By Nilova Roy Chaudhury
History is much in the news and abounds in India, where the merits of a patriotic poem composed 150 years ago are debated in the national parliament; yet across India’s eastern borders, in Bangladesh, the leadership and most citizens appear to have bypassed recorded history about how and why their country came into being less than 55 years ago.
It is interesting, therefore, that among the events to celebrate the 60th anniversary or Raising Day of India’s premier paramilitary organisation, the Border Security Force (the BSF was formed on December 1, 1965), the country’s oldest defence think tank, the United Services Institute (USI) chose to commemorate the role of the BSF in the creation of Bangladesh as part of its Military Heritage Festival.
Whenever the ‘liberation war’ (“mukti juddho” in Bengali) of Bangladesh in 1971 is mentioned, the Indian names that immediately spring to mind are, of course, those of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Indian army officers led by General (later Field Marshal) SHFJ ‘Sam’ Maneckshaw, who planned the strategy for the 13-day war (December 3 – December 16, 1971) to defeat the Pakistani armed forces and allow the creation of a Bengali speaking nation.
Less remembered is the name of Khusro Faramurz (KF) Rustamji, the police officer who founded the BSF and led it to play such a stellar role in the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. In November 1971, months after it started
Rustomji sent a signal to one of his battalion commandants, “BSF is making history.”
Virendra Kumar Gaur, then Deputy Commandant of the BSF’s 83rd battalion, based in Tura in the just created Meghalaya state recalls the night of March 26, 1971, when he got a phone call from the border outpost (BOP) at Mankachar, under his command, that a group of East Pakistani civilians were seeking asylum. Minutes later, he got a call from Bagmara BOP, where another group of asylum seekers had arrived, saying civilians were being killed in East Pakistan. When another sentry called in with similar information from Dalu BOP, saying asylum seekers were scared they would be killed, Gaur realised that a crisis was brewing and called his superiors for instructions. He told sentries to seat the people along the BOP walls, so they would not be attacked. When similar reports of people seeking refuge kept coming from BOPs all along the border, instructions arrived that the East Pakistanis could be put up for the night in Indian camps, for their safety.
Gaur, who retired as IG BSF, recounted some key events as they unfolded over the next nine months, including how they assisted a Major Ziaur Rahman, who had mutinied against his Pakistani army superior officer in Chittagong and read out Mujibur Rahman’s declaration of independence on March 27th, and helped to hold on to the command centre there. Pakistan finally recaptured Chittagong after its naval vessels bombarded the city and cantonment which Zia was guarding. Several family members of Major Zia’s immediate family stayed in the rear quarters of Gaur’s residence while this civil war raged inside East Pakistan.
The USI’s Military Heritage festival also featured Ushinor Majumdar who, in his book ‘India’s Secret War: BSF and Nine Months to the Birth of Bangladesh’, (Penguin, 2023) was the first to document a comprehensive historical account of the BSF’s role in the Bangladesh liberation war, which changed the course of South Asian history.
Majumdar, an investigative journalist, said he was inspired by the book ‘Blood Telegram’ by Gary Bass, who wrote about the ‘Genocide’ in the run-up to the creation of Bangladesh based on despatches from Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka in 1971, to do some research about India’s role in facilitating the creation of Bangladesh. He, like most people, was unaware of the BSF’s role in the nine months before the 1971 India Pakistan war.
Majumdar spoke about how Rustamji and his men went well beyond their charter of policing borders to respond sensitively to one of the world’s worst ever humanitarian crises then unfolding next to India. For nine months, till the war in December, the BSF covertly gave support to the resistance forces through clandestine missions and black ops deep in East Pakistan, while they welcomed democratically elected Bengali politicians and helped establish them as the government-in-exile. They installed a clandestine radio station, “Swadhin Bangla Betaar Kendra” (SBKK or Free Bengal Broadcast Centre) which triggered the defections of East Pakistani diplomats and foiled the Pakistan Army’s tactical trump card to damage Indian Air Force bases. Unique in the annals of history, India helped to set up and run the SBKK, but gave the government-in-exile the independence to run it with their own content.
Majumdar, who could access BSF files and other documents only after 2021, 50 years after the events, when the documents were de-classified, called his book the “first draft of that history” of which Rustomji spoke in 1971.
Ousted Bangladesh Premier Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Mujibur Rahman, probably lost office because of her intense focus on the history of that period and legacy issues concerning her family’s role in their liberation struggle.
Most people of Bangladesh, born after 1971, are conflicted and feel that as the political situation unfolded after 1971, many of the ‘heroes’ of that era, including ‘Bangabandhu’ Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself, are no longer heroes.
It is this sentiment that that the interim government in Bangladesh today, led by Mohammad Yunus, is choosing to foreground and consolidate, while pushing for primacy of their religious identity (Islam) over their cultural identity (Bengali) on which their liberation struggle was based. Leaving people and culture aside, it is curious how the administration can choose to ignore the genocidal aspects of the country’s history, by again forging links with the same Pakistan armed forces.
Ziaur Rahman, later Major-General who took over as President of Bangladesh after a coup, had to flee from Chittagong after intense Pakistan navy shelling in May 1971 allowed the Pakistan army to regain the cantonment. Zia later founded the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to oppose the Awami League founded by Mujibur Rahman. The BNP, now led by Zia’s ailing wife Khaleda and son Tareq, is widely expected to perform very well in nationwide elections which are scheduled there in February 2026. However, even the BNP has not protested the return of Pakistan navy ships to dock at Chittagong harbour.
