Calcutta, Dee 17. If the East Pakistan Army had concentrated their forces between the natural barriers of the rivers Meghna and Madhumati they could have kept the war going for several months, Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the victorious Indian Army commander in the East, said today. But they did not, with the result that they are in their barracks tonight, their guns still close at hand; a privilege surprisingly allowed them by the Indians to protect them against a resentful populace bent on revenge.

A special guard has been ordered on Lieutenant-General Amir Niazi, the Pakistan GOC Eastern Command, to save him from the danger of being butchered by the people of Bangladesh. General Aurora, amid the glare of television lights at a victory press conference here, said: “We decided not to disarm the Pakistanis until we could put them into prisoner of war camps and ensure their security. “Their security has now become my responsibility. We will move them to India as soon as we can. It is the local populace, not the Mukti Bahini, that I am worried about”, he said, speaking before tonight’s announcement that President Yahya Khan had agreed to a cease-fire in West Pakistan too.

General Aurora, in contrast to General Niazi, had a conquering hero’s welcome in Calcutta today. People in the streets recognized his staff car parked outside the Army Public Relations Office and by the time he re- emerged a crowd of several thousand had gathered. The general all but disappeared from sight as Indians, laughing and cheering, fought to shake his hand while mounted police struggled to make a way back to the car for him. Many even clambered
on to neighbouring rooftops to peer in through the windows at the press conference.

Then General Aurora left to deal with his problems, which are formidable. Apart from the job of marshalling prisoners of war prior their repatriation to West
Pakistan, the Army has now to help the People of East Pakistan repair the shattered communications the disfigured bridges and torn up roads, the twisted railway tracks and collapsed telephone wires. And then there is the problem of transporting back the refugees who have been one of the principal causes of this 13-day war.

Despite the peasant of clay huts, dispossessed villages and poverty, and despite the hatred of the people of Bangladesh for the Pakistan Army, it has been in many ways a “gentleman’s war”. The defeated General Niazi ceremoniously tore off his epaulettes and his ribbons, then emptied his revolver and politely handed them over to General Aurora at yesterday’s surrender. Then both men, with another Indian general, talked about General Niazi’s family in Lahore and fellow officers they had known at the Indian Military Academy. “General Niazi thanked me for our generous treatment and I told him that among soldiers we had to do our duty and there was no resentment or bitterness”, General Aurora said, adding later that generals “are very chummy you know”.

Then they began discussing the war. “He told me that their forces, regular and paramilitary, had numbered 93,000. I would have been rather more worried had I known this. I had thought they had come to something more like 70,000. And General Niazi told me that he thought we had had a great advantage in having the Mukti Bahini helping us. They gave us information and they helped us to cross obstacles. He (General Niazi) signed the surrender terms very willingly. And their personnel have surrendered willingly, except in a few places where up to last night they had not received instructions from headquarters. I think General Niazi very much wants to be repatriated.” No decision had been taken on whether or not to try General Niazi for war crimes, he added

The length of the war was slightly less than the Indian commander’s personal estimate. I had thought it would last a fortnight or possibly three weeks, so it is more or less what I said. I said that my aim was to contain the surrender of the Pakistan forces in Bangladesh and I also said that my strategy was not to go to important towns and cities. Instead, I would try to create conditions in which they would find it futile to fight. After isolating the enemy in strong positions we could reduce them. Many Pakistanis gave up and my technique and strategy worked extremely well. But I would like to give credit first to the men who carried it out and who fought in difficult conditions without respite day and night.

“Next, credit should be given to the commanding officers in the field who ensured that our offensive action would pay handsome dividends. I think that individually the Pakistan units and subunits fought extremely well, with resolution and competence. But I consider their overall plan of how to fight the war as faulty. “I think they should have realised that if they were going to keep themselves stretched out, fighting as units and sub-units, they would not be able to support each other and could be separated and dealt with piecemeal. This is one of the first principles of war.

“We have captured large quantities of ammunition, Pakistan-made, Chinese, American, Persian and some Italian for their Italian guns. And I do not think I have yet seen a fourth of it all. I think from the point of view of ammunition they could have gone on fighting for a long time. But they had lost this mobility to move and regroup. They had lost this mobility because of our techniques and superiority, and they realized they could not retrieve the situation. The Pakistanis were surprised by our technique of bypassing cities. They did not expect our movement to have been so fast and were surprised by our crossing rivers so quickly. Then again there were press 'reports that we had landed an airborne brigade, whereas in fact, we had only used a battalion. But they believed the reports, and that helped us quite a lot”, he said amid laughter.

The general paid tribute to the work of the Indian Navy, who had blockaded the country, the aircraft carrier Vikrant, whose aircraft had blasted Chittagong and other ports, and the Air Force. “I think the Air Force’s bombing of river craft made my task of persuading the Pakistan Army to surrender a great deal easier.” He thought that in many, aspects the Pakistanis had superior weaponry. They had had more recoilless anti-tank guns, for instance. But the Indian Army had had more tanks in the East than the regiment and a half used by the Pakistanis. Still more important than the number of tanks as the type. The Pakistanis relied mainly on the elderly American Chafee, whereas the Indians had placed their faith on the Russian-built PT 76. Both tanks are in fact very similar. They are light tanks of roughly equivalent tonnage with about the same level of armament. The Pakistanis had about half a dozen PT76s of their own while the Indians had a few T 55s with their heavier guns.

But General Aurora told me after his press conference that, there was no tank in the world as mobile and as manoeuvrable as the PT76 over the soft- marsh and endless paddy fields of East Pakistan. “This is why we were able to move with so much greater speed than the enemy had expected.” He felt that the deployment of the Pakistan troops had undermined their defence. “If they had concentrated their forces between the two big rivers, the Meghna and the Madhumati. I think they could have kept on for several months.”

As it was, one Indian column spent several days trying to cross, the Madhumati at Magura, while another in the East had to establish a bridgehead over the Meghna where it was 1,200 yards wide at Ashuganj. Had he a name for this 13-day struggle amid the rivers of East Pakistan? “I think the ‘war of obstacles’”, he said. In a sense it has been a war for Engineers. As the work of repairing East Pakistan starts, it looks, as if the first months of peace will be their responsibility too.