J. F. R. Jacob

Origins and early life

Jack Farj Rafael Jacob was born in Calcutta on 2 May 1921 into the Baghdadi Jewish community of the city, whose families had come from Iraq in the eighteenth century and built the synagogues, schools and trading houses of Jewish Calcutta; he was a Jew all his life, the highest-ranking Jew in the history of the Indian army, and this fiche records it as he did himself, without ever having been observant.

Work and career

He enlisted in the British Indian Army in 1942, he said, because of what he had heard of the Nazis and the Jews of Europe, and fought in North Africa and Burma; he stayed on in the army of independent India, commanded artillery in the war of 1965, and in 1969 became chief of staff of the Eastern Command under General Jagjit Singh Aurora. In 1971, when India went to war with Pakistan over the massacres in East Bengal, it was Jacob who planned the campaign — a war of movement that bypassed the Pakistani strongholds and drove for Dacca in thirteen days — and Jacob who, on 16 December, flew into the encircled city with a draft instrument of surrender and, by his own account, gave General Niazi thirty minutes to accept it; Niazi signed that afternoon before Aurora on the Dacca racecourse, and 93,000 Pakistani soldiers laid down their arms, the largest surrender since the Second World War, and Bangladesh was born.

He retired as a lieutenant-general in 1978, wrote the campaign's history in Surrender at Dacca, and served as governor of Goa from 1998 to 1999 and of Punjab from 1999 to 2003, a lifelong bachelor and an unlikely elder of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose politics this fiche notes without comment. He died in New Delhi on 13 January 2016, and was buried with military honors in the Jewish cemetery of the capital.