Cornered Pak troops employ new tactics
From Pradeep Dasgupta (Back from Cachar), GAUHATI, AUG. 21- Under constant pressure from the freedom fighters, the flurried Pakistani forces in the Sylhet sector of occupied Bangladesh are now desperately trying to raise a Fifth column in Assam’s border district of Cachar.
This insidious game may have two objectives : to get the Mukti Bahini stabbed from behind on the one hand and to provoke India to involve herself into a war on the other. Political circles in Cachar, however, consider that there is also a quite obvious third objective-namely, to engineer a communal estrangement in the border regions of Eastern India, adjacent to the Mukti Bahini strongholds, where many of the Bangladesh evacuees have been sheltered.
There is no denying the fact that the Pakistani strategists have been largely successful in their ulterior design. Of these success instances galore at least in the Karimganj subdivision of Cachar, where on August 14 (Pakistan’s Independence Day) a goods train and an ambulance van were blown up, followed by the detection of some unexploded mines both on the rail track and on the national highway.
Incidentally, two live mines were found on August 16 also at Kukitol in the Laitila-Dumbari sector of the Karimganj border. Fukitol is in the precincts of the Putani Tea Estate, which has been under illegal occupation of Pakistan since 1962. Fukitol, where India has a border security post, is on the border between Assam and Tripura along the national highway (the maintenance and development of which has just been handed over to the Border Road Task Force) and has, thus, a tremendous strategic importance.
The Puthani Tea Estate, was originally owned and managed by a European company. But it is known that the company decided to sell it out towards the end of 1961, when Pakistan claimed that the estate fell within its territorial limits. A Muslim gentle man of Dibrugarh purchased the garden. Later, in view of the Pakistani claim and on other political grounds, the Indian Central Tea Board acquired the estate from its. Dibrugarh owner. But before the CTB came to operate the garden it was occupied by Pakistan violating a bipartite Sector. Commanders agreement which stipulated “status quo” to be maintained in regard to 300 acres of land west of Puthani. Ever since, the garden is under illegal occupation of Pakistan which is reported to have set up a big camp in the garden area North Sylhet sub-divisions. The erstwhile Army officer, who now commands the Mukti Bahini over a wide area of the Sylhet sector claimed that each of these encounters inflicted disastrous losses on the Pakistani Army.
The officer, whom this correspondent met, beamed in joy and pride as he narrated the patriotism and valor of his “boys”- particularly of the six teenagers, who grounded an American C-130 transport plane on July 31 at the Salutikar airport near Sylhet. Pretending to be fishermen, they entered a lake within 200 yards of the runway in a boat and simultaneously fired from their light machine guns when the plane had just taken off. As the plane went ablaze and the Air Force personnel were still licking their wounds, these boys spent their boat into safety.
The Mukti Bahini commander claimed that an area of about 80 square miles in Sylhet district was now liberated by his men, which formed a corridor between the enemy strongholds. Despite the presence of Ansars, Razakars, Muslim Leaguers and the army, the people of this corridor were very helpful to the Mukti Bahini. Even the Razakars, he said, were not happy with the Pakistani Army who acted with them rudely.
Some people of Karimganj gave an instance of how the Pak troops treat the people, who still live in Bangladesh. On August 14, the Independence Day of Pakistan, there was a procession of people at Zakiganj (opposite the Indian border town of Karimganj), conducted by uniformed and equipped army personnel. The impressionists were ordered to shout slogans like “Pakistan Zindabad”, “President Yahya Khan Zindabad”, etc and to make them dance while yelling the slogans, the army people constantly prodded them with the butts and bayonets of their guns. Some of the old, obdurate professionists who refused to oblige the bosses were even shot at.
The inmates of a Mukti Bahini camp, situated in the “corridor” told the visiting Pressmen from Assam that the whole of Bangladesh would be liberated before the end of the year. “It is a question of not only confidence, but also determination,” they asserted And, these inmates included many Hindu boys. * It is no wonder, therefore, that the junta is now trying to put their “allies” within the border regions of India into commission. And, strangely enough, while the Bangladesh people, irrespective of communities, are shedding blood for the liberation of their homeland from the clutches of an exploiting and blood-thirsty military regime, some people in the Bengali-speaking Cachar district of India are anxious to conserve the vestige of the West Pakistani clique in Bangladesh.
The Chief Minister of Assam, who visited Cachar the day on which a goods train and an ambulance van were blown off near Karimganj, gave a warning that if subversive activities still continued the Government would take punitive measures against all nearby villagers. But the warning seems to have passed unheeded. Namir Ali and six others (including a Pak national), who were arrested at the Lamajuar village after two police dogs consecutively tracked them down are understood to have pleaded not guilty. To avoid interrogations, the male members of the Lamajuar village stay outside their homes. Meanwhile, more mines have been discovered on the same rail track and elsewhere, planted following the incidents of August 14 which means that the Namir Ali group is succeeded by a fresh batch of saboteurs.
At Karimganj, a Bangladesh leaders disclosed that he had received an anonymous letter, which contained the names of a few persons belonging to one or two villages adjacent to Lamajuar, who according to the informant, were maintaining a link with the Pakistani forces and had hatched a plan to carry on subversive and communal activities According to the writer of the letter a school teacher was the leader of this gang.
This information, it is learnt, had been communicated to the proper authorities at Karimganj, who must have received such intelligence from their own sources as well. Even so, the miscreants succeeded in planting more mines on the rail and the road in the same region, which were discovered on August 19. On August 19, two anti-tank mines were recovered from a road near Bhanga, a short while before the Pakistan troops from the other side of the Kushiara opened fire on the Bhanga sector of the Karimganj border. Army experts then arrested three persons from a neighboring village with the help of a trained dog. Earlier on the same day, there mines were unearthed from the rail track near the Chargola station just when a Badarpur bound passenger train was proceeding from Karimganj.
Reference: Hindustan Standard, 22.08.1977