Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw

Sam Manekshaw was born in Amritsar on 3 April 1914 to Parsi parents and was India's Chief of the Army Staff during the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. He studied at Hindu Sabha College in Amritsar (Wikipedia), joined the first course of the Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun and was commissioned in 1934. In the Second World War he won the Military Cross at the Sittang river bridge in Burma, where he was badly wounded.

Key moments

• 7 June 1969: becomes Chief of the Army Staff, succeeding General P. P. Kumaramangalam.
• April 1971: a tribute in Mainstream says he offered to resign rather than attack East Pakistan before the army was ready. Wikipedia reports that Indira Gandhi then accepted that he would run the war on his own terms.
• 1971: before the war the army trained and armed the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali guerrilla force (Wikipedia). The Sikh community website SinghStation says Manekshaw specially selected Brigadier Shabeg Singh to run the Delta Sector from Agartala, planning and directing the training of Bengali youth. That claim rests on SinghStation, a partisan source, and the other sources opened here do not mention it.
• 3 to 16 December 1971: the war lasts twelve days. On 16 December Lt Gen A. A. K. Niazi signs the surrender at Dhaka. Manekshaw declined to go to Dhaka himself and left the surrender to Lt Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora, a Sikh (Wikipedia). More than 90,000 Pakistani soldiers were taken prisoner (The Daily Star).
• 1972 and 1973: receives the Padma Vibhushan in 1972; is made Field Marshal on 1 January 1973, the first Indian officer to hold the rank (Mainstream), and retires on 15 January 1973 (The Daily Star).
• 27 June 2008: dies at the Military Hospital in Wellington, Tamil Nadu, aged 94 (Dawn; Mainstream gives 26 June).

What he is remembered for. He is remembered as the architect of the 1971 victory, in which Sikh and Punjabi officers stood at the centre. In the Sikh record he is also named in the story of Major General Shahbeg Singh, the officer who trained the Mukti Bahini, was dismissed from the army in 1976 and was killed in the Golden Temple complex in June 1984.