Remembering 1971
War in East Pakistan was an intra-state conflict that has once again become familiar in Pakistan: unequal development.
We continue to hurt Bangladesh by writing false textbooks on how we lost it.
The dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh are mourned here as routine every December 16, during which most of the blame for what happened, is placed on external factors. The habit is well formed because in 2011, too, we are externalising our essentially intra-state conflict and blaming it on others. The two-nation theory, which should have died with East Pakistan, is alive and well and is taking revenge on non-Muslim Pakistanis through the Blasphemy Law. The common denominator in the military defeats suffered by Pakistan, is dominance of the Pakistan Army and a succession of martial laws. This dominance still continues. Therefore, the crisis of the state continues.
The first blunder in East Pakistan was the failure to understand Bengali nationalism, which was language-based, and impose Urdu on the province using the ‘national language’ as the basis of ‘separation’ from India. Hassan Zaheer’s book The Separation of East Pakistan (OUP 1994) notes that the All India Muslim League had run into trouble in 1937, when it proposed Urdu as the national language of the league. It was opposed by the Bengali Muslim Leaguers who got Jinnah to water down the resolution to read that Urdu should be encouraged in areas where it was spoken. The same kind of mistake was made in Sindh, where, too, nationalism was language-based and we have the issue of Sindhi nationalism even today.
Military rule and the strategy of defence it created for East Pakistan was deeply flawed. An army officer has written a book titled The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (OUP 2002), which touches upon some very important issues. The author, Major-General (retd) Hakeem Arshad Qureshi, commanded the SSG (commandos) and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71, was a POW in India and later commanded Pakistan Rangers as director-general before retiring in 1990. He criticises the military’s strategy that the defence of West Pakistan should lie in West Pakistan: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan, no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not sympathetic given long years of dissent in the eastern wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
The war in East Pakistan was an intra-state conflict that has once again become familiar in Pakistan: unequal development. That no lesson has been learned is proved by the Baloch insurgency, which Pakistan blames on India just as it did in 1970. The use of religion to paper over reality continues in Pakistan. Hassan Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.”
Pakistan has taken on America today because of its flawed view of India as an eternal enemy. Without a strategy that could be understood and supported by the world, Pakistan wants Afghanistan left open to a repetition of what it did there after the exit of Soviet Union in 1991. Its argument is that no solution in Afghanistan is possible without its consent, but it has no credible policy that the neighbours of Afghanistan could accept as viable: it has no influence on the Afghan Taliban of Mullah Omar; it negotiates from a position of weakness with its own Taliban.
Major-General (retd) Qureshi says national strategy is conceived by the civilian mind based on the country’s resource base. When the state will go to war is never a determination made by the army. As a small state situated next to a big neighbour, Pakistan must devote its energy to becoming economically strong. Another defeat is looming because of the unlearnt lessons from the loss of East Pakistan. We continue to hurt Bangladesh by writing false textbooks on how we lost it. In 2011, Pakistan is all set for an implosion since the world is gradually abandoning it even at the risk of letting al Qaeda get at our nuclear weapons.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 16th, 2011.
Quest for liberty: Celebrations at Comilla in Bangladesh after the town was freed by Indian forces. Photo: The Hindu Photo Library
Was there an Indian plot to break up Pakistan in 1971?
Following the victory of the Awami League, India hoped relations with a new democratic Pakistan would improve. But the Pakistani army's brutal crackdown on March 25 changed everything.
The sweeping victory of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman's Awami League in the 1970 Pakistani elections was warmly received in India. The Bengalis of East Pakistan had always favoured a more cooperative approach in relations with India. New Delhi hoped for a progressive improvement in bilateral relations with a new democratic Pakistan, in which the eastern wing had its rightful representation. However, some observers questioned the possibility of bridging the vast political divide between the two wings of Pakistan. They felt that the eastern wing was likely to secede.
Secession, objectives
In December, High Commissioner B.K. Acharya expressed a view that was widely accepted in New Delhi. He recognised the possibility of secession but argued that majority control of the Central Pakistan Government by the East Pakistanis offered the only hope of achieving India's policy objectives towards Pakistan and overcoming the stonewall resistance of West Pakistan against better ties. Moreover, a secessionist East Bengal might demand integration with West Bengal and a United Bengal and might pass under the control of pro-Chinese Marxists. Such developments would further complicate India's defence and strategic problems. Foreign Secretary T.N. Kaul agreed that India should do nothing to encourage the separation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan but he added that it did not lie in India's hands to stop it. Much would depend on the rulers of Pakistan and the realisation by West Pakistan of the need to come to an equitable arrangement with East Pakistan.
Indian officials reviewed the situation in early January. MEA Secretary S.K. Banerjee and Acharya observed that the question of a secessionist movement would arise only if the eastern wing failed to secure its six-point autonomy demand through constitutional means. Acharya observed that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples' Party, might accept the autonomy demand if he himself could be all-powerful in the western wing, or if each wing was allowed to go its own way. However, a basic point of disagreement was in regard to powers of taxation. The army would not accept an arrangement under which it would have to depend upon subventions from the provinces for its funding.
R.N. Kao, the head of India's Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), said that he had received information that Mujib himself considered secession to be a definite possibility and was preparing for such an eventuality. Kao's assessment was that Mujib's hands were tied. He would either have to adopt an unyielding stand on the six-point demand or be swept aside by popular opinion. He would go through the motions of seeking implementation of the demand through constitutional means but a secessionist movement was a definite possibility. In this case, India could expect appeals for assistance in a variety of fields, including arms, money and military training. He urged that India should position itself to offer the assistance that might be requested.
What the records show
The records show that New Delhi had no prior intention of dismembering Pakistan. However, events moved rapidly in East Pakistan. At the end of January 1971, RAW confirmed that the Awami League leadership was not very optimistic about the outcome of the negotiations on a new constitution and was preparing to launch a mass movement for an independent Bangladesh if the talks proved abortive. In early March, Tajuddin Ahmad met secretly with Deputy High Commissioner K.C. Sen Gupta, on Mujib's instructions, to explore whether India would provide political asylum and other assistance in the event of a liberation war. After consulting Delhi, Sen Gupta gave a response that was insufficiently specific to satisfy Sheikh Mujib. In mid-March, the latter repeated his appeal for assistance at this critical hour for his country, which was left with no alternative but to fight for independence.
India was not taken by surprise by the Pakistani crackdown on the Bengalis on March 25. She was not prepared, however, for the savagery of the onslaught. This drew impassioned condemnation from all sections of the Indian public. It also resulted in a refugee influx on a totally unexpected and unprecedented scale.
Though border inhabitants offered unstinting hospitality to the victims of the barbaric crackdown, it became evident that economic and political stability in the border provinces would be in danger unless conditions were created for the return of the millions of refugees to their homeland.
The plan
By the beginning of April, India's political aims had crystallised. New Delhi entertained deep apprehensions concerning a long-drawn guerrilla war in East Pakistan. It feared that a freedom struggle initially led by the moderate Awami League might eventually be taken over by pro-Chinese extremists if it dragged on for years. Thus the freedom fighters had to be assisted to bring the hostilities to the earliest possible conclusion and open military intervention might be required in the final stage.
Second, conditions had to be created to enable the return of the refugees to their homes as early as possible. In the absence of a political settlement between the Awami League leadership and Islamabad, the refugees would return only to an independent Bangladesh.
These cerebral reasons were powerfully reinforced by the moral outrage caused by Pakistan army atrocities and the strong public support for intervention on behalf of the victims. After March 25, Indian public opinion was unanimous in demanding that the government should extend full assistance to the Bangladesh freedom struggle.
At the beginning of the year, India had hoped for a united Pakistan in which the eastern wing exercised a degree of influence proportionate to its population. The prospect of secession was viewed with some misgiving. It soon became evident, however, that secession was a very real possibility as the dominant forces in Pakistan were not prepared to accept the six-point programme. The brutal crackdown of March 25 sealed the fate of a united Pakistan. The emergence of an independent Bangladesh was inevitable after the massacre. Public sympathy for the people of Bangladesh and India's national interests demanded that full cooperation be extended to the freedom struggle in order to ensure its speedy success.
Chandrashekhar Dasgupta (The writer is a retired diplomat and author of War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947-48.)
War in East Pakistan was an intra-state conflict that has once again become familiar in Pakistan: unequal development.
We continue to hurt Bangladesh by writing false textbooks on how we lost it.
The dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh are mourned here as routine every December 16, during which most of the blame for what happened, is placed on external factors. The habit is well formed because in 2011, too, we are externalising our essentially intra-state conflict and blaming it on others. The two-nation theory, which should have died with East Pakistan, is alive and well and is taking revenge on non-Muslim Pakistanis through the Blasphemy Law. The common denominator in the military defeats suffered by Pakistan, is dominance of the Pakistan Army and a succession of martial laws. This dominance still continues. Therefore, the crisis of the state continues.
The first blunder in East Pakistan was the failure to understand Bengali nationalism, which was language-based, and impose Urdu on the province using the ‘national language’ as the basis of ‘separation’ from India. Hassan Zaheer’s book The Separation of East Pakistan (OUP 1994) notes that the All India Muslim League had run into trouble in 1937, when it proposed Urdu as the national language of the league. It was opposed by the Bengali Muslim Leaguers who got Jinnah to water down the resolution to read that Urdu should be encouraged in areas where it was spoken. The same kind of mistake was made in Sindh, where, too, nationalism was language-based and we have the issue of Sindhi nationalism even today.
Military rule and the strategy of defence it created for East Pakistan was deeply flawed. An army officer has written a book titled The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (OUP 2002), which touches upon some very important issues. The author, Major-General (retd) Hakeem Arshad Qureshi, commanded the SSG (commandos) and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71, was a POW in India and later commanded Pakistan Rangers as director-general before retiring in 1990. He criticises the military’s strategy that the defence of West Pakistan should lie in West Pakistan: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan, no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not sympathetic given long years of dissent in the eastern wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
The war in East Pakistan was an intra-state conflict that has once again become familiar in Pakistan: unequal development. That no lesson has been learned is proved by the Baloch insurgency, which Pakistan blames on India just as it did in 1970. The use of religion to paper over reality continues in Pakistan. Hassan Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.”
Pakistan has taken on America today because of its flawed view of India as an eternal enemy. Without a strategy that could be understood and supported by the world, Pakistan wants Afghanistan left open to a repetition of what it did there after the exit of Soviet Union in 1991. Its argument is that no solution in Afghanistan is possible without its consent, but it has no credible policy that the neighbours of Afghanistan could accept as viable: it has no influence on the Afghan Taliban of Mullah Omar; it negotiates from a position of weakness with its own Taliban.
Major-General (retd) Qureshi says national strategy is conceived by the civilian mind based on the country’s resource base. When the state will go to war is never a determination made by the army. As a small state situated next to a big neighbour, Pakistan must devote its energy to becoming economically strong. Another defeat is looming because of the unlearnt lessons from the loss of East Pakistan. We continue to hurt Bangladesh by writing false textbooks on how we lost it. In 2011, Pakistan is all set for an implosion since the world is gradually abandoning it even at the risk of letting al Qaeda get at our nuclear weapons.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 16th, 2011.
Quest for liberty: Celebrations at Comilla in Bangladesh after the town was freed by Indian forces. Photo: The Hindu Photo Library
Was there an Indian plot to break up Pakistan in 1971?
Following the victory of the Awami League, India hoped relations with a new democratic Pakistan would improve. But the Pakistani army's brutal crackdown on March 25 changed everything.
The sweeping victory of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rehman's Awami League in the 1970 Pakistani elections was warmly received in India. The Bengalis of East Pakistan had always favoured a more cooperative approach in relations with India. New Delhi hoped for a progressive improvement in bilateral relations with a new democratic Pakistan, in which the eastern wing had its rightful representation. However, some observers questioned the possibility of bridging the vast political divide between the two wings of Pakistan. They felt that the eastern wing was likely to secede.
Secession, objectives
In December, High Commissioner B.K. Acharya expressed a view that was widely accepted in New Delhi. He recognised the possibility of secession but argued that majority control of the Central Pakistan Government by the East Pakistanis offered the only hope of achieving India's policy objectives towards Pakistan and overcoming the stonewall resistance of West Pakistan against better ties. Moreover, a secessionist East Bengal might demand integration with West Bengal and a United Bengal and might pass under the control of pro-Chinese Marxists. Such developments would further complicate India's defence and strategic problems. Foreign Secretary T.N. Kaul agreed that India should do nothing to encourage the separation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan but he added that it did not lie in India's hands to stop it. Much would depend on the rulers of Pakistan and the realisation by West Pakistan of the need to come to an equitable arrangement with East Pakistan.
Indian officials reviewed the situation in early January. MEA Secretary S.K. Banerjee and Acharya observed that the question of a secessionist movement would arise only if the eastern wing failed to secure its six-point autonomy demand through constitutional means. Acharya observed that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples' Party, might accept the autonomy demand if he himself could be all-powerful in the western wing, or if each wing was allowed to go its own way. However, a basic point of disagreement was in regard to powers of taxation. The army would not accept an arrangement under which it would have to depend upon subventions from the provinces for its funding.
R.N. Kao, the head of India's Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), said that he had received information that Mujib himself considered secession to be a definite possibility and was preparing for such an eventuality. Kao's assessment was that Mujib's hands were tied. He would either have to adopt an unyielding stand on the six-point demand or be swept aside by popular opinion. He would go through the motions of seeking implementation of the demand through constitutional means but a secessionist movement was a definite possibility. In this case, India could expect appeals for assistance in a variety of fields, including arms, money and military training. He urged that India should position itself to offer the assistance that might be requested.
What the records show
The records show that New Delhi had no prior intention of dismembering Pakistan. However, events moved rapidly in East Pakistan. At the end of January 1971, RAW confirmed that the Awami League leadership was not very optimistic about the outcome of the negotiations on a new constitution and was preparing to launch a mass movement for an independent Bangladesh if the talks proved abortive. In early March, Tajuddin Ahmad met secretly with Deputy High Commissioner K.C. Sen Gupta, on Mujib's instructions, to explore whether India would provide political asylum and other assistance in the event of a liberation war. After consulting Delhi, Sen Gupta gave a response that was insufficiently specific to satisfy Sheikh Mujib. In mid-March, the latter repeated his appeal for assistance at this critical hour for his country, which was left with no alternative but to fight for independence.
India was not taken by surprise by the Pakistani crackdown on the Bengalis on March 25. She was not prepared, however, for the savagery of the onslaught. This drew impassioned condemnation from all sections of the Indian public. It also resulted in a refugee influx on a totally unexpected and unprecedented scale.
Though border inhabitants offered unstinting hospitality to the victims of the barbaric crackdown, it became evident that economic and political stability in the border provinces would be in danger unless conditions were created for the return of the millions of refugees to their homeland.
The plan
By the beginning of April, India's political aims had crystallised. New Delhi entertained deep apprehensions concerning a long-drawn guerrilla war in East Pakistan. It feared that a freedom struggle initially led by the moderate Awami League might eventually be taken over by pro-Chinese extremists if it dragged on for years. Thus the freedom fighters had to be assisted to bring the hostilities to the earliest possible conclusion and open military intervention might be required in the final stage.
Second, conditions had to be created to enable the return of the refugees to their homes as early as possible. In the absence of a political settlement between the Awami League leadership and Islamabad, the refugees would return only to an independent Bangladesh.
These cerebral reasons were powerfully reinforced by the moral outrage caused by Pakistan army atrocities and the strong public support for intervention on behalf of the victims. After March 25, Indian public opinion was unanimous in demanding that the government should extend full assistance to the Bangladesh freedom struggle.
At the beginning of the year, India had hoped for a united Pakistan in which the eastern wing exercised a degree of influence proportionate to its population. The prospect of secession was viewed with some misgiving. It soon became evident, however, that secession was a very real possibility as the dominant forces in Pakistan were not prepared to accept the six-point programme. The brutal crackdown of March 25 sealed the fate of a united Pakistan. The emergence of an independent Bangladesh was inevitable after the massacre. Public sympathy for the people of Bangladesh and India's national interests demanded that full cooperation be extended to the freedom struggle in order to ensure its speedy success.
Chandrashekhar Dasgupta (The writer is a retired diplomat and author of War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947-48.)
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