WASHINGTON, June 2: A report published on some US websites on Thursday claims that India might have deliberately sold a bogus plan to Pakistan in 1965 to mislead the Pakistani military.
The report, by Dr. Anil Athale, a former joint director of war history at the Indian Ministry of Defence, counters a claim by former foreign minister Gauhar Ayub Khan that an Indian brigadier had sold Indian army plans to Pakistan for Rs 20,000, before the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war.
The report recalls that in the Second World War, to fool the Germans about the actual site of Allied landings, the Allies had deliberately handed over the ‘plan’ to the Germans, planted on a dead body.
The report also refers to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Fokker Friendship aircraft Ganga in the early part of 1971. The aircraft was hijacked by two Kashmiris, Butt and Hashim Quereshi. One of them was a member of the Indian Border Security Force.
According to the report, the Pakistanis fell into the trap, hailed the two men as heroes and burned the aircraft. This gave India the excuse to ban overflights by Pakistani aircraft, which had a significant impact on situation in erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
The Pakistanis soon realised their mistake, branded the hijackers as Indian agents and sentenced them to prison terms, the report adds. The author points out that Ganga was one of the oldest aircraft in the Indian Airline fleet and was already withdrawn from service but was re-inducted days before the hijack.
The author recalls that a deputy inspector-general of the BSF based in Jammu, bristling at the involvement of one of his men in the hijack, had gone public to say that he had objected to the induction of Butt into the BSF but was overruled by a ‘higher intelligence agency’.
Pakistan continues to assert that the episode was stage-managed by India. The Indian side has, for obvious reasons, never responded to this charge.
“Coming back to Gauhar Ayub’s charge, to sell such a valuable document for mere Rs 20,000, the said brigadier must either be very foolish or was asked to plant fake documents. The later seems more likely,” the report adds.
“If that is so, then like the Ganga episode the Indian side is not likely to come out in the open to accept or deny it. But to an average (Indian) citizen it is gratifying to know that we are indeed capable of such a feat,” the report concludes.
