Great Soldiers Never Die

My first memories of Lt Gen Aurora were of him sitting atop a jeep, hands folded and garlands weighing around his neck as the vehicle moved slowly along Ludhiana’s Field Ganj market. It was perhaps called Jail Road too. He had just returned after winning a war. I was all of five years of age as my father hosted me on his shoulders for a better view. Only Gable hosts a child better in It Started In Naples, better even than Sophia Loren I am sure. For the next few years, I used school notebooks with the photograph of Aurora watching General Niazi sign the instrument of surrender on the title. My father used to instill a lot of romance into the stories of Indian soldiers’ bravery in the 1971 war. Aurora’s was the bravest tale.

So it was with a childlike awe with which I first met the great general in the Constitution Club in Delhi. He was the prime force behind The Sikh Forum and it was a pleasure to listen to him. He spoke like a sage. And died like one. I was working with The Times of India when this hero died. It wasn’t easy writing about him, simply because the news had affected me very badly, but then the urge to pay a tribute carried the day. The front page that day, personally overseen by the editor Sridhar Raman, was also a tribute to the hero.

Great Soldiers Never Die. General Aurora Faded Away. A Gentleman Even In Death

S P Singh

“We were waiting at Ramna Park Racecourse Road venue. When General Niazi arrived in a jeep, he and I saluted each other, military fashion. Many were surprised. Then he took out his revolver from its holster and placed it on the table. His epaulette was stripped. Again we shook hands and hugged. First he signed, then I did, and then both saluted each other again. No pomp, just a brief ceremony. I believe General Niazi was a good soldier.” Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora in a conversation with me in 2001 at the Constitution Club, New Delhi.

December 16, 1971. It was a moment that defined the man and the nation. Graceful and magnanimous in the hour of glory. He accorded respect to the enemy general, India guaranteed safety of over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war. The moment was forever etched in time and became the best-recall picture of a nation's glory. The architect of the moment is no more.

On Tuesday (May 3, 2005), Lt General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the hero of India's emphatic victory over Pakistan that led to the birth of Bangladesh died of heart failure. He was 89 and is survived by a son, a daughter and a grateful nation which hailed him as a great hero.

Lt General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, who had signed the surrender of Pakistan forces as GOC Eastern Command, had died on February 2, 2004, three years after Pakistan's controversial Hamoodur Rahman Commission recommended that he be court martialled.

Aurora was all dignity at the death of the general he had defeated. "I am sad. I came to know him first when we were together at a college in Quetta and after that I met him during the Bangladesh war. He has been a quiet chap," he had said about Niazi.

Aurora was a veteran of the country's three wars with Pakistan. Besides 1971, he also saw action in 1947 and 1965. He was also the brigadier general staff of the army corps that first engaged China in the months before a brief border war between the two nations in 1962. He retired from the army in 1973.

Born in February 1916 in what is now Pakistan's Punjab state before the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent, Aurora joined the army in 1939 and fought alongside British forces in Myanmar during World War II.

Aurora became a member of the Rajya Sabha for the 1986-1992 period as a nominee of the Shiromani Akali Dal. Following the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and elsewhere, Aurora, a bitter critic of Operation Bluestar, set up a Sikh Forum and consistently pursued the cases before several commissions of inquiry, including the Nanawati Commission.

(May 3, 2005)