‘The offensive–defensive concept still baffles me.’ In the overall context, however, it was a balanced mix of manoeuvre, aggression and offensive defence that resulted in a comprehensive military victory for India.
The next major operational takeaway from a joint perspective was that training, logistics and infrastructure requirements had been well anticipated by India in the six months prior to the war. Across the border, the Pakistan Armed forces had got lethargic and used to the trappings of political power. Their army was mainly engaged in ‘mass-killing operations’ in East Pakistan, and was not really prepared for war. When asked how his division trained for war, the ninety-two-year-old General Pinto said, ‘We were much better prepared than the formations had been in 1965. As the divisional commander, I spent a lot of time in conceptual thinking and then testing these concepts during sand-model discussions. Though the peacetime location of my division was in Secunderabad, we made regular visits to the I Corps HQ at Mathura and onwards to our operational locations. We knew exactly what we had to do when the balloon went up. Intellectual sharpness is essential in modern warfare; the air chief, P.C. Lal, was one of those with a sharp and incisive mind,’ he chuckled.
While the IAF went about building airfields, stringing across air defence networks and developing innovative tactics,15Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal, My Years with the IAF (New Delhi: Lancer, 1986). the PAF had slackened its usually stringent operational training. It failed to build on the operational successes during the 1965 war despite best attempts by Air Marshal Nur Khan, the PAF chief during the interim years, to keep pace with the IAF.16S. Sajad Haider, The Flight of the Falcon: Demolishing Myths of the Indo-Pak Wars of 1965 and 1971 (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 2009), p. 187–88 The IAF gained complete air superiority over East Pakistan in a few days and flew over 2,300 sorties of fighters, helicopters and transport aircraft.
With near parity in the western sector between the IAF and PAF, the IAF flew more than twice the number of sorties in 1971 compared to 1965.17P.C. Lal puts the total number of sorties flown in the 1971 war at over 7,500 as against a total number of around 4,000 sorties flown in 1965. Furthermore, though it was not able to achieve complete air superiority, it was able to keep down the PAF and prevent it from operating to its full potential. The PAF suffered greater attrition in the 1971 war as compared to 1965 and had to reckon with a resurgent IAF as the war progressed. Interdiction of follow-on forces and operational support requirements by the IAF proved to be quite decisive when it came to denying the Pakistan Army of reinforcements when they were needed the most. The innovative bombing of a Pak artillery brigade in Haji Pir and the largest ammunition dump in the Changa Manga forest by An-12 transport aircraft led by the brilliant Wing Commander Vashisht contributed immensely to the IAF’s deep interdiction campaign. He too was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra for his exploits in battle. Though Lal had articulated a departure from old aerial strategies, the temptation of creating an impact by Strategic Interdiction was too great and the IAF did carry out some effective strikes on the Kiamari oil refineries at Karachi harbour, Sui gas plant in Sind, Mangala dam and the Attock oil refinery near Rawalpindi. Even though some Indian military historians have questioned the impact of such strikes on a short war such as the one fought in 1971,18S.N. Prasad, Official History of the 1971 War, Chapter X, p. 433–34. their offensive flavour certainly had an impact on the Pakistani mindset and demonstrated India’s willingness to strike deep in order to hurt an adversary’s economic potential.
The seriousness with which the Indian Navy went about operationalizing its new missile boats was reflected in the audacious manner in which they were used during the war. A holistic and integrated approach to preparing for war paid rich dividends for India. Deception was executed successfully as a mission of war by concealing the presence of the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant as it lay in wait in the Andamans. Another instance of effective deception by the Indian Navy was seen during the missile attacks on Karachi wherein the crew of the missile boats communicated with each other in Russian, baffling the Pakistanis. With the Indian Navy’s Carrier Battle Group performing well in the Bay of Bengal, concepts of ‘sea control’ took seed in the Indian Navy as it sought to build significant asymmetry vis-à-vis the Pakistan Navy. Indigenization of warship design commenced in right earnest after the 1971 war and would pay rich dividends in the years to come. The Pakistan Navy, on the other hand, failed to put together an offensive naval strategy, preferring instead to rely on the deterrent capabilities of its submarine fleet.
One of the biggest strategic and operational ‘ifs’ of the 1971 war would have been: ‘If’ Manekshaw had acquiesced in Indira Gandhi’s compulsions of wanting to go into East Pakistan in April 1971, would there have been a different end result? Despite many distinguished analysts having since debated Manekshaw’s conservative approach, I believe there would have been a less than favourable outcome for several reasons. First and most importantly, the ‘eyes and ears’ of the Indian Army, the Mukti Bahini, would not have been the ‘force multiplier’, as they eventually turned out to be. This would have meant that India’s field commanders would have operated in an intelligence vacuum similar to the one that existed on the western front. Their ensuing progress would have been significantly slower than what actually happened, considering that there would have been no Mukti Bahini to nibble, snipe and harass the Pakistanis in the hinterland. The second reason for a different outcome would have been the absence of an ‘enveloping strategy’ that Manekshaw had envisaged. As discussed earlier in the book, Manekshaw’s staff had candidly told him that in the option for an operation in April/May, it was only the ‘western option’ with an entry into East Pakistan from Bengal that could be supported logistically. This meant that only XXXIII Corps and II Corps would have been available for operations in full strength and fully stocked. As it turned out, these corps made the slowest progress during the final campaign. Considering the larger distance from the west to Dacca and the more than formidable river obstacles, whether Dacca could have been threatened in the time frame that it eventually was would be well next to impossible to predict. The last major reason for the likely stalling of an early attack was the possibility of getting bogged down by the monsoon should operational momentum be impacted by various reasons.
In the desert sector too, ‘if’ the commander of the Southern Army Command, Lieutenant General Bewoor, had had a backup force, he could have been more aggressive; ‘if’ Major General Khambatta, the divisional commander of 12 Infantry Division, had cut off Pakistan Army’s 18 Division as it retreated after getting a bloody nose at Longewala despite all his logistics and terrain constraints; ‘if’ the IAF had been less ecstatic about its exploits at Longewala and pursued the retreating Pakistani brigade in close coordination with 12 Infantry Division; the Indian forces could have scored a major victory in the desert and even contemplated threatening the town of Rahim Yar Khan.
Coming to the psychological dimension of the Bangladesh campaign, Niazi’s will to resist was broken by a combination of ‘feeling enveloped’ from all directions. The immense pressure exerted on him by a ‘manoeuvrist’ commander in the form of Sagat Singh, who used the third dimension of aerial pressure effectively in tandem with the Tangail paradrop, effectively broke his will to resist. When combined with the precision strike by IAF MiG-21s and Hunters on the Government House in Dacca, the psychological disintegration of Niazi’s forces was complete and Pakistan’s field commanders were convinced that it was better to surrender than be held responsible for an inevitable defeat and heavy loss of life. Commenting on the contribution of operational commanders and staff at headquarters, Shammi Mehta says:
If there was no Sagat Singh and no Chandan Singh, there would have been no Dacca. If there was no Jacob (Lieutenant General Jacob was chief of staff at Eastern Command HQ), there would have been no spectacular surrender. One was a genius with troops and the other a genius with manipulating the mind of the enemy. It is as simple as that.19Interview with Lieutenant General Shammi Mehta.
LEADERSHIP
The 1971 war reaffirmed the importance of inspirational senior leadership in battle and heralded the emergence of a new fighting class amongst younger officers and men of India’s armed forces, most of whom were born in the late 1930s and 1940s. Identifying talent and nurturing it for operational effect seemed to be the forte of all the three chiefs. While Manekshaw placed all the talented officers who had worked with him at Eastern Command, Defence Services Staff College and Infantry School, like Lieutenant General Aurora, Major General Jacob, Lieutenant General Sagat Singh and Major General Inder Gill, in key positions prior to the 1971 war, Lal too had his men like Malse, Wollen and Chandan Singh as his point men at key places. In Krishnan, Kohli and Swaraj Prakash, Admiral Nanda had chosen an excellent team to execute the naval campaigns on the eastern and western seaboards.
An old military adage says, ‘There are no good troops or bad troops, only good or bad leaders.’ What then were the leadership traits of the successful field commanders of the Indian armed forces in the 1971 war? While all the three services displayed higher leadership skills of an exceptional order, there were some stand-out performances. While initiative and momentum were exploited well by Pinto in Basantar, Sartaj in Kargil and Zorawar Bakshi in the Chicken’s Neck sector, Swaraj Prakash, the captain of INS Vikrant, dominated the eastern seas off the East Pakistan coast just as Chandan Singh used all his experience from the 1962 conflict to orchestrate the heli-borne operations. However, it was not too difficult to single out the one operational leader who stood head and shoulders over the rest – Sagat Singh.
Sagat was a go-getter from his younger days and General Pinto remembers him as a dashing type at the Infantry School and even later as a divisional commander when he controlled the Mizo insurgency in 1966 and gave a bloody nose to the Chinese in 1967 during two successive encounters at Nathula and Chola passes. Sagat Singh not only inspired officers and troops from the Indian Army under his command but also transmitted his aggression to many IAF helicopter pilots who served in the eastern sector. Air Vice Marshal ‘Harry’ Ahluwalia, one of the IAF’s most distinguished and operationally proficient helicopter pilots, recalls his association with Sagat when the latter was commanding 101 Communication Zone as a major general in 1966 during the early years of insurgency in the north-eastern region of the country:
Soon after the Mizo trouble started in 1966 General Sagat, then a major general, was posted to Shillong as the GOC 101 Communication Zone area. There used to be a four-Mi-4 detachment of 110 Helicopter Unit in Kumbhigram to look after the operations in Mizoram. Actually I am one of the pioneers of the Mizo operations having taken part in them from in March 1966 when the trouble first erupted. Anyway, General Sagat used to visit Mizoram very often as that was the only operational area that he had under his HQ. He also became very friendly with us chopper guys as we would fly him around, and we would do anything for him. He once planned to attack a Mizo camp in East Pakistan. I was the detachment commander in Aizawl (I don’t really have the date with me but it must have been in 1967–68). He wanted fourteen army guys to go in the chopper as he had information that the camp in Zupui (across the border with Mizoram) had some hostiles staying there. I agreed to do the job. Our plan was to drop them there and they would do what they had to do and return across the border. In those days communications were almost non-existent and so there was no way of informing the unit which was then in Tezpur. In any case we never told the commanding officer or the flight commander what we did on detachment. Choppers in those days had very limited experience and we would just read what the Yanks did in Vietnam and try and emulate that. I can relate many such stories to you. I did the sortie for him, and we dropped the guys where we were supposed to, but they found the camp to be deserted. General Sagat too was on board the chopper.
I say this only to show that the guy was willing to take chances and I as a young flying officer, and others like me, were quite in awe of him. He had a very easy way about him and frankly we felt honoured to do what we could for him. The army guys used to tell us that the 101 Communication Zone posting was a full stop for him, but his success in Mizoram saw to it that he made it to Lieutenant General. Little wonder then that many years later he still turned to 110 HU to spearhead the airlift into East Pakistan during 1971.
What of the younger lot? They were represented by officers and men like Hoshiar Singh, Arun Khetrapal, Albert Ekka, Don Lazarus, Nirmaljit Sekhon, Arun Prakash, and Bahadur Karim Navina, who commanded INS Nipat, the missile boat during the Karachi attack. Bold and fearless, and reflecting the true diversity of independent India, they would prove to be role models for the next generation of war fighters who would be blooded in a completely new genre of warfare. The 1971 war further demolished the martial race proposition, with troops from the southern part of India and the tribal belt of central India acquitting themselves with honour in various battles, foremost amongst them being in the battles of Akhaura, Basantar and Shakargarh.20Major General Pinto’s 54 Division was primarily a south Indian division with bulk of the troops being from the Madras Regiment and the Madras Engineering Group (MEG).
FINAL THOUGHTS
Like most major decisions of war in the twentieth century, India’s decisions to go to wars during the period 1947–71 were primarily political ones. Whenever these political decisions were accompanied by sound military advice, India’s armed forces emerged victorious. Nehru’s reluctance to send a backup brigade to Srinagar in 1948 to follow 161 Brigade as it drove the raiders back towards Domel and Muzaffarabad occurred because he relied more on the military advice of his British C-in-C, rather than on his young Indian commanders. Had he immediately sent in a backup brigade, the final ceasefire line could have been different. Similarly, the reluctance to allow the RIAF to attack bridges at Domel and Muzaffarabad allowed the raiders to withdraw and be replaced instead by regulars of the Pakistan Army. It emerges now that there was a clear vacuum of military advice as Nehru replaced one British C-in-C with another one as the war progressed. Compare this with all the major decisions of WW II where Roosevelt and Churchill completely dominated their military commanders, but listened to them when they were offered sage military advice. The likes of Eisenhower, Marshall, Montgomery and Alan Brooke were known to mince no words when it came to placing the right military template over a political one and empowering their operational leaders to fight their battles as they deemed fit.
Indira Gandhi and Jagjivan Ram were no great strategic geniuses, nor were they endowed with a sound understanding of matters military. Where they played their cards well in 1971 was when they gave clear political objectives and adequate space and respect to the service chiefs, who in turn came up with sage advice that was well taken and woven into an overall grand strategy. In the final analysis, India’s victory in the 1971 war proved that if effectively used, India’s armed forces could emerge as a cutting-edge tool of statecraft. Strong political will, synergy between all stakeholders of national security and a fierce national spirit to overcome adversity against all odds cleared the fog of war and resulted in a decisive victory. The aftermath of the 1971 war was a good opportunity for introspection and thinking about how wars of the future would be fought and whether there was a need to improve ‘jointmanship’ at every level, be it in the politico-military domain, or between the three services.
Writing in her brilliantly researched but controversial book on some of the lesser-known happenings during the birth of Bangladesh titled Dead Reckoning, Oxford historian Sarmila Bose, a Bengali herself, writes:
Flying helicopters in the dark during the war, pilots used ‘dead reckoning’ when one’s best judgement was that by going in a particular direction for a certain time one was likely to arrive at the intended destination … Navigating through the conflicting memories of 1971 seemed a very similar journey. There is only partial visibility and many treacherous twists and turns with plenty of room for error. Yet by steering a firm course charted by an open mind, research based on evidence and corroboration, fairness to all sides and analysis anchored on data … one is likely to arrive, inshallah, at the best approximation of the ideal destination.21Sarmila Bose, Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War (New Delhi: Hachette, 2011), p. x.
With all humility and a quest for the truth with objectivity, I have tried in this book with all earnestness to uphold the principles of Dead Reckoning as suggested by Sarmila Bose. Not only do pilots resort to dead reckoning, even paratroopers and special forces resort to it when they find themselves over unfamiliar territory – sniffing their way to the target based on prior knowledge, a gut feeling and complete situational awareness.
Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times was among the few international reporters with a prolonged ringside view of the war in East Pakistan. When I approached him to offer some insights into military operations in Bangladesh, the eighty-year-old journalist replied very graciously in an email to me: ‘Your project is very interesting and I can say that all my experiences with the Indian Armed Forces were very positive and impressive. Their professionalism and fairness were always in sight. Good luck with your project.’22Email to the author from Sydney Schanberg on Christmas Eve of 2014.