Twenty-six years ago, on the sidelines of a South Asian media conference in Lahore, I asked Dr Mubashir Hasan if he planned to write his account of what had gone wrong for Pakistan in Bangladesh in 1971. Dr Hasan, one of the founders of the Pakistan People’s Party in late 1967, was part of his party’s team which Z.A. Bhutto led to Dhaka in March to join the dialogue already underway between the Yahya Khan junta and the Awami League. In post-1971 Pakistan, Mubashir Hasan served as finance minister in the Bhutto government. The ageing politician gave me a sad look as he told me in Urdu, ‘Kya likkhein? Itna sab kuch ho gaya (What shall I write? So much has happened).’
Mubashir Hasan has written a good deal on politics in Pakistan as he observed it in the years after the emergence of Bangladesh, but he has stayed away from writing on the crisis which erupted in March 1971 as a consequence of the decision of his party leader to boycott the session of the national assembly called for 3 March in Dhaka. Like Hasan, there have been others in Pakistan who have kept their silence on the realities as they shaped up in 1971, especially in terms of what transpired in Dhaka between 15 and 25 March. No one in Pakistan has ever explained why President Yahya Khan, without formally calling an end to the regime’s negotiations with Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League, stealthily left Dhaka in the evening on 25 March. That General Tikka Khan, once Yahya had flown off to Karachi, informed General Khadim Hussain Raja that the army would launch Operation Searchlight within hours was a decision that would prove fatal for Pakistan.
There are the reflections and reminiscences associated with the manner in which politics was turned on its head fifty years ago. The very fact that the army, unwilling to hand over power to the majority leader in the national assembly, in this case, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and instead abduct him and whisk him away to West Pakistan was a travesty of political norms. The regime had little inclination to respond to the final proposal from the Awami League regarding a solution to the crisis. On 24 March, Bangabandhu instructed his negotiating team to inform the junta that the Bengali leadership would now opt for a confederal arrangement with the western part of the country. General S.G.M.M. Peerzada, on Yahya Khan’s team, assured Dr Kamal Hossain and his fellow negotiators that he would call them the following morning about the regime’s response to the proposal.
The response never came. What did come was the initiation of a murderous mission by the Pakistan army across Dhaka. In that initial phase of the military’s assault on Bengalis, no fewer than seven thousand people were killed, including academics and students at Dhaka University. Jagannath Hall came under attack as were the East Pakistan Rifles at Peelkhana and the police headquarters at Rajarbagh. The Central Shaheed Minar was blown to bits, to frighten Bengalis into desisting from any more acts of nationalism. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who would not be flown out to Karachi until the next day, watched the offices of The People newspaper burn from his suite in the Intercontinental. Arriving in Karachi on the evening of 26 March, a clearly ebullient Bhutto told the waiting newsmen, “Thank God, Pakistan has been saved.” Neither he nor anyone else in the civil-military bureaucracy in West Pakistan could foresee the damage that the army had inflicted on Pakistan’s future by the atrocities it had inaugurated in Dhaka.
Early on 26 March, as the soldiers kept up their operations of physically eliminating Bengalis, Roedad Khan, secretary of Pakistan’s ministry of information, walked into a room where Tikka Khan and other military officers were enjoying a hearty breakfast in the Dhaka cantonment. A beaming Roedad Khan let his emotions flow. “Yaar, imaantaaza ho giya (friends, faith has been revived).” Decades later, speaking on a Pakistani television channel on the anniversary of what Pakistan refers to as ‘saqoot-e-Dhaka’ or fall of Dhaka, Roedad Khan would come up with a wholly new version of how he saw 1971 from a distance of time. He had advised Yahya Khan, so he told his audience, to go for a political settlement to the crisis. No one has ever asked him about his state of exultation on 26 March 1971. Like so many others --- Bhutto, Yahya Khan, Rao Farman Ali, A.A.K Niazi, et cetera --- he has always pointed the finger of blame at others.
In 1971, the state of Pakistan, thanks to the men who had it in their grip, blundered from one mistake to another. In an inconceivable, not to say outrageous, adoption of the policy, Bangabandhu was placed on trial before a military tribunal in West Pakistan on charges of waging war against Pakistan. Here was a civilian, experienced politician who had led his party to untrammelled victory at the general election being tried by a military court headed by a brigadier. The trial was held on camera, which was a clever ploy on the part of the regime to prevent the world from hearing what Mujib had to say about the perfidy of the army in pouncing on the unarmed people of Bangladesh. And that was not all. A military officer in Comilla told a rather disbelieving Anthony Mascarenhas that the army would keep the Bengalis in slavery for as many as thirty years. Earlier, within days of the 1970 election, a general reassured his men in West Pakistan thus, “We will not let these black bastards rule over us.” And in his crude fashion, responding to reports of the rape of Bengali women committed by men under his command, General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi cheerfully stated, “Hum un ki nasl badal denge (we will bring about a change in their (Bengali) generations),” obviously through systematic impregnation of the women.
On a flight from Karachi to Lahore a good number of years ago, I met Brigadier A.R. Siddiqi, who had been chief of Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations in 1971. We had a friendly conversation on the flight, in the course of which he let me in on the conflict as he saw it building up in March and moving on beyond the military crackdown. He was planning to put it all down in a book he said he would write. The book did get written (East Pakistan: The Endgame: An Onlooker’s Journal 1969-1971). There is a good tranche of objectivity about it. It is one of the few books coming from Pakistan that I have enjoyed going through. Which reminds me of the time when I asked the veteran Pakistani journalist M.B. Naqvi, who was among the West Pakistani media people dispatched to occupied Bangladesh by the junta in April 1971 as part of its propaganda depicting a return of normal life in East Pakistan, if he meant to record his impressions in a book. My query had been a response to what he told me at the time, that he had seen the devastation all over East Pakistan and yet had written reports on the situation that were at variance with his experience. His sense of guilt was obvious. I am told he did write his memoirs, but I am not quite sure he was able to present in his book the truth of what he saw in Bangladesh in 1971.
Pakistan’s generals as also Bhutto and his People’s Party have never expressed any contrition over their role in the making of the crisis. Indeed, in his statements following the army crackdown in Bangladesh, Bhutto spoke of Bangabandhu’s appeal to him in March for them to work together, for otherwise, the army would destroy them both. Bhutto’s answer to Mujib, as the man himself, puts it: “I would rather be destroyed by the military than by history.” Ironically, it was the military that, having raised Bhutto to political prominence, destroyed him in the end.
Political myopia and a haughty army precluded a sight of the disaster that lay ahead for Pakistan in 1971. The genocide, the flight of refugees to India, the setting up of rightwing Bengali collaborationist forces, the ‘Crush India’ propaganda, the failure to comprehend the enormity of Bengali support for the Mukti Bahini, the inability of the regime to properly assess the appeal and reach of the Mujibnagar government --- all of these were to put an end to Pakistan in East Bengal only twenty-four years into the creation of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s ‘two-nation’ theory-based state.
Between March and December 1971, Pakistan’s army and its illiberal political classes failed to spot the danger coming. On 16 December, they simply did not know what hit them. Or why.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and a biographer