Time

For twelve tense days, Dacca felt the war draw steadily closer, with
nightly curfews and blackouts and up to a dozen air raids a day. It
was a siege of sorts, but one of liberation. Until the last few days,
when it appeared that Pakistani troops would make a final stand in the
city, the Indian army was awaited calmly and without fear. Most people
went about their usual business -- offices were open, rickshas running
and pushcarts plying. The sweet tea of the street stalls drew the same
gabby old fellows with white beards. The mood of the overwhelming
majority of Bengalis was less one of apprehension than pent-up
anticipation. Said one Bengali journalist: "Now we know how the
Parisians felt when the Allies were approaching."

The Indian air force had knocked out the Pakistanis' runways and,
outside of the limited range of ack-ack guns, Indian planes could fly
as freely as if they were at an air show. I was surprised at the
extent to which India could do no wrong in the eyes of the Bengalis.
They showed me through rocketed houses where about 15 people had died.
Several Bengalis whispered that it must have been a mistake, and I
heard no one cursing the Indians.

In the final two days of fighting, the Indians put rockets on the
governor's house, starting a small fire and bringing about the prompt
resignation of the Islamabad-appointed governor and his cabinet of
so-called dalals , or "collaborators." They fled to the eleven-story
Hotel Intercontinental, a Red Cross neutral zone that became a haven
for foreigners, minorities and other likely targets. Thanks to three
gusty British C-130 pilots who made pinpoint landings on the heavily
damaged airfield, all who wanted to go went, including two mynah
birds and a gray toy poodle named "Baby" that had been on
tranquilizers for a week.

Also at the hotel were all of ex-Governor A.M. Malik's cabinet
members, who were mostly hand-picked opportunists from minor parties.
They are expected to face trial as war criminals. Their wives and
other Pakistani women lived in fear, and the frequent moaning from
their rooms at the Intercontinental contrasted eerily with the noisy
candlelight poker and chess games of the correspondents who were not
standing four-hour guard duty to keep out intruders. The hotel roof
could hardly have been a better place for TV crews to grind away at
air strikes. During the raids, shrapnel was occasionally fished out of
the swimming pool, and a large time bomb planted in the hotel was
disarmed and replanted in a trench on the nearby lawns. Beer soon ran
out, but there was always fish or something else tasty for those cured
of curry.

Outside the city, reporters had to go looking for the war, and for the
first few days they found the countryside, more often than not, as
peaceful as North Carolina during military maneuvers. "We'll give
those buggers a good hammering" had been a favorite boast of Pakistani
officers. But once the serious fighting began, only a few of the
outnumbered and outgunned Pakistani units fought it out in pitched
battles.

One of the bloodiest was a Jamalpur, north of Dacca where the
Pakistani battalion commander was sent a surrender offer by one of
three Indian battalions surrounding him. The Pakistani colonel replied
with a note ("I suggest you come with a Sten gun instead of a pen over
which you have such mastery") and enclosed a 7.62mm bullet. Apparently
thinking the Indians were bluffing and that he was confronted by a
company or so, the Pakistani colonel attacked that night, with five
waves of about 100 men each charging head-on at a dug-in Indian
battalion. The Indians claimed to have killed nearly 300 and captured
400 others. The top Indian commander at Jamalpur, Brigadier General
Hardev Singh Kler, 47, said later that the battle "broke the
Pakistanis' backs" and enabled his troops to reach Dacca first. A
Pakistani officer waving a white flag went to a Mirpur bridge two
miles west of the city to make the first surrender contact.

"It's a great day for a soldier," beamed the Indian field commander,
bush-hated Major General Gandharv Nagra, who led the first red-bereted
troops in. "For us, it's like going to Berlin," The scene at the Dacca
garrison's cantonment seemed bizarre to an outsider, although it was
obviously perfectly natural for professional soldiers of the
subcontinent. Senior officers were warmly embracing old friends from
the other side, amid snatches of overhead conversation about times 25
years ago. Top generals lunched together in the mess, and around
general headquarters it was like an old home week at the war college.

After the surrender of Dacca, death was mixed with delight. Small
pockets of Pakistani soldiers switched to civilian clothes and ran
through the city of celebrants shooting at Bengalis and Mukti Bahini
at random. By midday Friday most of them had been hunted down and
either arrested or killed. I saw one summarily executed by three Mukti
outside the U.S. Consulate General that morning and few minutes later
the head of another Pakistani was laid on the corpse's chest.
Civilians and soldiers were killed in nervous shootouts and accidents.
Five died in front of Hotel Intercontinental, as South Asia's greatest
convulsion since the partition of India and Pakistan neared its bloody
finale.