March 5, 1966. Screaming fighter jets of the Indian Air Force (IAF) — Dassault Ouragan (Toofanis) and British Hunters — strafed Aizawl, now Mizoram’s capital, using machine guns to fire at the densely populated town, dropping scores of incendiary bombs. Shocked and terrified civilians fled to the hills; rebels escaped to the jungles of Myanmar and East Pakistan. Till date, it remains the only instance of the IAF carrying out bombings within the country’s civilian territory, on orders from the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. New Delhi denied the bombings.
Soon after, the military, again on government orders, regrouped villages, clustering residents into the so-called Protected and Progressive Villages (PPVs) and forcing them at gunpoint to give up their land, crops and homes to live behind barbed wire under armed guard. A newspaper reported that no Russian gulag or German concentration camp had hosted such a large chunk of the local population.
The bombing was to quell the Mizoram uprising after Mizo National Front (MNF) leader Pu Laldenga declared independence from India. The military action left deep scars on the collective memory of Mizoram, leading to an insurgency that lasted two decades until Mizoram became a State of the Indian union.
