Not agreed.
Joe, we Pakistanis are also patriots like you.
Denying everything based on your personal assumption/liking, will not help you.
Again and again, you resort to the foolish assumption of 'Humka sub maloom'; it won't serve any purpose.
These are the short answers prompted by foolish assertions by fanboys who should never have opened their mouths.
Indian Government and Indian Army both involved in terrorism in former 'East Pakistan'.
My quarrel is with the dates that your friend talked about.
It is really disappointing that with superficial knowledge of India, of Indian politics of the period, of the organisation of the Indian border security arrangements, of the creation of Indian intelligence organisations, and of the leadership and primary objectives of the Indian Army, people should make these assertions.
If I had made similar suggestions about Pakistan and about affairs in Pakistan, I would rightly have become a laughing stock. In this case, I shall restrict myself to saying that you need to read what I have to say below before ever commenting on this aspect.
So here your knee-jerk reaction is also undiluted filth.
I'm afraid that the facts completely are against you. It isn't a question of patriotism, or even of facts interpreted by two sides.
These are not my personal assumptions or likings. Everything I say below is a matter of public record, or of personal experience and knowledge.
First, the Army was indifferent, and unconcerned with affairs in the east.
From 1965 to 1971, we had two Army Chiefs, the well-liked but quiescent Kumaramangalam, and following him, Manekshaw, who had been separated from HQ for several years and spent a lot of time coping with renewing contacts in Army HQ in Delhi and keeping the Army out of the political turmoil that gripped the nation. There was no time for fiddling around creating terrorist organisations in the east.
The primary objectives of the Indian Army were to guard against the Chinese; at the time of Manekshaw's taking over, (in 1969, it was just seven years before that the traumatic defeat at the hands of the PLA had occurred), and to strengthen the order of battle in the west, where we had won some, and lost some encounters in 1965. The failure of the Indian 1st Armoured Division was uppermost, followed by the disastrous surrender of the Haji Pir Pass in the Tashkent peace agreement, something that the Army regrets bitterly to this day. There was also the trauma of the Nagas to deal with, although the Assam Rifles took the brunt of the burden, as the Indian Army objected strongly to being engaged as a substitute for the failed apparatus of civil administration. There was nobody in the Army even aware of events in East Pakistan; both Jagjit Arora and his Chief of Staff, Jacob, were focussed on the activities of XXXIII Corps and on the northern borders. Only IV Corps had some responsibility for the rest of Eastern Command, and they were deployed in Assam and Nagaland. There was no organisation within the Army, and no apparatus for fiddling around creating terrorist operations in the east. In fact, the boot was on the other foot.
In 1966, the Mizo National Front staged an armed revolt, and killed and fought the security forces, at that time, their own constabulary, as well as a battalion of the Assam Rifles. They failed, the Indian Army and Indian Air Force were called out, and by 1967, the MNF were driven out; two battalions of regulars, three battalions of Assam Rifles, and four battalions of CRPF were involved in pacifying the territory. MNF forces retired to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where, in 1971, Brigadier Z. A. Khan found them in well-organised barracks, with regular service weaponry, and subsidised by the ISI. This last is on record in the Pakistani army officer's memoirs.
There was not even a local civil organisation to fiddle around creating terrorist organisations in the east.
In 1965, the only hostilities in the east were between the West Bengal armed police, three battalions of constables armed with .303 SMLE rifles of World War II vintage. Until hostilities became intense, there were not even Light Machine Guns available. There was also one battalion of the Eastern Frontier Rifles.
Against this, there were 10,000 enlisted men of the East Pakistan Rifles, composed of units of the old Eastern Frontier Rifles, less the Gorkhas, who stayed back in India, in West Bengal, units of the Calcutta Armed Police and nearly one thousand ex-servicemen of the Pakistan Army transferred here. In 1965, they were commanded by Brigadier Torgul, whose name sticks to my memory because it was the first exotic name from the north-west that I had encountered.
Largely as a reaction to facing the organised covert operations of the Pakistan Army in Operation Gibraltar, very well recorded in Pakistani accounts, a senior officer with experience of armed operations was pulled out of the Madhya Pradesh and asked to organise a border guard, that became the Border Security Force. This force was raised with 25 battalions in December 1965, and had four or five battalions in the east, and was still trying to find its feet over the next two to three years. By 1968, when they had settled down, these formations, not exceeding 3,000 in the east, were faced by a tough, well-armed EPR with 10,000 people in it.
Whether this force could organise terrorism under the noses of the well-armed and well-equipped and officered by the Regular Army EPR is for you to judge. But since you don't know the facts, and will not take the trouble of taking my laconic statements at face value but ascribe them to an ego problem, it is difficult for you to accept that you are mistaken.
Things were worse on the political front.
We had the political turmoil of Shastri's tragic death at Tashkent, and the succession problem. Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister by the Congress Legislative Party in Parliament, but power lay with a set of powerful, conservative leaders who despised her and thought of her as a figurehead who would allow them to govern just as they pleased. This was clearly an untenable situation; over 1968 and early 1969, Indira Gandhi challenged the old guard of the Congress, put up her own candidate for president . Mr. V. V. Giri won the elections in 1969, and became President. Indira Gandhi then set about consolidating her grip on the party, and on the administration, and was completely caught up in those political affairs. Even in 1971, events in East Pakistan, as it then was, came as a shock to the entire political establishment, and for several months, the Indian response was confused and undecided. None of the politicians had any clue about the possibilities of organising terrorism in the east.
That leaves one factor to be dealt with, the intelligence agencies.
Following the debacle in 1962, it was already clear that the Intelligence Bureau would not be capable of handling extra-territorial intelligence gathering. in 1968, a policeman named Kao was asked to build such an organisation, and he was appointed to the Cabinet Secretariat. There was no constitutional provision for such an agency other than as an arm of the bureaucracy. If you have read any of the books published by former senior officers of the intelligence agencies, you will have known that the IB spent most of its time in Kashmir, and RAW spent most of its time in monitoring the Pakistan Army. These are on record. Not one person, not one source, within or outside the government, has ever even suggested that there was an eastern initiative. RAW was setting up, selecting officers for its cadre positions and recruiting the rank and file. RAW was completely in set up mode through 1969, 1970 and most of 1971. They had no time fiddling around building terrorist organisations in the east.
Finally, the role of Mujib and the Awami League. That is something that did not amount to building a terrorist organisation, and that is something for which India, and Indian intelligence agencies, or security forces, or the Indian military cannot be blamed.
When I speak about a subject, you may be sure that I do that with a thorough awareness of the facts, both public and private. It is disappointing that you chose to consider my brief remark as a knee-jerk reaction and to use foul language about a body of knowledge acquired over a lifetime of service. On these matters that I have described above, I challenge anyone to contradict me on any fact.
I believe you owe me an apology.
Joe seems first cousin of Gen Bakhshi...
You should find out first what the facts are and how faithfully I present them.