In a season when we recall the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state in 1971, it is important that the history of the final days of Pakistan be recounted. The generations born after the War of Liberation as well as those yet to come to life deserve a telling of the story as it happened 54 years ago. That the two wings of Pakistan were linked to each other through means that were bound not to endure was demonstrated only 24years into the creation of the country by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League in 1947.
And yet there is a caveat. Pakistan just might have survived as a state had its ruling classes embraced the idea early on that an underpinning of a modern state, even one based on the spurious idea of a religious community being redefined as a nation, was the degree of democracy offered to its people. That democratic element was simply not there in Pakistan.
Add to that the systematic discrimination, in both economic and political terms, that the Bengali citizens of Pakistan in East Bengal were constantly subjected to between 1947 and 1971. Making matters worse was the infiltration by the Pakistan army into politics, followed by the growth of a military-civil service nexus which removed any chance of political pluralism developing in the country.
Pakistan’s real chance of transforming itself into a modern democratic state came through the general elections, the very first in the country’s history, in December 1970. But political chicanery on the part of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the determination of the army to block any transfer of power to the electorally triumphant Awami League led by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman drove the final nail into the coffin that would soon lead to a burial of the state, in East Bengal, that Jinnah and his followers had cobbled into shape in the aftermath of the departure of the British colonial power in 1947.
The rest of the sequence is known. And yet it becomes necessary to recall the collapse of the Pakistan state in Bangladesh through briefly narrating the turn of events leading up to the surrender of the Pakistan army at the Race Course in Dhaka on December 16, 1971.
Increasingly weakened by the activities of the Mukti Bahini in the months prior to the surrender, the Yahya Khan junta was by November 1971 completely at sea on how to roll back the oncoming disaster. Its rash decision to launch airstrikes on Indian bases in the western sector on December 3 -- the Indians had judiciously had their air force jets removed from those bases in anticipation of such an attack -- was its last desperate measure of asserting itself.
From December 3 on, Pakistan’s forces speedily began to lose ground both in the west and in the east. But General Yahya Khan did not see the writing on the wall. On the same day, he tried to pull off a stunt, one aimed at convincing people that he was finally ready to have a civilian government take charge, of course under his continued presidency.
He appointed Nurul Amin, the Bengali chief of the Pakistan Democratic Party (PDP) supportive of the army action in Bangladesh launched in March of the year, as Pakistan’s PM. Amin was to share power with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was named deputy PM and foreign minister. Bhutto, who had defended Pakistan as foreign minister in the regime of Ayub Khan at the UN Security Council in September 1965, was sent off to do the same job at the UN even as Indian forces and Bangladesh’s Mukti Bahini advanced rapidly in the villages, towns, and cities of the occupied land, liberating them from Pakistani occupation.
In Dhaka and elsewhere, Pakistan’s army began to lose battles in quick succession. That did not prevent General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, the commander of Pakistan’s forces, from boasting to western journalists based in Dhaka that the Indians would occupy the city over his dead body. His position turned untenable with the increasing frequency of Indian air strikes.
At the UN Security Council, one resolution after another advocating a ceasefire came to naught. The Soviet Union played a creditable role through applying its right of veto, obviously making it clear that it was not willing to have the war come to an end until Bangladesh stood fully liberated. Bhutto indulged in theatrics, at one point tearing up a sheaf of papers he said was a copy of a ceasefire proposal before storming out of the hall. A pensive George W Bush quietly watched Bhutto’s hysterical action.
By December 16, as the Pakistan army prepared to throw in the towel in Bangladesh, Yahya Khan engaged in his make-believe world --- that everything was under control. On that very day, officials of the Pakistan government distributed documents regarding the new constitution the regime planned for Pakistan among the foreign journalists gathered at a five-star hotel in Rawalpindi. As Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, later Pakistan’s foreign minister, relates in his book, Neither A Hawk Nor A Dove, within moments the officials came back to request the journalists earnestly to return the constitution-related documents they had been handed earlier.
In Dhaka, through the services of the UN agencies in a dying East Pakistan, the Intercontinental Hotel was converted into a neutral zone where Governor Malek, his ministers and civil servants who had been brought into the province from (West) Pakistan following the launch of the genocide in March were provided with safety guarantees under international law. In the evening on December 16, in what would be the remainder of Pakistan, state television telecast images of the surrender in Dhaka by Niazi and the troops under his command.
Soon, however, the authorities clamped a ban on such images being shown, but by that time public fury had taken over the streets in various Pakistani cities. In the nine months of the Bangladesh war, Pakistanis had repeatedly been misled by the junta into believing that “East Pakistan” was under control and that the “secessionists” had been defeated. The surrender in Dhaka came as a rude shock to them.
Yahya Khan was forced to step down and hand over the presidency to Bhutto on December 20. Nurul Amin was appointed VP under Bhutto. On December 22, Mujib was freed from solitary confinement in Mianwali jail and placed under house arrest at a guest house outside Rawalpindi. On the same day, the leaders of the Mujibnagar government arrived in Dhaka from Calcutta and immediately took charge of the administration of Bangladesh. Bhutto held two rounds of talks with Mujib in Pakistan but was compelled to order his release on January 8, 1972. Once the aircraft taking Bangladesh’s founder to freedom took off from Chaklala airport in Rawalpindi, Bhutto told journalists: “The bird has flown.”
Thus the final days of Pakistan in Bangladesh. Thus history as it was forged in December 1971.
