AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 7 – Panorama CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 306 of 332 "Mind you, there were a lot of Pakistani jasoos (enemy agents) in Calcutta then, whose task was to eliminate these so-called traitors," the veteran remembers. There were these two outstanding military officers among these 40 VIPs -- Colonel M A G (Muhammad Ataul Goni) Osmani and Wing Commander Abdul Karim Khondker. Besides them, we also had civil servants and powerful politicians like Tajuddin Ahmed, Nazrul Islam, Mansoor Ali and Qamruzzaman who worked tirelessly manning various portfolios of the government in exile. Some of these men were arrested and murdered in the 1975 uprising which saw Sheikh Mujib and most of his family (barring current Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her sister who were abroad then) assassinated. "Colonel Osmani was soon sent back into Bangladesh. He had a good local following and was tasked to start the resistance movement," the IAF veteran tells me. Khondker was tasked to work out strategies to deal with the Pakistani army in East Pakistan. He was also assigned to create a fighting force by recruiting able-bodied Bengalis and train them at ten-odd camps set up all along the eastern border with India. Wing Commander Khondker was a distinguished fighter pilot who had been head of Pakistan's air force academy. He was appointed deputy chief of the nascent Bangladesh air force during the 1971 War and later took on the mantle of the BAF's chief of air staff. After retirement, he became Bangladesh's planning minister before retiring from public life in the 1990s. The idea of providing guerrilla training to the Bangladeshis in exile was finally accepted amidst scepticism that India should not end up arming the East Bengali dissidents so heavily that they became a problem to handle at a later stage. The requirement at that time was to create enough trouble for the Pakistan army and force them to withdraw from East Pakistan thus leading to a democratic setup and local governance to take over peacefully. General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the Eastern Army Commander, was given full responsibility for training the cadres while the responsibility of running of the Eastern Army was left to his deputy, General J F R Jacob.