On the banks of the Karnaphuli River, 48km from Chittagong, a Bangali chemical engineer, Kaiser Siddiqi (not his real name), was doing his best to keep the Karnaphuli Rayon Mill operating in the middle of a war.
With a staff of various ethnicities, he concentrated on keeping everybody safe, and the mill spinning, despite the unrest sweeping the country.
The Karnaphuli industrial site at Chandraghona was crucially important to West Pakistan. The nearby paper mill was one of the largest in Asia at the time. Securing the mills was a tactical priority for Pakistan’s military rulers.
From early October through the end of November, the Mukti Bahini was operating at a greater intensity and with greater success than before. Attacks on infrastructure, rail and road communications, industrial installations and gas pipelines, coupled with the growing reach of the provisional government’s parallel administration, slowly unravelled the Pakistani administration’s grip on the province.
So it was that in mid-November, that Kaiser – caught in the turbulent eddies created by the Pakistani military – prepared to abandon the West Pakistan-owned mill.
“You have daughters, sir. You have to get out until things calm down,” Chowdhury, one of his staff members said. Kaiser was taken aback by the panic in his voice.
He replied: “Why? What has happened? Where would we go?”
Kaiser admits to me in our interview: “The truth is, I was naive. I knew what was happening and I knew we were in danger. But I focused on my work and prayed for the best. I had not really planned for the worst.”
Strained looks and hushed exchanges are common during wartime, especially in a place like Chandraghona where members of both camps have to live and work side by side. But the urgency in Chowdhury’s voice was different that day.
“We cross the river, sir. I have a relative in a village on the far bank. He has a large house, owns a bit of land and enjoys the respect and loyalty of his neighbours. You will be safe.”
In a few days, Kaiser, his family, and another family of Bangali officers, were bundled into a waiting boat and moved beyond the threshold of imminent danger. They would not likely be pursued in the interior by the Pakistani forces, they thought. Open battles, like that fought at Rangamati-Mahalchari Waterway in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in April, were now being avoided by the Pakistan military as Mukti Bahini guerilla tactics became more effective. Chittagong, with its hilly terrain and myriad nationalities, kept them on the back foot.
Chowdhury’s relative in the village was a wise and thoughtful host. “The women will be safe here, scattered among my family members and neighbours. But the men cannot be found here. If the military sends out a search party and they find you, obvious city dwellers, they will assume you are Mukti Bahini and you will summarily be shot.”
Kaiser and the other men from the Chandraghona mill set off on a day-long trek to avoid avoid army trackers or informants sent to find them.
“We will walk through the village into the countryside beyond, and will stay there until nightfall. You must keep up and keep moving. Our lives depend on it,” Chowdhury said.
The little party trekked for hours, exchanging glances and smiles with people in the villages and wilderness they passed through.
Jum people, Bangali people and people of multiple ethnicities nodded at and greeted the little party.
Kaiser tells me: “People of many backgrounds were quietly supporting our cause. Whether by offering a nod of solidarity, or sharing in the comradeship of conspiratorial silence or offering a drink or food as we made our way to nowhere in particular, all of the seemed to be saying to us: ‘We are in your corner, you are not alone, victory is ours’.”
Accounts of the Liberation War in Chittagong miss that, despite the Chakma king Tridev Roy’s decision to opt for Pakistani citizenship after independence, his mother the Rajmata Benita Roy led Bangladesh’s delegation in the diplomatic effort to gain recognition for Bangladesh in the United Nations.
It is important to also remember Bir Bikram Euke Ching Marma, freedom fighter Karuna Mohan Chakma and martyred freedom fighter Khagendra Nath Chakma. They are just a few of the many members of the Jum people and other communities who supported, fought and died for independence in 1971. Their names and the memory of their valour must not be forgotten.
Kaiser says he was never entirely sure of Chowdhury’s ethnicity. The two communicated in Bangla and English, but Kaiser was aware that members of the Bandarban Chowdhury family did live in the vicinity.
The daily treks from sun-up to nightfall continued for over a week. As it turned out, no military patrols had been sent in search of the mill staff. Kaiser crossed back across the river and found his house ransacked and learned that a young colleague who stayed behind had been murdered by the Pakistani forces.
It was near the end of November and Mukti Bahini engagements had intensified and were being met with desperate Pakistani efforts at rollback. The international press had by now given the world an idea of the carnage wrought by the Pakistan military. Simon Dring, Colin Smith, Peter Kann, Peter Hazelhurst and Anthony Mascarenhas had sent off their seminal dispatches. Bangladesh’s struggle for independence found refuge in the hearts and minds of people everywhere.
So when Kaiser told two British doctors, who he had befriended when he first arrived in Chandraghona, that he had to get his family out of Chittagong and closer to family in Dhaka, they immediately volunteered to help. The doctors, part of the medical staff at a missionary hospital, organised transportation from the mill to the airport. Kaiser put his wife and two daughters on a flight to Dhaka and then returned to work.
“I was not afraid,” Kaiser says, knowing that these were dangerous times: “And I was very fortunate.”
Everywhere Kaiser turned, he said, people seemed to want to help. His British manager, understanding lives might be in the balance, gave him leave for Eid, no questions asked. Kaiser’s British friends at the missionary hospital helped buy him an airline ticket and arranged to get him to the airport.
Two days after Eid, the intensely fought Battle of Hili began. The battle for control of Bogra and its cantonment, the seat of the military’s armoured divisions, augured ill for the occupied forces and set off a whirlwind of reprisal killings.
Late in November, Kaiser, whose daughters had been born in the United States, was given word that the girls and their guardians were eligible for evacuation. The US embassy provided a transport for the family and the young family took leave of their relatives and headed for the Intercontinental Hotel, which had been transformed into a halfway house for expatriates leaving the war zone.
The following day, as evacuees boarded buses for the airport, Kaiser was stopped by a disgruntled Pakistani soldier: “Where do you think you are going? This bus is for foreigners only!”
“You, come with me. We have some questions for you,” he barked.
Kaiser tells me: “We were winning the war. There was word that India was planning something big. This soldier was watching former international allies pack up and leave, and he was not happy.”
He continues: “I knew if they took me for questioning, I would not return.”
In this most personal of theatres of war – the battle of the civilian to resist the depredations of unlawfully constituted authority – survival and dignity are forms of victory, and he feared that the angry soldiers would win.
An American diplomat who was an old acquaintance chanced upon the scene and intervened, probably saving Kaiser’s life.
“Don’t worry, there is no hanky panky here. I know him. He is with me. Carry on,” the American diplomat said with some authority.
An hour later, the family was sitting in the metal belly of C-3 military aircraft en route to Kolkata.
In Kolkata, where evacuees were being processed, Kaiser’s aquiline nose and fair skin caused more trouble, this time from the other side. A Bangali case officer was convinced that Kaiser was an Urdu-speaker hitching a ride out of the war zone.
“Do you not speak Bangla? Do I sound like a non-native speaker?” Kaiser asked him in Bangla.
He was put on the telephone and spoke to a succession of officials. Finally, a high official in the Kolkata police told the case officers to let him go.
A week later, the young family landed in Manila after a brief stop in Singapore, where Kaiser was reunited with a brother-in-law, himself on the list of intellectuals that the Pakistan military intended to murder. His brother-in-law had got word early from an insider and flew out with his wife and infant daughter in August, six days before the army came for him.
Kaiser pauses, and says: “God was with me. But so were a lot of people.”
Victory does not lie on the field of battle, but in the hearts and minds of women and men. While we rightly remember December 16, 1971 as the day the enemy surrendered, our victory was won long before that. Slowly the cost of this hard-won victory revealed itself. Many had perished. Some had disappeared. But none was lost in vain.
In early 1972, together with thousands of others, Kaiser and his family returned to a free country.
