I am hearing this first time. Can you elaborate? Post sources etc.
https://defence.pk/threads/agartala-conspiracy-confession-what-does-it-mean-for-our-history.196786/
A true but funny incident of 1971 war:
Indian troops under a brave and intelligent officer(i forgot his name) attacked pakistani bunkers. Pakistan army was forced to retreat. Indians captured the Posts and bunkers.
The officer(major i think by rank) decided to not build new fortification and use pakistani bunkers for defence. Later that day Pakistan army did counter attack and indian army was not able to repel it because of the one factor. the bunker they were using were designed to defend the attacks coming from opposite direction. The officer was captured as POW. He said to the Pakistani officer that "thanks God the war is over". Pakistani reminded him that war is still going on.
the sardar G reply was an rocking "Mere liye to jang khatam ho gaye ha."
translation: "but for me war it is over"
It is a true incident. Plz don't take it as a troll. I read it in a history book.
Ikram Sehgal’s great escape
Published in tribune.
I confess I have been deeply affected by Ikram Sehgal’s memoir
Escape from Oblivion: The Story of a Pakistani Prisoner of War in India (OUP 2012). He carried a binary identity — born of a Punjabi father and a Bengali mother — which held only as long as East and West Pakistan held together. What devastated me was how it was invalidated by both and Ikram was handed over to India as a prisoner of war (POW). Across time, he comes across as the only morally valid reference in the story of Pakistan.
Ikram got into the army in 1965 and was commissioned into 2E Bengal Regiment where he served till 1968 before qualifying as a pilot in army aviation. On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani military cracked down on Dhaka. Ikram reached Dhaka two days later to join Logistic Flight, Eastern Command, and was told he had been posted to Sri Lanka instead. The meaning of the second transfer was lost on him. He used his ‘joining time’ period to visit 2E Bengal near the Indian border.
But 2E Bengal was in revolt. They thought he was a
Punjabi commando come to kill their commander. Ikram was handed over to the Indians who took him to a camp in Agartala where the Indian Border Security Force savagely tortured him. Soldier to the core, he now posed as a rebel to survive, causing his identity crisis to become an insoluble riddle. From Agartala he was finally moved to Panagarh in West Bengal, along with other Pakistani POWs. In 1947, his father, Captain (later Lt Col) Abdul Majeed Sehgal, was demobbed from the same Panagarh to Lahore and on to Sialkot.
Ikram spent 99 days in Indian custody but escaped on the 100th day, barefoot and naked except for his underwear, in a replay of the
Great Escape film, which forms the purple patch of the book. He went to Calcutta — home of his maternal grandmother — in a truck driven by Biharis. He managed to walk half-naked into the US Consulate in the city, was given shelter because of the recent Henry Kissinger-Yahya Khan plot to facilitate President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing, but was asked to leave lest the Indians got wind of it. He was given Rs1,000 as his fare to wherever he wanted to go. He plumped for New Delhi. What the ISI officer did in the Pakistan High Commission reads like fiction but it really happened. Two commandos, fully armed — AK-47, three magazines, a pistol, and some grenades — took him on a circuitous route to Kathmandu in Nepal from where he took a flight to Rangoon, and finally to Bangkok, with the weapons as hand luggage! In Bangkok, the defence attaché was intellectually incapable of grasping his now-invalidated identity. Back in Dhaka, he spent 84 days under interrogation at the HQ Inter Services Screening Committee.
In November 1971, he rejoined the Pakistan Army and served in Thar and Balochistan “but was dismissed from service two years later without any reasons for this action”.
Ikram Sehgal’s mother was an Urdu-speaking Bengali from Midnapore near Calcutta. Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy and JA Rahim were his grandmother’s first cousins. On his father’s side, his late grandfather, Haji Abdul Karim Sehgal, partly built the Marine Drive of Bombay. His grand-uncle Shaikh Mohammad Abdullah served as chief engineer at the Bombay Baroda Central India Railways. Today, Ikram runs his
security firms and has gone back to Bangladesh to rejoin the 2E Bengal as an old friend and he is still a Pakistan Army soldier to the marrow. But this is what he writes about 1971: “When soldiers make war on women and children, they cease to be soldiers. That is why in the final analysis, when it came to real combat, they could not face up to bullets which is their actual job as soldiers … the terror that was unleashed by them in East Pakistan between March and November 1971 is simply inexcusable.”
What should one do when two identities are in violent clash and you are stuck in the middle? Is reality acceptable only when it is framed in black and white?
Funny incident of war from times of india.
When ignorance of Kalma made IAF pilot a Pakistan PoW
Ajay Sura | TNN | Dec 16, 2014, 06.34 PM IST
CHANDIGARH: Forty-three years ago, when young Flight Lieutenant (who retired as Air Commodore) Jawahar Lal Bhargava ejected from his aircraft in Pakistan territory after being shot down, he had almost made it to India by posing as Flt Lt Mansur Ali of Pakistan Air Force. However, as luck would have it, his ignorance about the "Kalma" (testimony of Islamic faith) made him a prisoner of war (PoW).
Talking to TOI, the 73-year-old veteran, Air Commodore Bhargava, who had to spent almost a year in Pakistan during 1971 Indo-Pak war after his HF-24 9 aircraft — popularly known as "Marut" — was shot down, recalled how an IAF pilot deals with the situation after landing in enemy territory.
Bhargava, who recently shifted to Panchkula from Gurgaon, said he took off from Air Force station Barmer (Rajasthan) on the morning of December 5, 1971, on his first sortie to launch an attack in the enemy territory.
Around 9am, his aircraft was hit by ground fire and he decided to eject. His parachute had barely opened when he touched down and the "Marut" had crashed into a sand dune.
He immediately took out some items from the survival pack, buried his G-suit under the bushes, set his watch on Pakistan standard time and started marching away from the aircraft.
While he was struggling to find some way to escape to Indian territory, he ran into three people from an adjacent village. Bhargava introduced himself as pilot Mansoor Ali of Pakistan Air Force (PAF), whose plane was shot down by Indian forces. He even showed them Pakistan currency. They took him to the village, where his real test began.
On entering the village, he was surrounded by a large number of residents. Among them was a school headmaster who was apparently not convinced that Bhargava was a PAF pilot. He started posing questions on Bhargava's native place in Pakistan. "When I said that I was from Rawalpindi, he asked me where did I stay? When I told him that I resided on Mall Road, he said I was in an Indian village. When I requested them to let me go back to Pakistan, he assured me that he was only testing me."
Bhargava planned to escape from the village at 8pm on the pretext of going to relieve himself, but to his surprise, four Pakistani rangers arrived there — apparently called by the headmaster — and began grilling him.
"They did not believe me when I reiterated that I was Mansur Ali of PAF. Around 9pm, one of them, Awaj Ali, asked me to read the Kalma. He even recited it and asked me to repeat it, but I could not. He then threatened me to tell the truth or they would extract it some other way. I told them that I was Flt Lt Jawahar Lal Bhargava of the IAF and they could do whatever they wanted to with me, even kill me," said the veteran.
Thereafter, he was blindfolded, handcuffed and handed over to the Pakistani army on December 8, 1971.
Bhargava said if he had been able to repeat the Kalma that day, he would have escaped from Pakistan that very night.