Ah, I managed to get this work in a different way. Since I am using this in conjunction with JQGrid, I picked loadComplete event to patch my code. Here goes the steps:
1.Create a DIV to hold the paging buttons (of twbs control)
<div id="paginationholder"></div>
2.Crated a local js variable to hold current page
var currentPage=1;
3.Update page number before AJAX of JQgrid
beforeRequest: function () {
    var postData = grid.jqGrid('getGridParam', "postData");
    postData.page = currentPage;
    postData.rows = $("#rows").val();
}
4.Rebuild the pagination control on loadComplete. When user clicks on a page, I am updating the page number (currentPage) and reloading the grid.
loadComplete: function (data) {
    $('#paginationholder').html('');
    $('#paginationholder').html('<ul id="pagination" class="pagination-sm"></ul>');
    $('#pagination').twbsPagination({
        startPage: data.page,
        totalPages: data.total,
        visiblePages: 5,
        onPageClick: function (event, page) {
            currentPage = page;
            grid.trigger('reloadGrid');
        }
    });
}