As we debate Balakot airstrike, 53 years ago today: Indira Gandhi ordered IAF to drop bombs in India
Here's what happened in Aizawl, in Mizoram, on March 5, 1966 -- an event one writer has called "one of the most shameful and tragic" events in modern Indian history.
In Short
- IAF plans conducted airstrikes in Aizawl
- Mizo National Front had declared independence
- Assault would last over a week
It is said two kinds of planes flew over Aizawl in Mizoram on March 5, 1966: the "good" and the "angry".
The angry ones, witnesses would tell a committee probing rights violations, were "those which escaped to a distance before the sound of their coming could be heard, and who spat out smoke and fire".
Sajal Nag, an academic, writes after quoting these lines that India's air raids "completely destroyed" many parts of Aizawl and "terrified" civilians -- some of whom would hide "in the gorges and ravines around Aizawl fearing more air raids".
The journalist Anand Ranganathan has described the bombing of Aizawl as "one of the most shameful and tragic" events in modern Indian history.
But why did the Indian Air Force, then under the command of Indira Gandhi, conduct a strike on its own territory?
Ranganathan's retelling of history begins, believe it or not, with bamboo.
To be precise, the rare flowering of bamboo and the ensuing plague of rats and famine -- an event called mautam.
When the then-Assam government refused to part with funds to help a Mizo District Council bracing for mautam's effects, Ranganathan writes here, it set off a chain of events that included the formation of the Mizo National Front (MNF), which on March 1, 1966, would replace the Indian flag with its own at the Assam Rifles headquarters and declare independence.
Four days later, the angry planes came. The assault would last over a week.
"This was the first -- and only -- time that the Air Force has been used to attack Indians in India," said a report in the Economic Times in 2013. "Till the 1980s, the Indian military stoutly denied the use of air attacks in Mizoram in 1966."
Indira Gandhi is said to have told a foreign journalist, on March 9, 1966, that the Air Force was used to drop supplies and men.
Exactly 53 years later, an operation featuring Indian warplanes is the story on everyone's lips.
This one, of course, was conducted on foreign territory, against a terrorist group that killed 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers last month. Carried out in Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, it drew a response from Islamabad -- an attempt to target Indian military installations that New Delhi says was thwarted. A pilot captured by Pakistan has been returned.
"The last fortnight has been a horrific time for all of us," said Shah Faesal, a former IAS officer from Kashmir, at the India Today Conclave this weekend.
"I was in my home, and all of us were really waiting for these jets to crash over us and all these bombs to crash in through our roofs."