Publish : 02 Dec 2021, 01:08 AMUpdate : 02 Dec 2021, 01:08 AM
December comes in a mix of brilliance and gloom. It is at once cheerful laughter and lugubrious silence. It shines a light on dreams. It is remembrance of nightmares long past.
And, yes, there are the other Decembers I remember. On a December day in 1969, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman enlightened us in no small measure. East Pakistan, he informed us and the world, would henceforth be Bangladesh. It gladdened the heart in all of us.
A year later, on a cold December day, I cycled home, my right hand holding a huge portrait of Bangabandhu. It was the day after the general election on December 7, a vote which anointed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the undisputed leader of the Bengali nation and by far the most powerful politician in all of Pakistan. Middle-aged and elderly men stopped me at various points along the way, to have a glimpse of the man who would soon be Pakistan’s first elected prime minister.
But that was not to be. And that was why there needed to be one more December a year later. How do I recall, at this distance of a half century, December as it was in 1971?
I was a teenager, a proud Bengali, waiting with 75 million of my compatriots for the dawn of liberation to break through the winter mist. The detonation of bombs anywhere in Dhaka was cause for joy, for it was a harbinger of freedom. We counted the days.
And then came December 3, when Yahya Khan made that suicidal attack on Indian air force bases in the western theatre of war. There were no Indian fighter jets there, for defense strategy had earlier seen to it that they were taken to safer ground.
I tuned in to the small transistor that was among the family’s more prized possessions and learned that Indira Gandhi was on her way back to Delhi from Calcutta to shape her response to the generals in Rawalpindi.
It was a decisive moment in history we lived through. As the war raged on, leaflets from General SHFJ Manekshaw were dropped from Indian planes sailing comfortably in the skies over Dhaka. Pakistan’s fighter jets had been destroyed on the ground, putting paid to General Niazi’s chest-thumping boast that the Indians would take Dhaka over his dead body. When the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini marched into Dhaka, Niazi was very much alive, though not kicking.
Those leaflets had a stark yet polite warning for Pakistan’s forces: Surrender and you will be treated according to internationally-recognized rules of war. One of those leaflets, in Bengali, dropped like a feather into the courtyard of our Malibagh home.
I was happy. So was everyone else who had come by the leaflets or heard of them. And yet there was the fear of a protracted battle for Dhaka. What if Niazi’s men did not capitulate? My maternal uncle convinced my parents that he and I ought to go to my Nanabari and wait out the outcome.
On December 14, we went out, walking all the way to where we now have the House Building Corporation adjacent to Baitul Mukarram mosque. Almost everyone was trying to get out of Dhaka, but how would they do that?
The Indian soldiers and the Mukti Bahini were on their way to Dhaka, where Pakistan’s forces were ensconced. That was the reality. The bigger reality was an absence of transport to ferry my uncle and me and all those others out of the city. We trudged back home, weary, hungry, and worried about the immediate future. Away at Governor’s House, Niazi wept as an avuncular AM Malek consoled him. A Bengali waiter, howled out of the room, cheerfully told his co-workers, “The sahibs are crying inside.”
Away in Rawalpindi, General Yahya Khan, oblivious to the rapidly changing situation in occupied Bangladesh, went on pretending that politics was normal. On the very day that India, subsequent to the Pakistani attack on its bases in the west, entered the war, he named Nurul Amin as Pakistan’s prime minister.
And then he told ZA Bhutto that he was the new deputy prime minister and foreign minister, before packing him off to argue Pakistan’s case at the UN Security Council. It was theatrics Bhutto would employ in New York, tearing up a piece of paper he told everyone was a resolution calling for a ceasefire. His country called him, he said, before stalking out of the chamber.
We worried about Bangabandhu as Bangladesh appeared to take increasingly larger political and geographical dimensions. We had not heard of him since August, when the junta announced in a terse statement that he would be tried in camera by a military tribunal on charges of waging war against Pakistan.
Had he been executed after that sham of a trial? And if he were alive, would Yahya Khan and his fellow generals let him live once Bangladesh, as increasingly appeared to be the case, became a free country? And where was Kamal Hossain, his constitutional advisor who too, in April, had been flown to West Pakistan? Not until the end of the war would we know that Bangabandhu had been held in Mianwali and Kamal Hossain was confined in a Haripur prison.
And the war went on. Even as we waited for that moment of deliverance from oppression, we simply had no idea that many of our foremost achievers, men and women forming the intellectual structure of Bengali society, were being picked up by the goon squad history knows as al-Badr and then picked off, in medieval fashion.
The military had thrown a curfew blanket all over the city and in that cover, our doctors, journalists, and academics were abducted. Their fate would not be known till two days after liberation. The tears of their wives and children would draw us to Rayer Bazaar, to be witness to one of the most horrific of crimes ever committed in war. Mutilated beyond recognition, those brilliant souls lay in eternal silence.
But in the late afternoon of December 16, as Niazi, flanked by General Jagjit Singh Aurora and Major A T M Haider, was marched to the Race Course, to affix his signature to the instrument of surrender, we did not know of that final atrocity. And then we knew. We knew too that we had waded through rivers of blood to arrive at liberty.
Abdul Jabbar sang: “Hajar bochhor pore abar eshechhi phire / Bangla’r buuke achhi dnarhiye.”Joy Bangla was in the air. Life had meaning.
Joy Bangla was in the air
December comes in a mix of brilliance and gloom. It is at once cheerful laughter and lugubrious silence. It shines a light on dreams. It is remembrance of nightmares long past.
And, yes, there are the other Decembers I remember. On a December day in 1969, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman enlightened us in no small measure. East Pakistan, he informed us and the world, would henceforth be Bangladesh. It gladdened the heart in all of us.
A year later, on a cold December day, I cycled home, my right hand holding a huge portrait of Bangabandhu. It was the day after the general election on December 7, a vote which anointed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the undisputed leader of the Bengali nation and by far the most powerful politician in all of Pakistan. Middle-aged and elderly men stopped me at various points along the way, to have a glimpse of the man who would soon be Pakistan’s first elected prime minister.
But that was not to be. And that was why there needed to be one more December a year later. How do I recall, at this distance of a half century, December as it was in 1971?
I was a teenager, a proud Bengali, waiting with 75 million of my compatriots for the dawn of liberation to break through the winter mist. The detonation of bombs anywhere in Dhaka was cause for joy, for it was a harbinger of freedom. We counted the days.
And then came December 3, when Yahya Khan made that suicidal attack on Indian air force bases in the western theatre of war. There were no Indian fighter jets there, for defense strategy had earlier seen to it that they were taken to safer ground.
I tuned in to the small transistor that was among the family’s more prized possessions and learned that Indira Gandhi was on her way back to Delhi from Calcutta to shape her response to the generals in Rawalpindi.
It was a decisive moment in history we lived through. As the war raged on, leaflets from General SHFJ Manekshaw were dropped from Indian planes sailing comfortably in the skies over Dhaka. Pakistan’s fighter jets had been destroyed on the ground, putting paid to General Niazi’s chest-thumping boast that the Indians would take Dhaka over his dead body. When the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini marched into Dhaka, Niazi was very much alive, though not kicking.
Those leaflets had a stark yet polite warning for Pakistan’s forces: Surrender and you will be treated according to internationally-recognized rules of war. One of those leaflets, in Bengali, dropped like a feather into the courtyard of our Malibagh home.
I was happy. So was everyone else who had come by the leaflets or heard of them. And yet there was the fear of a protracted battle for Dhaka. What if Niazi’s men did not capitulate? My maternal uncle convinced my parents that he and I ought to go to my Nanabari and wait out the outcome.
On December 14, we went out, walking all the way to where we now have the House Building Corporation adjacent to Baitul Mukarram mosque. Almost everyone was trying to get out of Dhaka, but how would they do that?
The Indian soldiers and the Mukti Bahini were on their way to Dhaka, where Pakistan’s forces were ensconced. That was the reality. The bigger reality was an absence of transport to ferry my uncle and me and all those others out of the city. We trudged back home, weary, hungry, and worried about the immediate future. Away at Governor’s House, Niazi wept as an avuncular AM Malek consoled him. A Bengali waiter, howled out of the room, cheerfully told his co-workers, “The sahibs are crying inside.”
Away in Rawalpindi, General Yahya Khan, oblivious to the rapidly changing situation in occupied Bangladesh, went on pretending that politics was normal. On the very day that India, subsequent to the Pakistani attack on its bases in the west, entered the war, he named Nurul Amin as Pakistan’s prime minister.
And then he told ZA Bhutto that he was the new deputy prime minister and foreign minister, before packing him off to argue Pakistan’s case at the UN Security Council. It was theatrics Bhutto would employ in New York, tearing up a piece of paper he told everyone was a resolution calling for a ceasefire. His country called him, he said, before stalking out of the chamber.
We worried about Bangabandhu as Bangladesh appeared to take increasingly larger political and geographical dimensions. We had not heard of him since August, when the junta announced in a terse statement that he would be tried in camera by a military tribunal on charges of waging war against Pakistan.
Had he been executed after that sham of a trial? And if he were alive, would Yahya Khan and his fellow generals let him live once Bangladesh, as increasingly appeared to be the case, became a free country? And where was Kamal Hossain, his constitutional advisor who too, in April, had been flown to West Pakistan? Not until the end of the war would we know that Bangabandhu had been held in Mianwali and Kamal Hossain was confined in a Haripur prison.
And the war went on. Even as we waited for that moment of deliverance from oppression, we simply had no idea that many of our foremost achievers, men and women forming the intellectual structure of Bengali society, were being picked up by the goon squad history knows as al-Badr and then picked off, in medieval fashion.
The military had thrown a curfew blanket all over the city and in that cover, our doctors, journalists, and academics were abducted. Their fate would not be known till two days after liberation. The tears of their wives and children would draw us to Rayer Bazaar, to be witness to one of the most horrific of crimes ever committed in war. Mutilated beyond recognition, those brilliant souls lay in eternal silence.
But in the late afternoon of December 16, as Niazi, flanked by General Jagjit Singh Aurora and Major A T M Haider, was marched to the Race Course, to affix his signature to the instrument of surrender, we did not know of that final atrocity. And then we knew. We knew too that we had waded through rivers of blood to arrive at liberty.
Abdul Jabbar sang: “Hajar bochhor pore abar eshechhi phire / Bangla’r buuke achhi dnarhiye.” Joy Bangla was in the air. Life had meaning.
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