Features
Birth of Bangladesh
By Jayantha Somasundaram
“My greatest strength is the love for my people,
My greatest weakness is that I love them too much.”
– Sheikh Mujibur Rahman
On December 16, 1971, Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, Pakistan’s Eastern Commander, surrendered to India’s Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, bringing to an end the war that completed the bifurcation of Pakistan, in order to create the new state of Bangladesh. This war of independence had been a brutally bitter conflict that had lasted almost a year.
When dominion status was granted in August 1947, Pakistan was made up of two enclaves, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. Muslim-majority East Bengal made up East Pakistan while the other Muslim-majority areas in the west comprised West Pakistan. In 1971 East Pakistan with 73 million had a larger population than West Pakistan which had 57 million.
At the end of over a decade of military rule in Pakistan, General Yahya Khan held parliamentary elections in December 1970. The poll resulted in the Awami League securing nearly all the seats in East Pakistan. The All Pakistan Awami (People’s) League was founded in 1949 by Bengali nationalists as a counter to the Muslim League which sought centralisation of political power and the imposition of Urdu as the national language. The Awami League had gone to the election on a Six Point Plan to gain Bengali control of everything except defence and foreign affairs.
In response, Mujibur Rahman on March 7, 1971 at a public rally in Dacca, attended by two million Bengalis, called for civil disobedience, armed resistance and Bengali independence. The result was a civil disobedience campaign which took the form of a general strike, non-payment of taxes, closure of schools and courts; and for the next three weeks East Bengal was a de facto independent state ruled by the Awami League.
Sahabzada Lieutenant General Yaqub Ali Khan was commander of the Pakistan Army’s Eastern Command in Dacca and Governor of East Pakistan. He opposed the use of military force to settle the Bengali issue and when ordered to do so, he refused and resigned his position. He was replaced by Lieutenant General Tikka Khan. His use of force led to criticism even in West Pakistan and in August he was recalled.
Independence declared
On March 25 Mujibur declared Bangladesh independent. That night the West Pakistani armed forces attacked the police barracks at Rajarbagh and the East Pakistan Rifles, a 15,000 strong paramilitary force based in Dacca. Debasish Roy Chowdhury in The Asia Times (23/6/05) claims that, “The military now decided enough was enough. At a meeting of the military top brass, Yahya declared: Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.” Islamabad responded with Operation Searchlight on 26, a lightning military move aimed at taking all major Eastern cities. It included the arrest of Sheikh Mujibur who was thereafter imprisoned in Karachi in the West.
In addition, Islamabad banned the Awami League and arrested its leaders. The Awami League described it as genocide, targeting in particular their leadership and supporters as well as Bengali intellectuals and the destruction of their economy.
The New York Times
reported on March 30, “In two days and nights of shelling by the Pakistan Army perhaps seven thousand Bengalis died in Dacca alone. The Army which attacked without warning with American-supplied M24 Chaffee tanks destroyed large parts of the City.” A subsequent report published in the Times on April 14 said, “The Central Government forces killed East PakistanArmy officers and soldiers who were unable to break out and join the guerrillas when the Army offensive began on 25th March.”
Responding to the claim that Ceylon provided refuelling facilities for Pakistani military planes carrying troops to the East to suppress the uprising, Leslie Goonewardena, Minister of Communications stated, “in March 1971 sixteen east-bound and fifteen west-bound Pakistan Air Force planes touched down at the Bandaranaike International Airport.”
Provisional Government established
The Provisional Government of Bangladesh was established on April 17 when the 469 Bengali parliamentarians elected in December 1970, to the National and Provincial assemblies, formed the Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh and drew up an interim constitution. In the absence of Mujibur, Syed Nazrul Islam was appointed Acting President. In the months that followed it is alleged that anything up to three million Bengalis were killed, including students, intellectuals, politicians and Hindus in what is referred to as the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide. The post war Hamoodur Rahman Commission appointed by Islamabad concluded that there were only 26,000 civilian deaths.
Anthony Mascarenhas was a Karachi-based reporter who was one of eight Pakistani journalists given a tour of the East by the Government. Appalled by what he learnt he fled to London with his family and broke his story in an article published in The Sunday Times on June 13. Under the headline ‘Genocide’ it began with: “Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.”
“…I have heard the screams of men bludgeoned to death in the compound of the Circuit House (civil administrative headquarters) in Comilla. I have seen truckloads of other human targets and those who had the humanity to try to help them hauled off ‘for disposal’ under the cover of darkness and curfew…I have witnessed the brutality of ‘kill and burn missions’ as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages. I have seen whole villages devastated by ‘punitive action’. And in the officer’s mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honourable men proudly chewed over the day’s kill. ‘How many did you get?’ The answers are seared in my memory.”
Ten years ago on the anniversary of these events the BBC said: “There is little doubt that Mascarenhas’ reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role….In the first of many notorious war crimes, soldiers attacked Dhaka University, lining up and executing students and professors….Their campaign of terror then moved into the countryside, where they battled local troops who had mutinied.”
In an article titled ‘Pakistan: The Ravaging of Golden Bengal’ on August 2, Time reported that “In Dacca, where soldiers set sections of the Old City ablaze with flamethrowers and then machine-gunned thousands as they tried to escape the cordon of fire, nearly 25 blocks have been bulldozed clear, leaving open areas set incongruously amid jam-packed slums.” It quoted a senior US official as saying, “It is the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland.”
Archer Blood, US Consul-General in Dacca criticised Washington for supporting Islamabad, in an official cable subsequently known as the Blood Telegram. “Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy,” the telegram said. “Our government has failed to denounce atrocities….Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy.”
By April 10, the West Pakistani Army had control of Dacca and Operation Searchlight, and the military control of all of Bangladesh by Pakistan was successfully completed in less than two months. In the civil war that ensued 300,000 Bengalis died. And by August there were seven million Bangladeshi refugees in India.
(To be continued)