1971: confessions

by Shahzad Chaudhry

December 16 comes every year. Then why was it so special this time around? Is it Abdul Quader Mollah or, the high handedness of a government in power in Bangladesh that decided to use the moment to incite passion and shape an environment that will probably extend its own term or stay at the helm were elections to be held regardless. Welcome to the politics of South Asia.

It was March 1971, and Yahya Khan was visiting Dacca to confer with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. I, from the senior class in a public school, was glancing through the newspapers of the day set up on inclined tables for common reading, as is the way in any public library. They appropriately carried Yahya’s visit as the lead story, and had individual snaps of both Yahya and Mujib.

Glancing through the same news with me was a twelve-year old Bengali boy, also a student, but from the junior most class that year. Seeing his small frame trying to reach out and read the story, I remember making a teasing light remark on Mujib, perhaps touching his picture in the process, as any elder would playfully needle a young in the family.

Suddenly, all of this twelve years small frame – a thousand miles away from home, in a strange land, before a senior school-fellow twice his size – lunged at the newspaper and with his nails defiled Yahya’s photograph. I looked at him in clear shock and only saw rage in those young eyes. I knew it then that there was no turning away from a path the country had chosen for itself. We had playfully needled the East Pakistanis for too long without ever knowing when the threshold had been crossed.

A few months later, our East Pakistani colleagues of the last six years had begun to keep away. There were reports of them, our East Pakistani friends, some deep and close, now congregating separately in groups. In my school ‘house’ we were twelve from the same class, with one from East Pakistan, a very dear friend, who subsequent rose spectacularly in Bangladesh to be at its helm during the most critical years.

Given the open rebellion then which was being reported daily in the papers, and the perceptions built around heinous stories that such reports carried, the eleven West Pakistanis decided to teach a lesson to this rebel in our lair.

One afternoon under an insidious plan , we gathered in the Radio Room, a seniors-only facility and daily haunt, awaiting our wayward East Pakistani colleague. As he entered the room all eleven of us rose together in a show of united strength, while a self-appointed patriot from among us stepped forward and launched a full force slap on the un-expecting Bengali colleague. The sound, which was sharp and carried the full force of the patriot’s bulky frame, still resonates in my shameful recall of that afternoon.

Our East Pakistani ‘brother’ was bewildered, dazed and simply struck by the viciousness of it all. He gathered himself, and without as much as a faltering step walked staid and poised to his usual place where he sat each day. In that moment, we lost our innocence and he his hope. That is the usual consequence when you resort to ‘force’.

Still a few months further down, as autumn approached, we got inducted into the air force academy minus our East Pakistani colleagues who were all placed together in a collective facility within the college. Not all was as innocent as may seem, though. There, in that group were also people – schoolboys – who had requested immediate repatriation for they wanted to fight along with their countrymen against the West Pakistani forces. Some of them did, when they finally reached back.

A couple were known to incite hatred against West Pakistan and led their group discussions conveying to their colleagues what they had either been told, or had learnt from other East Pakistanis around; most likely from the air force base nearby – many of them air force aces with inimitable records. The irony of it all was obvious as was the tragedy.

When in 1968, President Ayub Khan celebrated his widely propagated ‘decade of development’, most of it centred around West Pakistan. If at all a confirmation was needed of the east’s neglect, this was it. It is unfortunate but true that West Pakistan’s macho culture thought little of the puny Bengali, deliberately avoiding note of his mental agility. He was derided and marginalised despite the Bengali having been at the heart of Pakistan’s independence movement. The list of such deliberate neglect is long and unpardonable. What came about then in the shape of a liberation movement was an evolutionary response of Pakistan’s eastern wing to the western wing’s misplaced appropriation of power and exclusive control over the state apparatus.

The final act in the coming apart of the two wings came via Pakistan’s most acclaimed and freest elections of 1970. Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League won majority seats in the nation-wide polls but was refused power on one pretext or another. Political manipulation of crass morbidity in West Pakistan, by West Pakistani politicians, both Yahya and Bhutto among them, was the final nail in the coffin. Pakistan was “cut to size” – Indira Gandhi’s words – and Bangladesh was created. We wept, openly and profusely.

It all began in 1965. When the war ended between India and Pakistan, a post-war analysis chastened India to what could have been. Pakistan neither had enough force in its eastern wing, nor did it use it as a platform to squeeze India enough on two fronts. India already had fought a war with China in 1962, and lost it badly. It understood the precariousness of it all and could have easily been squeezed from all three sides.

A Chinese ambassador to India had said as much to the Indians in 1950s. India decided to neutralise one front. That is when Sheikh Mujib enunciated his six points. The roots of it all were deeper and older in time, but India used them to serve its own purpose in 1966. The rest is history, now recounted by many, each from their own perspective.

The long and short of it all is that West Pakistan and its leadership slept through as its eastern half was being slowly amputated. What happened in December 1971 was only the coup de grace that will keep the pain alive. Hope had already evaporated a long time back.

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal of the Pakistan Air Force and served as its deputy chief of staff.

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com