Much is made of how an American war jet shot a missile through the window of an enemy television station in Kabul during the post-9/11 Afghan war. A small squadron of Indian Air Force MiG-21s did even better with old-fashioned free-fire rockets in 1971. That forced Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi to surrender.
IAF pilots had never flown a supersonic plane before the Russian MiG-21s came in the late 1960s. As the war approached, the 28 Squadron, which was given the new planes and nicknamed ‘The First Supersonics’, trained quickly, mastered the machine, improvised tactics, and kept the powder (and themselves) dry. By the night of December 14-15, the Indian Army had virtually surrounded Dacca. General Sam Manekshaw ordered them to hold fire and asked the Pakistan army in the east to surrender, but there was no response. It was clear that the enemy was counting on the US fleet, which had crossed the Strait of Malacca and was sailing up the Bay of Bengal, to come to their rescue.
Signals intercepted by air intelligence revealed that East Pakistan governor A.M. Malik had called a meeting to which he had invited the UN representative John Kelly, too. If Malik openly appealed for help from the US or UN, things would get out of hand. The meeting had to be stopped, but without spilling civilian or foreign blood.
IAF squadrons in Guwahati and Hasimara got the orders less than an hour before the meeting was to start. Four MiG-21 and two Hunter pilots were briefed, and their planes fuelled and armed in no time. Dacca was about 20 minutes away by flight. A new problem arose. They had no military maps of Dacca. Someone got a few tourist maps of the city.
As they were revving up the engine, the lead pilot Wing Commander B.K. Bishnoi was told the meeting would be at the Governor House, and not the circuit house as earlier thought.
From the sky, Bishnoi informed his buddies about the new target. They located the Governor House from the limousines parked outside. Spotting a dome atop the building they concluded that the conference room would be directly below. Four MiG-21s fired rockets straight through the dome and the roof, followed by the two Hunters which had only guns.
The precision attack unnerved the enemy. Governor Malik scribbled his resignation on a piece of paper and fled to the UN refugee office at Hotel InterContinental. Indian diplomat J.N. Dixit who saw the room after the surrender recorded: “The rockets hit and extensively damaged only this room and its conference table. My Bangladeshi friends told me later that this air operation specially unnerved the East Pakistani rulers and perhaps hastened a quick response to the call for unconditional surrender.”
Once on a visit to the squadron in Pune in 1991, this writer asked the then commanding officer Wing Commander U.N. Ganguly as to how that kind of precision had been achieved way back in 1971. Replied Ganguly with a twinkle in the eye: “You are asking me to reveal the squadron’s best-kept secret.”