Thirteen Days of Liberation: The Birth of Bangladesh
Excerpt from Anger Management Chapter 10 “A Second Partition, Third Country” Part 1
Read here Excerpt from Anger Management Chapter 10 “A Second Partition, Third Country” Part 2
“On 6 December, the Indian government announced its formal recognition of the government of Bangladesh. On the battlefield, India had an overwhelming advantage. A limited West Pakistani force that had descended on the east stood little chance in combating the combined might of a strengthened Indian Army and well-trained Mukti Bahini fighters. “
In New Delhi, Defence Secretary K. B. Lall rushed into the operations room at the army headquarters at 5 p.m. on 3 December. Lall told General Manekshaw that the western army commander had just called to say that three Indian airfields in Punjab were under attack by Pakistani aircraft. Both the prime minister and defence minister were out of Delhi and could not immediately be contacted.
Manekshaw ordered the commanders on the western front to put into effect their operational battle plans. India’s planners had been waiting for Pakistan to make the error of invasion. The prime minister’s secretary, P. N. Dhar, told Ambassador D. P. Dhar of Napoleon’s advice: ‘Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.’ D. P. Dhar was on the prime minister’s plane, travelling with her from Calcutta, when the pilot informed them of the Pakistani air strikes. He appeared unsurprised and remarked, ‘The fool has done exactly what I had expected.’ Indira Gandhi was received as she landed by the defence minister and driven straight to army headquarters for a briefing. Soon the war cabinet was meeting in India. It decided to declare hostilities on Pakistan and to recognize Bangladesh. The war officially began for India on the morning of 4 December 1971.
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High Commissioner Atal walked quietly into the chatter of a diplomatic reception in Islamabad, on 3 December, knowing it was not just another day. The briefing cables from back home were getting more alarming. Pakistan’s capital was buzzing with rumours that India would attack Pakistan on 4 December, provoking a full-scale conflict in both wings. Across the border, India had definitive intelligence inputs of a planned preemptive air strike from West Pakistan on 3 December. The bombing began that evening, even as Atal chatted with fellow guests at the reception—a farewell for the departing ambassador of Libya at their embassy.
Some information on the start of the war even trickled into the reception. Pakistan’s attack had drawn inspiration from a war four years earlier when a pre-emptive air strike by Israel had knocked the Egyptian Air Force out of action. Pakistan’s strikes, however, failed to have much impact on India’s air capability, but signalled the moment their most serious military conflict formally began. Nervous conversation at the embassy focused on the troubled border; anxious foreign diplomats tried to divine information from clueless Pakistani guests—judges, politicians, and bureaucrats. Atal overheard a Pakistani official confidently tell the Egyptian ambassador that India had attacked on the ground, so the Pakistani Air Force was taking retaliatory action.
The Egyptian ambassador turned quizzically to Atal, who responded within earshot of several Pakistani guests: ‘Excellency, do you think Indians are such bloody fools as to scratch on the ground and give the Pakistanis a chance to attack by air?’ The Russian ambassador and some other diplomats squirmed at Atal’s bravado and counselled him to leave the room, brimming as it was with Pakistani military officers. But Atal was in an expansive mood and insisted on making his views known to all he encountered. Atal did leave the reception before it ended and had his driver take him straight to the nearby Indian chancery building. His juniors had been camping in the office for days, given the imminence of hostilities and the lockdown protocols in place. The embassy staff had been pulled in from homes spread all over Islamabad to hole up in the chancery.
Atal briefly exchanged notes with his colleagues and then left for his own residence, in the F6 sector, the elite Islamabad neighbourhood favoured by diplomats, which was a fifteen-minute drive away. Not long after he reached home, a few men in civvies walked into his unguarded residence and asked Atal to step out. He quietly obeyed. Outside on the road were three or four cars with men in military and police uniforms. Atal was ushered into a car. A man he did not recognize wordlessly slipped into the rear seat. After a short drive, Atal was taken up two flights of a tall building. He was propelled into a dark room where another man was seated at a table. Without introducing himself, his inquisitor growled: ‘India has attacked us, we are at war, you are an ordinary prisoner of war. What have you to say?’ Atal guessed his diplomatic immunity meant nothing to his interrogator or even to his host government at that point. A war would lawfully have required diplomats to be repatriated or exchanged under the Vienna Convention. Taking them prisoner was, of course, illegal. But these niceties did not seem to matter at that moment. Atal remained unfazed: ‘If I am a prisoner of war, I have nothing to say except that don’t beat up or kill my men and don’t insult and burn my flag.’
The men drove Atal back to his residence, which stood undefended on the Margalla road, with neither a garden nor compound to buffer it from aggressors. His minders ordered Atal to remain in the bedroom. The house was now surrounded by dozens of uniformed men with automatic weapons. The electricity had been shut off. It was dark. Atal’s only Indian domestic helper was nowhere to be seen. His Indian chauffeur was locked up inside the garage with the diplomatic car. Atal was effectively a prisoner of war in Pakistan, with his diplomatic status seemingly extinguished as the war began. Alone in his bedroom, Atal took stock of his situation. His electricity and telephone connections had been cut; he was incommunicado. He rushed to fill the bathtub, fearing the water supply would also go quickly. The soldiers outside were talking. Perhaps for his benefit, they said that Pakistan’s air strikes had destroyed Indian airbases in Srinagar, Patiala, Delhi, and Agra; Bombay had been left burning. This news had Atal anxious and worried, but also surprised: how could so much damage have been inflicted so quickly on India’s air defences? He had a pilot’s licence from Oxford and understood how aircraft operated. Sleep eluded him that night, so he sat on a chair near a window, anxiously peering out at a portion of Islamabad where he could see no lights nor hear any sound of flying aircraft. ‘It was a terrible feeling,’ he recalled later, ‘to find oneself so completely cut off and blocked from any source of information.’ Near dawn, he heard the sound of planes flying high. He tried again to peek from the window but the guards ordered him in with pointed rifles.
As a trained pilot, it was not hard for Atal to pinpoint the direction in which these planes were heading. They remained high, not landing or taking off. He was convinced they were Indian and not Pakistani aircraft, since they were flying north, not east, over Pakistani territory. This made him feel a little less depressed and a little more hopeful that India’s air force had not been crippled by his host country’s attack. For three days after the war began, Atal remained a prisoner of war, under house arrest till the Red Cross took over. An official of the Red Cross came to see him on 6 December, along with Pakistan’s chief of protocol. Atal was asked to sign a declaration saying that all his mission staff were alive and safe. Atal refused to sign off on the paper till he was satisfied that his staff were indeed safe. Atal insisted that his deputy, Ashok Chib, accompany him to all the venues where his colleagues were incarcerated, so that they could do a head count before signing the Red Cross form.
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On 6 December, the Indian government announced its formal recognition of the government of Bangladesh. On the battlefield, India had an overwhelming advantage. A limited West Pakistani force that had descended on the east stood little chance in combating the combined might of a strengthened Indian Army and well-trained Mukti Bahini fighters. On 9 December, Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, the theatre commander in the east, sent a message to Rawalpindi painting a desperate military picture: ‘Situation extremely critical…. We will go on fighting and do our best.’ Niazi wrote, ‘Orders to own troops issued to hold on until the last man last round which may not be too long….’6 The same day, six days after the war began, the Swiss ambassador paid Atal a visit to inform him that Switzerland had agreed to look after India’s diplomatic interests in Pakistan and that he was under Swiss protection. He handed over a Swiss flag to fly at the embassy residence. Atal flew the Swiss flag and took custody of the Indian flag that he had been zealously flying till then. Atal was then locked up in his home again, this time in better conditions than before, along with the Embassy doctor, Colonel Saksena. Here he remained incommunicado for the next two weeks. Atal painstakingly maintained a diary noting the movement of aircraft each day, hoping this data would be of some use back home. Atal kept the flag in his bedroom and finally wrapped it around himself when he carried it to India after the war was over. The flag still flies proudly on national days in Atal’s residence in Jaipur, now occupied by his son.
The article is an excerpt from the book Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan written by Ajay Bisaria.