By Prabhjot Singh
“MY dear Abdullah. I am here. The game is up. I suggest you give yourself up to me. I will look after you,” wrote Major-General Gandharv Singh Nagra in a note sent to Lieut-Gen A.A. K. Niazi, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Eastern Command, soon after Indian troops had entered Dacca on December 16,1971, to the cheers of thousands of Bengalis shouting “Joi Bangla”.
Early in the morning on that day, the composite Indian force, led by General Nagra, successfully assaulted a bridge on the outskirts of the then East Pakistan’s capital before receiving word that Pakistani Commander had accepted India’s ultimatum to surrender.
The immediate response to General Nagra’s note was that there would be no further resistance. Subsequently, General Nagra and his men entered Dacca city. One-and-a-half hours after sending the message through his ADC, Captain Mehta, General Nagra was with General Niazi.
“Surely by the 13th day of the war, Abdullah knew that he had lost the war. It was only a question of time. Any further delay would have meant more casualties,” recalls General Nagra, living a retired life at his Sector-28 house in Chandigarh.
“And when I walked into Abdullah’s office in Dacca, there was instant recognition. General Niazi had put on some weight though his face still had the same glow.
“Hello Abdullah, how are you?” I asked him.
Abdullah broke down and exclaimed: “Pindi mein bethe hue logon ne marwa diya (The people sitting in Pindi doomed us.) I let him talk to lighten his heart. There were reminiscences. Tea followed and of course there was forced friendliness. The rest is history,” says General Nagra.
General Nagra has a huge pile of newspaper clippings, pictures, war mementos and war trophies to substantiate his story.
“After a meeting with General Abdullah Niazi,” he says, “I went to Dacca airport to await the arrival of the Chief of the staff of Eastern Command, Maj-Gen J.F.R. Jacob, by helicopter from Calcutta. At that time, Pakistani soldiers far out-numbered our men. There was sporadic shooting inside Dacca in which many soldiers, including both Pakistani and Indian, were killed. I sent Brig H.S. Kler, Commander of the 95th Mountain Brigade, to the Inter-Continental Hotel in the neutral zone to protect foreigners and the former civilian government of East Pakistan which had taken refuge there.
“I fought my way into Dacca from the North after crossing the Pakistan border on the morning of December 4. With slighty more than two brigades, we covered 160 miles, partly by bullock-cart and foot-fighting at every town,” says General Nagra.
Michael Carver, a retired Chief of Defence Staff of Great Britain and a known military expert, in his book War since 1945, writes about the fall of Dacca: “32 Corps had made less dramatic progress and was still some way from its two main objectives of Rangpur and Bogra; but it was on the operation of the small force under General Nagra in the northern sector that General Jagjit Singh Aurora had his eye. The Pakistan brigade at Mymnesingh, which his force, reinforced by a second brigade, was in the process of attempting to surround, was the only one that might now be able to escape, making its way to the south to join the garrison at Dacca”.
He further writes: “After several attempts to fight their way through, the Pakistanis gave up, some surrendering, others disappearing into the countryside. Nagra decided to exploit the situation and pushed his forces rapidly southwards. Delayed for a time at Jaydebpur, they bypassed it by a new road not marked on their maps, and by the early morning of December 16 were in the western outskirts of Dacca, 12 days after the war had started. By this time Pakistani troops were surrendering all over the country and Niazi realised that the game was up.
“In the early hours of December 16, General Yahya Khan accepted to surrender and, having given orders that would be no air operations against the city, General Aurora, with his naval and Air Force colleagues and the Chief of the Staff of Mukti Bahini, flew by helicopter to Dacca racecourse and there at 4.31 p.m. received Niazi’s signature to the surrender document, which his Chief of Staff had flown in three-and-a-half hours before and presented to Niazi to initial. At 3 p.m., Nagra had entered Dacca with four battalions and received the surrender of General Ansari’s 9th Pakistan Division. This blitzkrieg, as it could truly be called, was a classic example of the application of Lidell Hart’s theory of the expanding torrent, first pioneered by the German army with its tactics of infiltration in the Ludendorff offensive on the Western Front in March 1918,” wrote Field Marshal Carver.
Maj-Gen D.K. Palit, in his book, The lightning Campaign, the Indo-Pakistan War,1971, writes: “Later in the day on December 12, the Indian brigade coming down the Jamalpur road linked up with the paratroopers. Soon after came General Gandharv Nagra, the General Officer Commanding, and his tactical headquarters.
“The GOC’s plans were to push ahead as fast as possible for Dacca. He sent the leading brigade down the road, to Jaydebpur; a second brigade was due to follow up in a few hours. The Para Battalion was ordered to remain temporarily in Tangail.
“On the 13th the leading troops were held up at Joydebpur, where there was some resistance. The second brigade then passed through and took over the advance. They forced a crossing over a river which delayed them a few hours, but were soon pushing south towards Tungi.
“On the 14th, the GOC took a new step. Just east of Kaliakair, a newly built highway unmarked on the map takes off southwards. Informed by the locals that this road linked up with the Khulna-Dacca highway and led into Dacca, via Manikganj, from the west, General Nagra decided to place his bet on this axis and pushed the completely regrouped para battalion down this road.
“Thus it was that in the early morning of December 16, as dawn was breaking, the leading elements of the para battalion came on the outskirts of Dacca, exactly 12 days after the first Indian troops crossed the Bangladesh border on their historic mission of liberation.”
General Nagra says that he had been forced to present a correct picture of the entire operation just because certain attempts had been made to distort the facts and present a distorted version. “I did my job and never bothered to claim any credit for it. But when some one tries to misinterpret or distort history, it hurts you,” he says showing The Tribune team a number of war trophies he has cherished since his “golden triumph” at Dacca.
