Bangladesh War hero Lt Gen Jacob dies

New Delhi: Lt Gen J.F.R. Jacob (retd), one of the last of the Indian Army veterans to have seen action in the Second World War and who played a stellar role in the 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, died in a hospital here on Wednesday, an official said.

Jacob, 93, a bachelor, passed away around 8.30am at the Army Hospital (Research and Referral) due to pneumonia, a hospital official said. He had been admitted on January 1.

Enlisting in the British Indian Army in 1942, much against the wishes of his father, the Calcutta (now Kolkata)-born Jacob, who traced his roots to Baghdadi Jews from Iraq who settled in the city in the 18th century, saw his finest moment on December 16, 1971 when he flew to Dacca (now Dhaka) and persuaded the Pakistani Army commander in the then East Pakistan, Lt Gen A.A.K. Niazi, to surrender along with some 93,000 troops to bring the war to an end.

Niazi would later claim that Jacob had arm-twisted him, but the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, which probed the Pakistani army’s debacle, had this to say: “He displayed a shameful and abject attitude in agreeing to surrender when he had himself offered a ceasefire to the Indian commander-in-chief; in signing the surrender document agreeing to lay down arms ...”

The last word on Jacob, came from Pakistan’s National Defence College, which concluded in a study that “the credit really goes to General Jacob’s meticulous preparations in the Indian eastern command and to the implementation by his Corps commanders.”

Jacob was then a major general and soon picked up his third star to head the Eastern Command, of which he was chief of staff under Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh Aurora during the Bangladesh operations.

Before this, he commanded the 12 Infantry Division and saw action in the 1965 war with Pakistan. after retirement, he served as the governor of Goa and Punjab and as the security adviser to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“I am proud to be a Jew, but am Indian through and through,” he told journalist Aimee Ginsburg in 2012.