RIP Lt Gen JFR Jacob: Our hero of 1971 war

Lt Gen JFR Jacob has passed on. He was our hero of the 1971 war with Pakistan. As the chief of the staff, Eastern Command, he, then a major general, evolved a strategy that disagreed with what was suggested by the HQs and executed the campaign that led to the creation of Bangladesh, arguably the most populous new nation born in the last 50 years. He also negotiated the biggest ever surrender of armed forces anywhere in the history of modern warfare, when he persuaded Gen AKA Niazi to lay down arms along with his over 93,000 troops.

I was barely eight-years-old, in 1971, when India fought that war. That was the year my engagement with newspapers truly began.

I would identify the pictures related to the war in the day's copy and use a pair of scissors the next day to neatly crop them out for my collection. A tin-box, with the chubby "Murphy baby" on its lid, emptied out of the Diwali sweets that it came with barely weeks back, was to become my treasure trove of such clippings. I was to lose them two years later, inconsolably, while moving homes. The war gave me, perhaps, my first real-life heroes - Gen SHFJ Manekshaw, Air Marshal PC Lal and Admiral SM Nanda. The three chiefs had become the household names for winning us the war.

There were some valiant martyrs too. One was flying officer Nirmal Jeet Singh Sekhon, who won the Indian Air Force its first Param Veer Chakra, defending the Srinagar Airport, almost single-handedly, flying a Gnat against four intruding Sabres.

Captain Mahendra Nath Mulla, who went down along with the frigate under his command, INS Khukri, but not before evacuating over 60 of his colleagues and refusing to leave his ship till the very end, reaffirming the highest traditions of Navy.

I was overwhelmed and just couldn't understand then as to how could someone choose to not save himself from a sure death, when he actually could. He was decorated, posthumously, with Maha Veer Chakra. There was sinking of Ghazi, the destruction of Pattons, the air-raid sirens and black-outs, the fireworks at the Karachi harbour, the 7th fleet in the Bay of Bengal facing off with the Soviet submarines, the heroics of the PVC winner major Hoshiar Singh, but nothing in my memory about Gen Jacob.

I also got to know of Gen JS Aurora, GoC-in-C Eastern Command, to whom, Gen Niazi surrendered. Gen Jacob stands there, in the historic picture, watching over, as Gen Niazi signed the Instrument of Surrender sitting besides Gen Aurora. I came to know much later in life, that it was Gen Jacob who had flown into Dhaka to "persuade" Gen Niazi to surrender. With barely three thousand Indian troops in the vicinity, as compared to over 25,000 armed Pakistani troops in Dhaka, Gen Jacob, as Niazi recalled in an interview later, literally threatened him into a tame surrender, brandishing the option of carpet bombing.

It was also poetic justice of sorts. Pakistan, a self-proclaimed citadel of Islam, had to suffer the mortification of its a-hundred-thousand strong army give in, to, of all the people a Jew - theologically the most despised identity in Islam - and that too who led an army of non-believers. It will, perhaps, take the stuffed up Islamists that they have become forever to live that down.

Hearing about the atrocities faced by the Jews under Hitler, JFR Jacob had joined the Royal British Army and was deployed in Iraq and also in North Africa to fight the legendary Gen Rommel of the Nazi Army in the Second World War.

After 1947, he decided to serve the Indian Army. An infantryman throughout, he rose to become GoC-in-C Eastern Command, before retiring in 1973. He was a thinking soldier. There are two books he wrote - one on the memorable victory of 1971 and the other his memoir. In the '90s, he joined the BJP and contributed to the understanding on the security matters. Gen Jacob was appointed governor, first of Goa and then Punjab, by the first NDA government.

Gen Jacob was a great champion of India-Israeli friendship. The year before last, I was with him to attend a commemoration ceremony in the synagogue at the Prithviraj Road, for the Indian soldiers who were martyred liberating Haifa from the Ottomans and the Germans in the First World War. The fallen soldiers of the Jodhpur Lancers and the Mysore Lancers, who fought in that battle, are buried there in a cemetery. The Israelis pay their homage to their memory, every year.

He spoke with passion and with a great sense of history. But, that is how he always was. Often sitting in the first row at the auditorium of Vivekananda International Foundation, he would be among the first ones to engage with the speaker of the day, making erudite interventions and sharing fascinating nuggets from his elephantine memory. Candour was his middle name. He would speak without bothering to soften the blows. He was transparent like only an upright gentleman soldier can be. Particularly, on the issues of national security, he was unsparing of the sloth and meekness masquerading as strategy.

An unalloyed patriot, Gen Jacob was up and about till the very last. Well, almost. He would step out and attend events even when it was evident that his body was protesting the strain he was putting it through. Moving on at barely seven years short of 100, he was truly the very last of his generation. But if someone like me, just a few years more than half his age, is going to miss him in the public spaces, particularly at the events at Vivekananda International Foundation, it is a tribute to the presence his persona brought. They just don't make men like him anymore. Farewell General.