I confess
that this is an unsubstantiated story from the annals of the 1971 war,
liberation of Bangla Desh. Perhaps it is just innuendo, an invitation for
libel. I am just a silly story teller, more fiction than facts, but you perhaps
may find it difficult to figure out where the facts end and the fiction begins
!!
After the
surrender ceremony on 16 Dec 1971, in which Lt Gen Niazi unconditionally
surrendered, Lt Gen Sagat Singh (4 Corps Cdr, who masterminded and facilitated the quick defeat of E Pak) was left behind in Dacca, as martial law administrator, with a few soldiers to manage on his own, surrounded by enemy still bristling
with arms and heartfelt hate. All other ‘Brass’ who attended the surrender
ceremony (including the 'Silver', Arora’s wife)
flew off to Agartala same evening on their way back to Calcutta. By and
large the rest of 4 Corps and 101 Com Zone were deployed outside Dacca. Others
were still on the move barely 100 km from their launching pads on the border. 2 & 33 Corps which were as to have been the spear heads were stuck in the mud.
Around 17
Dec evening, the B’Desh Govt in exile, with 4 or 5 IAS officers to assist them, flew into Dacca
from Calcutta to take control and establish modicum of civilian command and
control. Sagat Singh issued orders for de-induction of troops just after the
‘Guard Of Honour’ for Manekshaw, I think two or three days later. By then the
Mukti Bahini and EBR had taken control of all treasuries in the new Bangla Desh
and found the coffers empty. Led to a lot of heart burn and Indian Army was
blamed for looting the treasury. Reason why Sagat ordered check posts and
physical check of all officers and men returning to India, exemplary
punishments for anyone found with any form of loot. Lot of honourable men
including 3 of Sagat’s senior and illustrious commanders and friends were
victims. Wait, let me tell you the story in proper sequence, as it evolved.
Sagat’s main
concern at the time, when Maj Gen Jacob was twisting Niazi’s arm to sign on the dotted line
for unconditional surrender vis-à-vis conditional surrender as Niazi wanted,
his concerns were probably the mustering and safe transfer of 93,000 odd POWs
to Indian territory before they were butchered by Mukti Bahini, to maintain law
& order in East Pak, immediate withdrawal of Indian forces, and finally
peaceful transfer of power to the civilian authority in Bangla Desh. Perhaps Sagat wanted to go home, his job well done, and not stay back in conquered territory
like Mc Arthur or Eisenhower. So he hastened his pre-departure tasks with
zestful efficiency and with great élan, to the full satisfaction of the hastily
assembled provisional Govt Of B’Desh.
Everything went well in the 71 war, and after the war in B’Desh, as well as
the subsequent transfer of power. All except one simple thing. The B’Desh
treasury was empty. That offset the goodwill and bonhomie that Bangla Deshis
had for Indians. The rumours spread far and wide with whispering rapidity, the Bengalis
began to view Indians not as saviours, but as rapists and looters, as bad as the
Paki army.
B’Desh
accused Indian army of pillage and loot despite the fact that not a single case was filed or reported, and there were check
posts at all exit points manned by Indian Military Police, accompanied by
B’Deshi police, with explicit orders from Sagat to search and arrest all
personnel who indulged in any form of repatriation of loot. To retain the honour of the Indian
army, under the unwavering eye of Manekshaw, Sagat and the Mil Police perhaps became
overzealous. They did not spare even
very senior and illustrious military officers returning to India. Even few
bottles of Single Malt whisky, that were presented to Indian army officials by Paki army
officers as well as EBR / Mukti Bahini, were confiscated as stolen contraband.
There were exemplary court marshals and several senior officers, honourable men
who had fought the war with distinction, they were asked to leave
dishonourably, or were cashiered.
So if it
were not the Indians, who looted and emptied the treasury in B’Desh, who did it ? I simply
wish to clear the needle of suspicion and an unjust blemish on the Indian army
as well as the man in charge, Sagat Singh, perhaps by connecting the dots of
truth with a few lies, artistic licence of a fiction writer.
It is truth
that RAW had practically ceased to operate in B’Desh after the purge in
Jun/Jul 1970, all our covert operatives in B’Desh were arrested, tortured and
put to death. Few intelligence
operatives were inducted immediately after the surrender, and hence they would
not have had the knowledge or wherewithal to run off with the treasure. So that
makes me conclude that the ones who ran off with the Bengali treasure was none
other than the ISI. And the man who can perhaps give a clue about the missing
treasure is none other than Parvez Mushraff, who as a commando, special forces Major, was an ISI
clandestine operative in East Pak in the closing stages of that war. Several
Mukti Banhini and EBR veterans that I talked to recollect seeing Mushraff in
Dacca in the closing stages of the war.
How was he inducted into Dacca despite the Naval and Air blockade by
Indians, who knows ? Perhaps by submarine ?
So how did
the ISI do it and what happened to the treasure ? Perhaps few others who could
explain, if they are so inclined to do it, is the crew of ‘SS Buckeye State’, a merchant ship
owned and operated by the CIA that was used to ferret out the treasure along
with CIA and ISI operatives out of the war zones, from Chittagong. It has a history of doing such things in WW-II, especially stealing the Japanese gold cashe from Philippines with the help of the infamous Ferdinand Marcos. But let me
not jump the gun.
Hamoodar Rehman was an elderly, conscientious
and sagacious Paki Supreme Court judge, empowered and appointed by Govt Of
Pak, after the 71 war, to enquire into the follies that led them to lose half
their country. His ‘Report On Commission
Of Inquiry Into 1971 War’ (Vanguard Books, Lahore), is perhaps the most
officious book of guilt as it can get, castigating those Pakis who deserved
blame, and praising those who fought with valour. To find the Bengali treasure,
which was not one of his charter or brief, one has to read between the lines of
his report.
After the death of Jinnah, soon after Paki
independence, Paki politics and the military hierarchy veered, it became an all
Punjabi show. The diaspora of Sindhies, the Baluch, the Kashmiris or the
Bengalis were shunned, perhaps like the OBC mentality in India. The political
parochialism and fratricide finally led to the Army under Ayub Khan to take
over controls in 1958. After 12 yrs of ‘Martial Law’, sometime 1970, Gen Yahya
Khan had enough and decided to revert Pak to democracy, perhaps with a revision
of the Paki constitution to keep the military still in the decision making loop. The precipitator of such a policy was
Zulfakir Ali Bhuto, a dynamic, vitriolic and very ambitious Paki Punjabi
political, who was expected to win the election. To every one’s surprise, the Awami League in
East Pak, with Mujibur Rehman in the lead, won a resounding victory, purely
because of the political dynamics of vote bank, the voters in East Pak
surpassed those in the west by 40%. Mujibur then caught a flight via Colombo
and rushed to Islamabad to stake claim to form a Govt with himself as a Prime
Minister of East and West Pak. Bhuto got Yahya Khan to put Mujibur in prison on
charges of treason, it was unacceptable to the Punjabi mentality to have a
Bengali rule Pak, West or East !! It sparked the civil war in East Pak.
Yahya Khan then appointed the ‘Butcher Of
Baluchistan’ Gen Tikka Khan as the martial law administrator in East Pak,
inducted a large number of troops and started a crackdown. The crackdown soon
turned into an enthusiastic ethnic cleansing which had only one historic
parallel, the Jewish purge by Hitler, or in a smaller context Bosnia, with
Bihari Muslims as collaborators to vanquish Bengalis Muslims of all kind. The mass genocide, exodus, search and
seizure, UNICIF, Red Cross and World Bank Aid, the CIA funding, all these
enriched the coffers of East Paki treasury in bullion, US Dollars in cash,
precious art and artefacts, all of them stored in safe houses, mostly in and
around Dacca. Maj Parvez Mushraff from the crack special forces SSG seconded to
ISI, assisted by few SSG and West Paki EBR personnel was in-charge of
safekeeping of this treasure. You have to read between the lines of Mushraff's autobiography to get the drift.
None could be trusted in East Pak since Mar
1971. The Bengalis officials including EBR (East Paki Bengla Rifles, hard core
military, mostly officered by west Pakis or a few Bengali officers whose wives
and children were hostages in West Pak) began to desert or abscond, most of
them heading for the Indian border. The brutal Paki Military police, Punjabis
to the last man, took over policing and the ISI took over the clandestine
activities, the encounters and the ‘Ab
Tak Chappan’. Due to the naval blockade, and prevention of over flights,
only a few could filter in or out via Colombo. The young Maj Parvez Mushraff, a
dynamic zealot, was then an important functionary of the ISI in Dacca, though
his exact role at that time, besides guarding the treasure, is not known.
A few days after the official war was
declared on 3/4 Dec 71, when Indian Kilo force (RAW Military Establishment
22 under Maj Gen Uban & BSF under Rustomji) began to pose a threat to Laksham and the escape route
to Chittagong, the ISI decided to move the Bengali treasure from Dacca to
Chittagong by rail. The treasure was shifted, staging through Lalksham, by a
special train travelling nonstop, mostly at night. At Lalksham, a very
fortified staging post, Mushraff and his small contingent of ‘treasure guards’
were attacked by two hunters from IAF led by Wg Cdr Vinod Nebb VrC & Bar.
Though Nebb managed to destroy most of the fortifications, Mushraff and the
Bengali treasure were safe in deep underground bunkers. They moved again at
night to Chittagong, unmolested by IAF.
At Chittagong they awaited the arrival of ‘SS Buckeye State’.
In it’s chequered history of 35 yrs, till it
sank, or was purposefully sunk off Panama in 1978 (perhaps due to US
congressional investigation and hearings), SS Buckeye State had been registered and
re-registered under 28 flags, under different names, mostly spurious offshore
companies owned by the CIA. The superstructure had undergone frequent
modifications to make its silhouette different around 32 times. It was a very
powerful flat bottomed ship capable of sailing in shallow water and high speeds
in open sea with retractable hydraulically operated stabilisers. It was
retrofitted with every modern electronic gadgets that CIA could buy. It had done everything from infiltration and
exfiltration of CIA agents and worldwide political dissidents, gun running,
opium smuggling, cash delivery and the most illustrious thing that it did in
its lifetime was to run off with the
Japanese cache of bullion and treasure from Philippines after the
Japanese surrender in 1945, with the assistance of Marcos, then a leader of the
underground. The incredible Japanese treasure had helped CIA to grow to be the
only intelligence agency, besides ISI, which does not need Govt funding to
conduct its worldwide operations, they have enough money of their own in Swiss
banks. Around first week Dec 1971, SS Buckeye State (a new name and a new
silhouette) sailed from Taiwan, through the Malacca Straits into the Indian
Ocean, ducked the Indian Navy blockade by skirting along the Malaysian and
Burmese coasts and sailed into Chittagong around 8 or 9th Dec 71.
Due to dock worker’s strike, sabotage by
Bengali frogmen led by an Indian Navy Officer Lt Cdr Akku Roy, strafing by a Sea Hawk ex Vikrant which destroyed some of its superstructure, the loading of the
treasure on Buckeye was delayed and the ghost ship was caught up in Chittagong
port when Niazi surrendered on 16 Dec 71.
Tremendous pressure was then put on GoI by the US Ambassador in Delhi to
allow the ship to sail. No mention was made of its purpose of visit to
Chittagong or cargo manifest. None in
India bothered to ask what was 'Buckeye' doing in Chittagong. It sailed on 18
Dec, two days after the war ended, with CIA deep cover operatives and Maj
Mushraf with his escort guarding the Bengali treasure below deck. In the post
war euphoria, the Indian Navy even offered a mine sweeper as escort. Off
Trincomalee coast, the escort said good bye to Buckeye and returned to Vizag.
It is said that a Paki Navy gun boat
intercepted Buckeye off Makran coast when it was trying to duck and sail off to
Dubai. Buckeye was then escorted to Karachi. Mushraff was given a gallantry
award, and the treasure transferred to a vault in Karcahi. Buckeye was allowed
to sail off into the yonder, ‘Pirates Of
The Caribbean’ world of CIA.
The subsequent Indo–Pak Shimla conference did
not go as well as Bhutto desired. On the last day the politically shrewd Bhutto requested Mrs Gandhi for an hour
long private tet-a-tet, all by themselves. After the tet-a-tet, despite having
93,000 prisoners and many thousand square miles of Paki territory in the Indian
kitty, it was perceived afterwards that it was Bhutto who dictated the final
Shimla agreement, not Indians. India gave
it all away, including the swaths of hard won, tactically most important real
estate, stupefying the team of Indian interlocutors including those from Indian Army MO
Directorate. The line of control (LOC), Indo-Pak border, it was incredibly
reverted back to pre-war days despite the mournful yodelling from the petrified
MO directorate. Perhaps the Bengali treasure was an incentive, deposited as
Congress party funds in Swiss bank account ?
The ISI is very clever, they would not have given all of it away,
perhaps just a part of the bullion.
Three decades
later, at Agra after the Kargil war, Mushraff now Paki President asked our then
PM Vajpai for a similar private tet-a-tet, all by themselves. Perhaps the sum
offered, the balance of the Bengali
Treasure that was not squandered by ISI, perhaps
it was not enough to buy off Kashmir. In 1847, after the first Punjab War, when
Gulab Singh bought Jammu & Kashmir from Henry Lawrence of East India
Company, the price was just Rs 70 lks.
With inflation and compound interest, perhaps Vajpai deemed that the
price for Kashmir was everything in Paki treasury + Paki GDP for next five
years + the balance of Bengali treasure, all of it to be transferred into BJP’s
Swiss bank account ? I have great regards for Vajpai, though slow witted, he
was good at maths !! Part of the Bengali treasure is perhaps still safe in
Switzerland, out of the reach of the politicals in B’Desh as well as India. It
is being put to good use by the Pakis, to conduct the proxy war, ‘kill by thousand cuts, and the new found
love Jihad’ in Kashmir, and elsewhere in India !!!
God bless Lt Gen Sagat Singh. May he RIP. He
neither stole anything, nor did he allow the Indian Army to steal anything,
especially the Bengali treasure. A few woman did offer themselves to Sagat but I
believe without any coercion. He was after all like Julius Caesar, irresistible
to the Cleopatras of those days and we really cannot complain about that sort
of privileges of a conquering hero who accepted affections of the gallant
ladies like a true gentleman, with total discretion !!
Cheers
CYCLIC
