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Rustamji’s two articles in The Indian Express proved to be the catalyst and formed the basis for the first Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in India in 1979 and was responsible for the phenomenon of judicial activism in India. Pakistani terrorists’ plans to hijack an Indian Airlines plane piloted by Rajiv Gandhi were scuttled thanks to Rustamji and other Bordermen. However, another plane was hijacked and taken to Lahore in January 1971. A few days after the crew and passengers were let off safely, the aircraft was set ablaze. A month later, Rajiv’s mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said to Rustamji, “Do what you like, but don’t get caught.” He cashed the blank cheque and helped Bangladeshi freedom fighters. The end result: the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh in December 1971. On Prime Minister Nehru’s seventieth birthday in 1959, Rustamji gave him a unique ‘present’ - the news of the killing of the notorious nose-chopping bandit, Gabbar Singh in full view of hundreds of people. The very same Gabbar Singh who is today a household name after the film Sholay once carried a reward of Rs 50,000 and was known as Gabra. Rustamji averred that the British intelligence must have had information that Jinnah was critically ill with cancer and would not live long. The British Government was apprehensive that if Jinnah died, Pakistan would not come into being and its strategic interest in the subcontinent would suffer. Hence, in June 1947, the date for Independence was suddenly advanced to 15 August 1947 on a specious excuse. The change in the date led to the tragedy of Partition.
Triggered by the US-backed Pakistani junta's brutal measures against the Bengalis Sheikh Mujibur Rahman proclaimed the independence of East Pakistan on 26 March 1971. They needed the world's support and was their first ally. The Border Security Force (BSF) an elite Indian force was only five years old at the time and became central to India's sustained military response in East Pakistan for nine months until the alliance of Indian and Bangladeshi forces won Dacca. The BSF's founding chief K.F. Rustamji and his men went beyond their charter of policing borders to respond to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises that was unfolding right next door to India. For nine months till the 1971 India-Pakistan war they covertly gave support to the forces of resistance through clandestine missions and black ops deep in East Pakistan while diplomats and politicians primed the world for the war. They welcomed democratically elected politicians and helped establish them as the government-in-exile installed a clandestine radio station triggered the defections of East Pakistani diplomats and foiled the Pakistan Army's tactical trump card to damage the Indian Air Force bases. With access to classified records and through exhaustive interviews with surviving veterans award-winning investigative reporter Ushinor Majumdar has crafted this first comprehensive historical account of the BSF's role in the Bangladesh liberation war which changed the course of South Asian history.
In 1971, the Pakistani army launched a devastating crackdown on what was then East Pakistan (today’s independent Bangladesh), killing thousands of people and sending ten million refugees fleeing into India. The events also sparked the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Drawing on recently declassified documents, unheard White House tapes, and meticulous investigative reporting, Gary Bass gives us an unprecedented chronicle of the break-up of Pakistan, and India’s role in it. This is the pathbreaking account of India’s real motives, the build-up to the war, and the secret decisions taken by Indira Gandhi and her closest advisers. This book is also the story of how two of the world’s great democracies—India and the United States—dealt with one of the most terrible humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. Gary Bass writes a revealing account of how the Bangladeshis became collateral damage in the great game being played by America and China, with Pakistan as the unlikely power broker. The United States’ embrace of the military dictatorship in Islamabad would affect geopolitics for decades, beginning a pattern of American anti-democratic engagement in Pakistan that went back far beyond General Musharraf. The Blood Telegram is a revelatory and compelling work, essential reading for anyone interested in the recent history of our region.
This book examines India’s foreign intelligence culture and strategic surprises in the 20th century. The work looks at whether there is a distinct way in which India ‘thinks about’ and ‘does’ intelligence, and, by extension, whether this affects the prospects of it being surprised. Drawing on a combination of archival data, secondary source information and interviews with members of the Indian security and intelligence community, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of Indian intelligence culture from the ancient period to colonial times and, subsequently, the post-colonial era. This evolutionary culture has played a significant role in explaining the India’s foreign intelligence failure during the occurrences of strategic surprises, such as the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the 1999 Kargil War, while it successfully prepared for surprise attacks like Operation Chenghiz Khan by Pakistan in 1971. The result is that the book argues that the strategic culture of a nation and its interplay with intelligence organisations and operations is important to understanding the conditions for intelligence failures and strategic surprises. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, Asian politics and International Relations.
The war of 1971 was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since its partition in 1947. At one swoop, it led to the creation of Bangladesh, and it tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of India. The Line of Control in Kashmir, the nuclearization of India and Pakistan, the conflicts in Siachen Glacier and Kargil, the insurgency in Kashmir, the political travails of Bangladesh—all can be traced back to the intense nine months in 1971. Against the grain of received wisdom, Srinath Raghavan contends that far from being a predestined event, the creation of Bangladesh was the product of conjuncture and contingency, choice and chance. The breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh can be understood only in a wider international context of the period: decolonization, the Cold War, and incipient globalization. In a narrative populated by the likes of Nixon, Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Tariq Ali, George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and Bob Dylan, Raghavan vividly portrays the stellar international cast that shaped the origins and outcome of the Bangladesh crisis. This strikingly original history uses the example of 1971 to open a window to the nature of international humanitarian crises, their management, and their unintended outcomes.
In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh and their efforts to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend.
The notion that a monolithic idea of ‘nonalignment’ shaped India’s foreign policy since its inception is a popular view. In Power and Diplomacy, Zorawar Daulet Singh challenges conventional wisdom by unveiling another layer of India’s strategic culture. In a richly detailed narrative using new archival material, the author not only reconstructs the worldviews and strategies that underlay geopolitics during the Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi years, he also illuminates the significant transformation in Indian statecraft as policymakers redefined some of their fundamental precepts on India’s role in in the subcontinent and beyond. His contention is that those exertions of Indian policymakers are equally apposite and relevant today. Whether it is about crafting a sustainable set of equations with competing great powers, formulating an intelligent Pakistan policy, managing India’s ties with its smaller neighbours, dealing with China’s rise and Sino-American tensions, or developing a sustainable Indian role in Asia, Power and Diplomacy strikes at the heart of contemporary debates on India’s unfolding foreign policies.
This book tells the story of ten Indian tribes who have been living lives very different-far away from or even within the same physical spaces-from the rest of mainstream India. Their histories have seldom been told. These tribes are . . . The Halakkis The Kanjars The Konyak Nagas The Changpas The Alu Kurumbas The Khasis The Hill Marias The Jarawas The Meos The Bhils Nidhi Dugar Kundalia traces the origins and explores the daily lives, customs and challenges of some of the many tribes who share the country with us.
India's rise as a global power in the 21st century will be backed with a strong blue economy. The high volumetric trade activities through its coastal region, mainly due to its geostrategic location and efficient links with the vast potential market in the hinterland and other landlocked states, provides it unmatched leverage. Among such promising enterprising, attracting global investments and trade, the non-conventional security threats within the Indian Ocean region and India's ports and coast cannot be ignored. Therefore, to address these challenges, the law at the seas formulated by various global organisations and other national and international regulatory mechanisms become essential for all those directly or indirectly involved in India's maritime security. Over the years, many state coastal security agencies have evolved with specific potential and restrictions, which creates a certain conditionality of the existing non-conventional security challenges and maritime conflicts with its neighbours. The successful use of security-related technology to outpace such non-conventional threats creates a demand for further bolstering such technologies for India's advantage. Besides, these prevailing threats to the ports and coastal region, the environmental security challenges also directly impact humans and cannot be undermined. The book covers all these facets in detail, identifying the specific fault lines and makes recommendations to address the non-conventional security challenges of India's ports, coast and maritime trade. The book will be of interest to policymakers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, and all those individuals and institutes interested in India's Ports, Coastal and Maritime Security.
K.F. Rustamji, who was chief of the Madhya Pradesh police and later founder Director General of the Border Security Force (BSF), worked as the chief security officer of Prime Minister Nehru from 1952 to 1958. Rustamji maintained a diary right from the time he joined the service in 1938 and continued in it for more than three decades. He felt he was living in stirring times and the maintenance of a diary, wherein he recorded the news and his views in great detail, would help him to be more observant. P.V. Rajgopal has edited the material collected from 1,600 pages of Rustamji’s diaries pertaining to the period he was with Pandit Nehru and brought out a first-person narrative about one of India’s greatest sons of the last century. The day-to-day record, maintained by a man whose duty demanded he be close to Nehru, depicts the portrait of the subject captured though a close-up lens, as it were. Nehru himself said, in 1960, "I know Rustamji very well." And after a pause and an enigmatic smile added, "Rustamji also knows me very well." The book depicts, in a way, why Nehru paused and then smiled.