<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Manekshaw got glory, but Jacob's bluff on Niazi pulled it off </b>
Udayan Namboodiri | New Delhi
The Daily Pioneer http://www.dailypioneer.com
2007/05/02
On December 16, 1971, more than 30,000 Pakistani troops faced just 3,000 Indians at the gates of Dhaka. Yet, by mid-afternoon, General AK Niazi, the Pakistani commander-in-chief in the east, decided to surrender without firing a shot.
The reason for this supreme show of cowardice? An equally supreme piece of bluff pulled on him earlier in the day by Major General JFR Jacob, the top staff officer of India's Eastern Command chief, Lieutenant-General Jasjit Singh Aurora.
Well, history is often made by the outrageous, not those who stick to form. This week, speaking to Karan Thapar in India Tonight, a talk show on CNBC TV-18 channel, Maj Gen Jacob, a World War II veteran who retired as GOC-in-C, Eastern Command, and went on to serve as Governor of Punjab and Goa, broke his silence after 35 long years on what helped India clinch its first-ever decisive military victory.
Gen Jacob describes in vivid detail how he drove through the streets of Dhaka with a Pakistani brigadier as fighting raged between the Mukti Bahini and Pakistani troops on the streets. He carried with him a copy of a surrender document which he had proposed to his Army Chief, General (later Field Marshall) Sam Manekshaw (but never got it wetted) and presented it before Niazi.
Till that moment, the Pakistanis were expecting a cease-fire proposal under United Nations' aegis. They were hoping to keep Dhaka and broker an honourable sharing of powers with the Mukti Bahini, which would ring the curtains down on the nine-month-old civil war and India would have withdrawn without any gains.
But what Gen Jacob slapped him with was a demand for unconditional surrender. A surprised Niazi tried to bargain, but fell for Jacob's assurance that it was not, after all, as unconditional as he thought. The Indian Government was willing to guarantee the lives of all Pakistanis in the event of his accepting it. Now, that meant a lot to the Pakistanis as, outside, their former countrymen were baying for their blood.
Niazi wanted time to consider. Jacob gave him half-an-hour. "I walked out of the room and said to myself, 'God, he has 30,000 troops and we have just 3,000. (Lt Gen) Aurora is about to land, what if he says no?" But, after 30 minutes, Niazi seemed a broken man. "Three times I asked him, but he did not answer. Then I held up the document and said 'I take it as acceptance'." The wily general recalls that Niazi was in tears at that time.
After the war, Niazi faced a commission - the Hamidoor Rehman Commission - and was grilled on why he allowed 3,000 Indians to walk over him when he had ten times as many soldiers. To that, Niazi said: "I was forced to do it because Gen Jacob blackmailed me with a massacre".
The interview was pegged on a recent Government decision to hand over a cheque for Rs 1.6 crore in back wages to the ailing Field Marshall Manekshaw. To Gen Jacob this was belated justice because the soldier who brought so much honour to India retired on a salary of just Rs 1,300 - just Rs 100 more than what the Army Chief of the time got.
Jacob recalls that Manekshaw had been disappointed that Indira Gandhi did not make him Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. Instead, she agreed to make him an envoy to one of the Commonwealth countries.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The Planning Commission has recommended a special agriculture development model for border and coastal districts under retired defence and para-military personnel programme.
The model should be linked with national security to address both security and development aspects, it has suggested.
A delegation/search group of 13 people to leave for Pakistan. Group comprises of experts and relatives of the 30 Indian POWs of 1971, who were taken to Pakistan by Pak army, and never returned. Pakistan Govt has agreed to allow the group to search for the POWs in various jails. Group plans to visit 10 places incl. Karachi, Lahore, Faislabad, Rawalpindi etc.
(Hoping against hope, wish something good comes out.)
A particular para from this particular article caught my attention:
However, probably just as important remains the question as to what the implications would have been for India's internal politics had the mutiny continued. This was became a movement characterised by a significant amount of inter-communal co-operation. The Indian nationalist leaders, most notably Gandhi and the Congress leadership apparently had been concerned that the mutiny would compromise the strategy of a negotiated and constitutional settlement, but they sought to negotiate with the British and not within the two prominent symbols of respective nationalism- the Congress and the Muslim League.[9]. By March 1947, the Congress had limited partition to only Punjab and Bengal (thus Jinnahâs famous moth-eaten Pakistan remark). However, that raises the question as to why, when granted the God-given chance for a cross-religious unifying factor like the RIN Mutiny in 1946, they chose to denounce it as a leaderless and futile agitation instead of granting it political legitimacy.
If you have it, keep it straight. One can choose to live like a barnacle but to claim leadership needs a different mettle. Bangladesh sent back our jawan's dead body on bamboo poles, a dreaded terrorist was flown out of the country with more than state honours - a minister accompanied him to ensure his safe escape, the Chinese have refused a visa to one of our IAS officers and claim Arunachal Pradesh in spite of keeping the farce of negotiations on border disputes on, and now the Army, which protects the Kashmiri people, has been slapped with a fatwa by a nondescript petty mullah who thought that the people couldnât accept the force's benevolence. This is an insult that the Army has been made to swallow in the name of secularism, which means kowtowing before Muslim separatism and arrogance.
Recently, Afzal's hanging was postponed to make strange quarters happy and now a Muslim cleric's fatwa against the Army's efforts to renovate and repair mosques in Jammu & Kashmir has been taken with a silent acceptance which means simple and straight cowardice.
The Army represents the state power, people's faith and the nation's honour. Soldiers give their blood and life for the cause of the motherland and since the British times they have been maintaining a number of shrines and places of worship belonging to all faiths without any discrimination. They are the best icons of religious brotherhood and amity.
In Ladakh, I have seen the Army help restore many a Buddhist monasteries. In fact, a fabulous gurudwara on the Indus banks came up because of the Army, and is still meticulously maintained by them. It has always been a matter of pride for the faithful that the Army is behind them and is taking care of their shrines.
That the mullah in the Valley chose to rebuff the Army's benevolence is a slap on the face of the Indian state, as these are the same mullahs who never ever complained or issued fatwas when the dreaded terrorists took shelter inside their mosques, stayed put in their shrines and even charred them, like Charar-e-Sharif to malign the Army or create further communal strife.
The mullahs were silent when the terrorists formed violent outfits in the name of Islam like Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and killed innocent men women and children. No fatwa was ever issued against such heinous criminal acts done in the name of Islam.
When the blood thirsty gun totters were holed up in the Hazratbal, the stress was not on killing the traitors but to safeguard the shrine at 'any cost' and none, repeat none of the Mullahs from the Valley or the mainland issued a strong statement against the 'boys' who, to the reasonable, desecrated a place of faith.
Now, when the Indian Army took it upon itself, under a false impression that their good work will get some nice return gifts in the form of loyalty to the nation and social harmony, plus a positive attitude towards the sentinels of our frontier, the mullah issued a fatwa against its helping hand. Such acts, which have not been condemned by any Muslim cleric from the mainland, also help expose the separatist tendencies grown on poisonous minds against India in the Valley.
A couple of years back I was the guest of GOC, 15 th corps in Srinagar and saw the wonderful work they were doing under Operation Sadbhavna (meaning goodwill). The Army, under great stress facing a guerilla war of the Islamists in the Valley, decided to win the hearts of the local populace by helping them in their day-to-day life. They built schools, dispensaries, co-operatives, bus stands and veterinary hospitals. They also distributed free medicines and started special sewing and embroidery training centres for the womenfolk to earn extra. It was an unbelievable sight. Muslim men and women were all praise for the Army's noble intentions and a gesture unheard of so far.
This kind of goodwill in a state where all the terrorists are Muslims, where Hindus have been forced to leave their homes and hearth and take shelter in Jammu as refugees, where the other minorities, the Buddhists, have been bitterly complaining about the discrimination being practiced by the Srinagar regime against them based on religion, also posed a question.
Can you win the hearts of a people fed on separatism and hate through simple gestures of goodwill, without bothering to see the problem in its holistic form? Is the reason of separatism in the Valley economic backwardness or hate based on some ideology of the Islamists? Can a few hospitals and schools change the attitude? Or the firmness of the state with a commitment to spread and propagate Indian values and education and extension of all the laws and constitutional provisions to the Valley will give a better message helping national integration?
When I had toured many a remote place in the Valley where Op Sadbhavna was in full swing, it showed a real genuine urge by the military top brass to win the hearts of the people through providing economic and educational infrastructure. Hundreds of girls were being imparted a composite training package in vocational training centres within a schedule of one year which included various skills like tailoring, knitting, carpet weaving, computer training and a comprehensive education package for the enhancement of their qualification.
The Army undertook a massive adult education drive to set up one Adult Education centre in each Army unit's area of responsibility, thus aiming at educating at least a batch of 3,600 non-literate women between the age of 18 and 35 in an 8-month cycle.
Rural electrification in selective areas was undertaken including the village irrigation and anti-drought schemes. Village cooperatives in poultry farming, vocational training for unemployed youths, resources centres for mentally and physically challenged, orphanages, hostels for boys, cultural fusion by mass community participation and the revival of local culture, traditions including horse polo and archery was initiated under the guidance of the Army.
Did it give positive results anywhere?
<i>See a press report about Operation Goodwill ( Sadbhavna )</i> released by AFP a few years before. It reported, <i>' nowhere in the world any army has ever done so much of development and social integration work that was done by jawans in Kashmir. But somehow, Kashmir continues to remain in the clutches of a 20-year-old Pakistan supported anti-Indian insurgency that has left 65,000 people dead by the official count, Separatists put the count at between 80,000 and 100,000. [Agency France Press, September 14, 2003]</i>
Misplaced benevolence is as meaningless as misplaced anger. The Indian army must be having better things to accomplish than to help an unwilling mullah's mosque or spend money like water in the sand dunes. At the same time it's the total failure of the Muslim intelligentsia to address this factor amongst the Muslims in the Valley that has further weakened the position of those who advocate a rational approach based on love and understanding. The best goodwill gesture that the Army can present is to ensure safe and honourable return of the Kashmiri Hindus back to their homes, which still are deserted and mostly have been illegally occupied by the Muslims thinking that the Pandits will never come back.
Such embarrassments, like a fatwa on Operation Sadbhavna , also show the failure of the politicians who control the movements and actions of the Army and force its ill-considered decisions to be implemented by an obedient and disciplined force. The Indian state can't be left at the mercy of those who value their term in office more important than the long-term interest of the nation. If a state can't force corrections on the dishonest and unrepentant aggressor and protect the self-pride of its loyal citizens, it loses the moral authority to rule.
<i>The author is the Editor of Panchjanya, a Hindi weekly brought out by the RSS. The views expressed are his personal.</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->New Delhi: Defence analysts have slammed the government for its decision to cap Indiaâs programme to build inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and restrict their range to a 5,000 km.
They say the decision compromises national security and was done to secure the nuclear deal with the US. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->New Delhi: India has declared itself capable of launching a nuclear missile from a submarine and has announced that a submarine-based cruise missile Sagarika has been developed and tested successfully.
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Also, the Agni Missile Programme has also been extended. The improved telemetry and electronics package will make the missile more compact. A compact design will accommodate another motor in the missile. The motor will have a solid propellant, hence better controls are needed. This is expected to make it possible to strike anywhere in China, which has intercontinental ballistic missiles. The range of rocket has been extended by 1,500 km.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->does this mean the Ndeal talks went south and bye bye? <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Not south,
Moron Singh will be visiting ranch and he will do is stupidity again by endrosing what uncle is saying. What else we can expect from Mr. Moron?
NEW DELHI: Twenty warships from five countries, including three aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and fighters, will assemble in the Bay of Bengal in September for a major naval exercise to be hosted by India.
Other countries taking part in the wargame are the US, Japan, Australia and Singapore and the warships that will be fielded for it include two American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, USS Nimitz and Kitty Hawk, defence ministry officials here said on Friday.
<b>Besides the carriers with their full complement of 80 to 100 aircraft, the exercise codenamed Malabar-07 will feature missile destroyers, stealth frigates, nuclear and conventional submarines and tankers.</b>
The five-day manoeuvres will also see shore-based Jaguar deep penetration strike aircraft of the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy's Sea Harrier jets and Sea King helicopters from the INS Viraat in action.
Last month's joint manoeuvres by Indian, US and Japanese warships off the Japanese coast in the Pacific had evoked a strong reaction from China. Beijing issued a demarche to the three nations, demanding to know the reason for them undertaking such a wargame close to Chinese territory.
Australia's Defence Minister Brendan Nelson allayed Beijing's fears, saying there was no quadrilateral security alliance comprising Australia, the US, India and Japan in the offing.
India and the United States are close to signing an agreement under which their armed forces will provide each other logistics support on a reciprocal basis even as New Delhi may bid to buy another American amphibious warship.
A logistics support agreement is in the final stages, said top Pentagon officials now on a visit to the country. They also said that Washington had offered the giant landing ship, USS Nashwill, to the Indian Navy.
"We have put the offer to the Indian Navy," Lt Gen Jeffrey B Kohler, director of the Defence Security Cooperation Agency in the US defence department told media persons. The amphibious warship is of the same class as the 17,000 ton USS Trenton that was bought by the Indian Navy.
Referring to the logistics support agreement, Kohler said the accord had been put up to the Cabinet Committee on Security. The Americans usually describe such a pact as an 'acquisition and cross-services' agreement.
It was listed as a logistics support agreement at the suggestion of India, he said.
"The agreement will ease joint operations by the armed forces of the two countries during exercises and in coming to the aid of people struck by natural calamities," Kohler said, making it clear that the accord did not in any way imply the stockpiling of weapons on each other's soil.
"The armed forces of the two countries are having frequent interactions and face immense difficulties by way of fuel supplies and other logistics. With such an agreement in place, it would ease things for both militaries," he said.
The US has signed similar agreements with 65 countries, including a recently concluded pact with India's neighbour Sri Lanka [Images].
Referring to the warship Nashwill <b>Nashville</b>, Kohler said the vessel recently underwent a major overhaul in the US. Once Washington received a response from New Delhi, which Kohler said he believed 'is on its way,' the American authorities will approach the US Congress to clear the sale.
Kohler said talks were also being held with the navy for supplying sub-systems and strategic components for India's new range of warships.
Asked about progress in talks for the sale of the Patriot III anti-missile system to India, the US officials said though New Delhi was participating as an observer in the development of the new system, it had not indicated any preference for the equipment as yet.
Kohler was accompanied to India by Rear Admiral Jeffrey W Wieringa, who will succeed him soon.
The officials held parleys with top officials, including Defence Secretary Shekhar Dutt, Defence Production Secretary K P Singh, Director General (Acquisitions) S Banerjee and senior navy and IAF officers.
They said US armament majors were keen to enter the Indian arms market in a 'big manner.'
These companies have frontline technology and want to compete in all major defence procurement deals, 'ranging from fighters to naval warships and systems, missiles to land systems,' they said.
Asked whether the US is ready to take on the 50 per cent direct offsets that India has announced for the jet fighter deal, Kohler said: "The US government is not involved. It is up to our companies to take on the challenge."
There are no offsets in US defence purchases, but the 50 per cent offsets announced by India would prove a challenge for any company bidding for the deal, the officials said.
On the delay and price escalation in the sale of the USS Trenton, the US officials said this was due to some extra work ordered by the Indian Navy.
CALCUTTA, India: India's navy will acquire six new submarines and 33 ships, the top admiral said Saturday, a day after India decided to invite bids for combat jets to upgrade its air force's capability.
"Our interest is not restricted to the Indian Ocean," Adm. Sureesh Mehta told reporters in the eastern city of Calcutta. He did not elaborate, but said "we need a vibrant navy" to safeguard India's economic interests.
India has 7,516 kilometers (4,670 miles) of coastline.
Mehta said it would take about six years for the navy to acquire the six new submarines and 33 ships. It currently has 126 ships and 16 submarines, some of which are aging.
India has been seeking to bolster its rise as an economic power by reshaping its armed forces into a modern military capable of projecting power well beyond its shores.
The Defense Ministry said Friday that it was inviting bids from international aircraft makers for 126 combat jets to upgrade its air force's capability at an estimated cost of 420 billion rupees (US$10 billion; â¬7.4 billion).
India is expected to evaluate aircraft built by U.S. manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Boeing, France's Dassault Aviation, Sweden's Gripen-SAAB and Russia's Sukhoi.
India's defense spending has steadily risen in recent years, despite significant steps toward peace with neighboring longtime rival Pakistan.
The government raised the defense budget by 12 percent to 960 billion rupees (US$21 billion; â¬16 billion) in fiscal 2007-08 to support the military's modernization.
