The book takes a totally fresh look at the Liberation War through the eyes of the Border Security Force (of India) which worked very closely with members of the Mukti Bahini (freedom fighters) of East Pakistan. The BSF side of the story has never been written before in such detail.
India’s Secret War: BSF and Nine Months to the birth of Bangladesh by Ushinor Majumdar is not a book about the 1971 India Pakistan War but India’s role in the nine-month-long Bangladesh Liberation struggle that culminated in the 13-day war. It is a document that needs to be preserved because it has details which are being revealed for the first time. It is a crucial piece of work that can be referred for future discussions and policy formulation while recording India’s glorious contributions to the creation of Bangladesh—an event that changed South Asian history.
It is sad that the Liberation War of 1971 has never been chronicled in its totality, India’s border with Bangladesh is still laced with loads of grievances, there are no museums in India that showcase horrors of the bloody war where the military junta of Pakistan massacred about three million Bengalis in a little over eight months—a genocide that rivals the Holocaust of Jews during the Second World War. It is estimated that over 10 million people fled the brutality of the Pakistan Army and took refuge in next-door India. Very few historians have attempted to write the most definitive scripts of how a nation that was once East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Most military historians have fixated on the 13-day war.
And it is here that Majumdar, a brilliant investigative reporter, scores over the rest, and has unearthed previously classified details that make the book worth hitting the stands 50 years after the war. The biggest advantage Majumdar has with his work is that he has packed the book with loads of exclusive material which were, for long, confined in the files of the Indian government. The result is a thrilling read of recreated secret missions and clandestine ops but stretching beyond the action to produce dramatic moments that the BSF pulled off outside the theatre of war as well.
More importantly, I think the book will make many sit up and take notice because it takes a totally fresh look at the liberation war through the eyes of the Border Security Force (of India) which worked very closely with members of the Mukti Bahini (freedom fighters) of East Pakistan. The BSF side of the story is very fresh and has never been written before in such detail.
The book is the first public record of India’s secret role in aiding Bengali guerrillas of Mukti Bahini who fought against the Pakistan Army, written with some exclusive documents from the archives of the BSF, whose top officials also gave detailed interviews to the author about the nine-month-long clandestine operations that India ran through its special missions that travelled to the killing fields of East Pakistan. So, let’s dig deep.
It was a bloody war that the world refused to take note of. I read some lines from the book that highlighted the days and nights of mayhem in East Pakistan. At 0300 hours on March 26, 1971, at the Mahadipur outpost of the BSF in Malda, a bordering town, Assistant Commandant B.N. Chaturvedi (retired as inspector general) of the BSF was woken up by loud cries. “He listened and worked out that the cries came from the direction of the border. He had never seen anything like that. There were about 1000 people from East Pakistan, screaming to be let into India for safety. ‘Either give us refuge in India or else shoot us’, they said,” writes the author. The refugees were eventually put up in an open area outside the border outpost.
The BSF, founded five years before March 1971, was for the first time facing such a massive crisis along the 4,000 kilometre-long border with East Pakistan. And that makes it a coming-of-age story of the premier Indian force. The book explains in detail why the BSF was India’s boots on the ground for these secret operations and the force proved itself as an elite force over nine months because its founding DG, K.F. Rustamji, was a seasoned leader who was sensitive to the rape and genocide of tens of thousands of Bengalis in East Pakistan.
I read with interest what transpired before the BSF finally got the order to penetrate East Pakistan and help the Mukti Bahini fighters. “Do what you like but do not get caught,” Mrs Indira Gandhi, the then Indian Prime Minister, told Rustamji before signing off the BSF move in the neighbouring nation.
The BSF was working deep inside the East Pakistan hinterland. “The joint team of the Mukti Bahini and BSF began to watch for patterns, and also worked with villagers for intelligence on troop movements,” writes Majumdar. That gave them an opportunity to welcome the Awami League leaders, set them up in Calcutta and spirit away a diplomatic mission from under the noses of the Pakistani foreign service. There are many more instances of such aces that India used to trump the Pakistanis.
The author chronicles the life and times of a young Roopak Ranjan Mitra who was among the first batch of Platoon Commander Direct Entry (PCDE) for the BSF that penetrated East Pakistan and disrupted the night patrols of the East Pakistani soldiers. Mitra and other BSF personnel left their identity cards back at their camps, donned civvies and went deep into East Pakistan to raid Pakistan Army installations and ambush their troop movements.
In Chapter 8, the author writes about how a special commando team sabotaged the Pakistan Army’s progress on the eastern side of East Pakistan and cut Chittagong off from Dhaka for months, complementing the Mukti Bahini troops that were fighting them.
The book also highlights how Indira Gandhi had asked for an international reaction against the Pakistani regime but that did not happen. The big powers of the world, who actually reacted within days to tackle the global oil crisis, wasted months in vacillation even as thousands fell to bullets of the Pakistani soldiers in East Pakistan. At the same time, India was overwhelmed by the burden of refugees, they were crossing over to India in hordes.
Majumdar writes about heroes across the BSF’s ranks—commandants, operational commanders, intelligence operatives, constables and cooks. The author spreads his works about the BSF’s intelligence operatives in two full chapters. The book is a deep dive into granular details of missions and has recreated them with the help of multiple sources creating a high-octane, action-packed read of the BSF’s operations and how it helped Mukti Bahini’s emergence as a dreaded guerilla force.
Lt Col N.G. O’Connor, the chain-smoking, grenade-throwing commandant led his men personally in raids against the razakars and was awarded the Vir Chakra. The BSF soldiers were on a mission, a mission to liberate a troubled nation from the clutches of a dictatorial regime.
Majumdar writes in detail about one Captain Ali or BSF’s Assistant Commandant P.K. Ghosh who was instrumental in several clandestine missions from his jurisdiction in Tripura and appears multiple times in the book. He was one of the first to lead joint missions deep inside East Pakistan and collaborated with military heroes of the Liberation War such as Captain Rafiqul Islam, Major Ziaur Rahman and others. Major Zia gave him the honorary title of Captain Ali, to go with his cover of being a Bangladeshi freedom fighter and the book records details of them fighting side by side. Strange that Ghosh hardly features in any of the books on the 1971 Liberation War.
One of the most important and popular cultural arms of the liberation war was the Swadhin Bangla Betaar Kendra. While the clandestine radio station’s programmes were created exclusively by the Bangladeshi artistes, the BSF helped to set it up and ran its logistics before transferring that function to the R&AW who beamed the programmes from Calcutta—a fact that appears for the first time in this book. This is brilliant research. Bengalis in both India and East Pakistan used to look forward to the radio station’s programmes, especially the satire shows that mocked Yahya Khan.
The book reminds us about the days when both Bengal and East Pakistan were in bloody turmoil. India was engaging with Pakistan on both eastern and western sectors and Bengal was witnessing the Maoist movement—the incubator of India’s epic class war—at the base of the cloud-kissed hills of North Bengal and in tea gardens around Naxalbari, a sleepy hamlet. The movement had stepped down to Calcutta, which was also the nerve centre of the Bangladesh Liberation War, since the Bangladesh government-in-exile worked from BSF safe houses in the city.
I remember how the Naxalites had infiltrated the ranks of the liberation war and spread messages to subvert the war effort of the Bengalis, calling Sheikh Mujibur Rehman a “running dog of India”, extolling Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Gen Khan as the “lions of Pakistan and dear friends of China”. And Bengal bore the maximum brunt of it, claims the author. Majumdar explains what the BSF did to change the face of the Mukti Bahini, he also explains in detail the human cost of the new nation that was born more than five decades ago. Majumdar describes what was won and what was lost.
Majumdar details the contradictions between exalting and forgetting what happened in 1971 and why the Liberation War in Bangladesh still remains a contested space, fully charged with emotional and psychological intensity after five long decades. India’s Secret War: BSF and Nine Months to the Birth of Bangladesh reminded me of William Faulkner’s words: “The past is never dead; it is not even past.”
Bangladesh is not just a nation, it has risen over the blood of millions, it is a state of mind for many. I heard stories of the Liberation War at Beauty Boarding, a dilapidated hotel that was once frequented by both Rabindranath Tagore and Subhas Chandra Bose. The narrator was Tushar Abdullah, the chief editor of EkhonTV, Bangladesh’s only business channel. This is a slice of history every Indian must know, remember and reflect upon.
The book is indeed a very powerful first telling of the secret side of one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century. Sadly, both the genocide and the struggle to create Bangladesh are largely unacknowledged in public. Majumdar must travel to Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh and talk about his book. It would generate some enlightening conversations.