History is forever a moving chronicle of time, of all the passions expended in a shaping of it. There are the momentous events which define it; and there are the monumental factors which all too often underpin it.
And with all of that come those moments of irony, those incidents and coincidences, which buttress our understanding of history. Dates constitute the fabric of history. Often we are left surprised at the many ways in which history is woven through a single thread of moments, days and seasons, leading up to a fresh sense of discovery about the ways our comprehension of time is reinforced or is left shaken to no end.
Consider March 21. Consider it in terms of the history we have lived through in our part of the world, with particular reference to the tumultuous season of March 1971, which served as the springboard to the eventual armed struggle for freedom we would soon wage.
On this day, 48 years ago, on the crowded, steamy streets of this city, a restive nation was becoming acutely and increasingly conscious of the gathering truth, which was that the military junta of General Yahya Khan, in cahoots with the Pakistan People’s Party of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was well into the insidious job of repudiating the results of the general elections of December 1970.
In the run-up to this day, between March 16 and March 20, a probable new shape of Pakistan remained the centrepiece of negotiations between Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Yahya Khan and their delegations.
On March 21, 1971, Bhutto and his PPP team, having earlier triggered the crisis over the proposed session of the new national assembly, arrived in Dhaka to join the Awami League and the army in what would be abortive tripartite negotiations on a transfer of power.
But, as subsequent findings were to demonstrate, both Yahya and Bhutto knew that there was to be no transfer of power to the AL, that indeed the army was about to plunge into the business of murder and mayhem on the streets of Dhaka and indeed throughout the province.
In essence, March 21, 1971 was a harbinger of the approaching end of the state Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League had influenced the British colonial power into slicing out of India.
But, of course, an early step toward that decline was taken on March 21, 1948, when a belligerent Jinnah harangued a crowd of disbelieving Bengalis at the Race Course in Dhaka on the primacy of Urdu in Pakistan.
He was unwilling to accommodate Bengali sentiments on the issue, reluctant to acknowledge the reality of the Bengalis forming the majority of Pakistan’s population. And that was not all. Those protesting the imposition of Urdu and arguing in defense of Bengali, said he, were being influenced by the enemies of Pakistan.
And so it was that conspiracy theories in Pakistan’s politics began to assume a concreteness that would eventually lead to disaster for the country.
Do not forget that less than a month before Jinnah spoke in Dhaka, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan had shot down Dhirendranath Dutta’s proposal for Bengali to be incorporated as one of the languages of the constituent assembly as part of a conspiracy to destroy the unity and integrity of Pakistan.
March 21, 1948 had an ominous ring about it. March 21, 1971 was a sign of the speed with which Pakistan was hurtling towards its end in its eastern province.
But go back in time, to put your finger on the moment when the original sin began to be conceived in the womb of sub-continental time.
On March 21, 1947, the last viceroy of India set foot in Delhi. Lord Mountbatten, with wife Edwina in tow, arrived in a disturbed land to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire in South Asia. That was not a bad undertaking.
But what was upsetting about the enterprise was the unseemly haste with which Mountbatten set about readying the British for their departure from India through a vivisection of the country. The British would no more rule, but they would divide before they left.
The ramifications of Mountbatten’s policies, judged in conjunction with the mutually exclusive politics of the Congress and the Muslim League, are yet being felt across the three nations that once were one seemingly indivisible whole. Mountbatten, enthused with ideas of self-glory and his place in history, brought the day of freedom, divisive as it was, forward from 1948 to 1947.
In the bedlam which followed, 14 million Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs were displaced, forced to leave ancestral homes and go looking for resettlement in unfamiliar territory. Anywhere between 1 and 2 million people perished in the riots and cross-border migration that accompanied the partition of the country.
And that is the thread of history which binds, darkly, South Asia in terms of the past.
Mountbatten opened the floodgates in March 1947 to future catastrophe.
Jinnah’s poor understanding of heritage laid fresh new bricks on the path to calamity in March 1948.
And Bhutto’s arrival in a nationalism-driven Dhaka in March 1971 guaranteed the coming collapse of a state founded on a communal bifurcation of history.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor-in-Charge, The Asian Age.
