Four Miles to Freedom (2 page)

As the three men squatted between the rear wall of the cell block and the hut in the recruiting compound, the wind grew fiercer by the moment and it started to rain. In no time the watchman tore the blanket from his head and made a dash for the recruiting centre verandah, carrying both blanket and charpoy. As soon as he had settled there, prone now, with the blanket over his head once more, the prisoners scaled the five-foot wall with no trouble.

By this time the theatre crowd had thinned out. Following Chati's directions, they turned left on Mall Road and kept walking, as if they, too, had come from a late show.

Soon it was pouring, but nothing could dampen their spirits. They were well aware that the stormy weather, first wind, then rain, was the perfect cover for their departure. It was just what they had hoped for.

‘Freedom!' exclaimed the ebullient Sinhji as they trudged down Mall Road. His thick black hair was drenched and water was pouring as if from a spout down his boyish face, catching in his long eyelashes.

‘Not yet,' replied Grewal with his usual caution. With his height and beard and close cropped head, he hoped to pass for a Pathan. Dilip walked alongside. He too had grown a beard for the occasion and had even had a special suit tailored by a camp attendant. Now the green salwar kurta he'd had made especially for this night was clinging to him like plastic wrap.

But Sinhji was right. For the moment, they were indeed free. It was only a matter of staying free. If everything went well, the alarm would not be raised until morning. That gave them seven or eight hours before anyone started looking for them. And should they be questioned, they had their stories ready. They had decided they would all pose as Christians for they knew little of Islamic prayers and rituals and their ignorance would give them away immediately. Though none of them was actually Christian, each had attended schools with Christians and served in the air force with them, and they knew that Pakistan, too, had a number of Christians in its air force.

As for their names, Dilip and Grewal were LACs Phillip Peters and Ali Ameer, based at PAF station, Lahore. Sinhji was Harold Jacob, an Anglo-Pakistani drummer from Hyderabad in Sind. He had met the other two in Lahore during a recent gig at La Bella Hotel. All this was made up and could easily crumble under questioning. They had no idea if there really was a hotel called La Bella in Lahore, and though Grewal had once had a Christian friend whose name was Ali Ameer, it was hardly a Christian name.

‘Remember,' said Dilip, ‘no rough stuff.' That had been their pledge from the beginning. They were honourable men, bent on a heroic task. Even if cornered, and a simple crack on the head could get them out of a tight spot, they would not take any violent action. They were going to use their wits, and only their wits.

Near Jullundur

(10 December 1971)

That morning Flight Lieutenant Dilip Parulkar took off in formation from Adampur, an Indian Air Force (IAF) base near Jullundur in the Punjab plains of northwestern India. It was the sixth day of the Indo-Pakistan War and Dilip's tenth sortie. This time, instead of providing support for the Indian Army by hitting convoys of Pakistani tanks and transport vehicles, his target was a radar station east of Lahore. The station was proving troublesome and they had been ordered to take it out.

Like all fighter pilots, Dilip had been preparing for war his whole career. In the 1965 War with Pakistan he had been wounded on his first sortie. He had managed to land his Hunter but then had been grounded for the duration. Now he was grateful to have a second chance to use his skills for the honour and defence of his country.

And he had no doubt that the Indian cause was just. Nine months before, the Pakistani government, led by President Yahya Khan, had refused to step down after the Awami League, based in East Pakistan, won a majority in the national elections. For years the Bengalis in East Pakistan had chaffed under governments that favoured the cultural and economic development of West Pakistan. Now the moderate Awami League, with a clear majority gained in the freest and fairest election in years, could implement its Six Point Plan, giving East Pakistan autonomy in all areas except foreign affairs and defence.

This was not the election result Yahya Khan had expected. With a number of political parties participating, he had hoped for a weak coalition that he and his own supporters could dominate. At first Yahya sought to retain at least some of his power by legitimate means. After the elections he tried to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose People's Party had gained the majority of votes in West Pakistan, but the negotiations got nowhere. Then, on 1 March 1971, Yahya Khan announced the indefinite postponement of the new National Assembly, which had been slated to meet that month. The people of East Pakistan were outraged. They hit the streets in mass demonstrations and strikes.

As protests in East Pakistan gained momentum, Yahya Khan recanted and proposed that the National Assembly meet on 25 March. In light of later events it appears that this announcement was not made in good faith. Instead, it was a stalling tactic so that he could prepare for a military crackdown. On 25 March Yahya curtailed negotiations and both he and Bhutto flew home from Dacca that day. Later that evening the Pakistan Army went on a killing spree that targeted supporters of the Awami League, students at Dacca University, leading intellectuals, Bengali members of the military and police forces, and others who got in their way. Foreign journalists were confined to their quarters and flown out of the country the next day. In the midst of the mayhem, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested and charged with treason.

There was nothing provoked or spontaneous about the army's response that night and in the days and nights that followed. Clearly, they were following orders. Altogether it is estimated that the Pakistan Army killed 2,00,000 people in East Pakistan, and others died as they fled across the border into India.

All pleas for the international community to intervene failed because Pakistan had the support of the United States. The Cold War led to some glaring injustices, and the plight of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was certainly one of them. At the time of the massacre in East Pakistan, Richard Nixon was well into his first term as president of the United States. His main foreign policy goal was to achieve détente with China (and ultimately the Soviet Union) in order to extricate his country from the war in Vietnam.

Since the United States had no diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, Nixon and his White House security advisor, Henry Kissinger, initially relied on Pakistan's president, Yahya Khan, to facilitate arrangements with China. The first step in these negotiations was a secret meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai and Kissinger. Kissinger flew from Karachi to Beijing in July 1971. Until that meeting took place, and even after it, Nixon and Kissinger, though fully informed of events in East Pakistan, refused to ruffle Yahya Khan's feathers by counselling restraint or cutting aid.

Meanwhile India bore the brunt of supporting a rapidly increasing number of refugees. By mid-July over six million refugees had fled East Pakistan and more were arriving every day. By November, just before war broke out, there were almost ten million. The Indian government decided, in secret, that unless Pakistan could devise a viable political settlement to get the refugees back home, India would have to gradually move to war.

The Awami League declared the independence of Bangladesh on 26 March and formed a guerilla army of freedom fighters called the Mukti Bahini. India supported the Mukti Bahini, again in secret, but it postponed recognizing the independence of Bangladesh. To do so would provoke Pakistan to war immediately, and India needed time to prepare. Indira Gandhi's army chief hoped for a delay until at least November. By then the monsoon would be over and the tidal rivers of East Pakistan easier to bridge. And just in case China decided to join the fray, the Himalayan passes along the Indian−Chinese border would be clogged with snow.

While planning for war, but hoping by some miracle for peace, Indira Gandhi and her emissaries made the rounds of world capitals more than once, pleading for action against Pakistan and help for the refugees. In August India signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union which did not mention defence but was intended to deter the Chinese from joining a war against India. Gandhi's last stop on her final round in early November was Washington, but by that time it was too late for any American pressure on Yahya to succeed. Pakistan, too, was preparing for war. It was just a matter of how and when.

Since late in March the Indian Air Force had been on standby, ready to move to the front at two hours' notice. Forward units had some of their aircraft armed and ready for action at all times. Still, training continued, and Dilip Parulkar spent those tense months training pilots on the Kiran jet trainer at Dundigal, an IAF flying school north of Hyderabad. In November he was ordered to join his squadron, the 26
^th
. Along with two other pilots he flew out the next day. ‘We definitely knew it meant war,' he remembers, and he was not happy at the thought of fighting on the western front.

‘Having trained as a fighter pilot, I was itching to fight. I wanted to put my training to use. But in this case I felt that going pell-mell into operations against West Pakistan was not a good idea. We were going to lose lives, equipment and aircraft, when really the central aim of the war was to advance on the eastern front. I remember standing in a bar in Adampur and holding forth on the subject that we should do nothing in the western sector that would cause us losses.'

Otherwise he was not sorry to be in Adampur, which was a major, heavily defended forward base with facilities for three squadrons. By the time he arrived, all the fighters were sheltered in blast pens and the army had set up perimeter patrols and anti-aircraft artillery. But Dilip's time there was short, even shorter than he expected. His task was to get up to speed once again on the Sukhoi 7, the IAF's newest and largest supersonic fighter. And he hoped also to see his good friend, Major Inder Khanna, who was stationed with a battalion in nearby Amritsar. In fact Dilip had just returned from seeing Inder the night of 3 December when the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) made a number of pre-emptive strikes on the western front. He remembers the attacks being ‘absolutely ineffective—just a show of force. They were saving their air force for future attacks.' And so the war began.

From 4 December the 26
^th
Squadron was flying sorties every day, some days more than one. By 10 December losses were already heavy. Out of eighteen pilots, two had been downed by ground fire. By the end of the twelve-day war, the toll for the 26
^th
Squadron alone would stand at three pilots dead and two captured.

As Dilip flew from Adampur the morning of 10 December, none of these matters weighed heavily. It was his tenth mission, the tenth time he had been briefed about the weather, followed by a briefing on the forward line of India's troops (FLOT). It was the tenth time he had stuffed 200 Pakistani rupees in his pocket and strapped a loaded .38 revolver to his leg, in case he had to eject and were beset by an angry mob. But he wasn't nervous. He remembers feeling relaxed. ‘Nothing's going to happen to me,' he thought. He always had an air of invincibility, a devil-may-care attitude that his colleagues remember.

His reputation for luck had been reinforced during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. Although fully operational on the Hunter only a week before that war started, Dilip had been in Delhi when his squadron commander answered a call for replacements from another squadron that had experienced heavy losses. Dilip and another pilot grabbed their helmets and took off immediately. Forty minutes later they reached Halwara, a base near the front.

Although Dilip was hit in his first sortie from Halwara, through a combination of good luck and competent flying, he had managed to save both his plane and his life. The target that day was a column of tanks. When they reached the target, the Hunters were greeted by ack-ack from anti-aircraft guns mounted on the tanks. Dilip, flying fourth, got the worst of it. The first plane can count on the element of surprise, but by the time the fourth makes its attack the gunners have had the time to correct and coordinate their fire.

Just into the dive, Dilip's Hunter was hit. Suddenly the cockpit filled with mist and ambient noise as cooler air and the sound of guns penetrated the cockpit. A half-inch bullet had pierced the floor of the cockpit and hit his right shoulder before exiting through the Plexiglas canopy.

He was lucky. If he hadn't been leaning forward to peer through the gun sight his head would have been in the path of the bullet.

As Dilip pulled out of the attack he felt a sharp pain in his arm and realized his G-suit was already soaked with blood. He decided not to report it. He was afraid the attack might be aborted if he mentioned he had been wounded. Once the four planes had exited the target area, he radioed that he had been hit in the right arm and was bleeding profusely. His flight commander suggested he eject as soon as they reached Indian territory. ‘You might be able to fly with one arm,' he said, ‘but you'll never be able to land.'

But Dilip hadn't heeded that advice. He'd been determined to try a landing. He was successful on his second attempt.

An inspection of Parulkar's Hunter revealed that he had made the right decision. After piercing his shoulder the bullet had gone through the headrest and the top of the ejection seat. In the process, it had severely frayed the static line that connects the drogue parachute with the main parachute. Had he ejected, the main chute would not have deployed.

Now, six years later, Dilip was flying his single-engine Russian fighter one hundred metres above the Punjab plains. He was travelling at a speed of a thousand kilometres an hour. Below him the wheat and cane were a blur of green. There was no time to think of luck or fate or invincibility. That was what he loved about flying. When you fly fighters there is no time to think of anything but the present task. It requires all your concentration.