A Vision of United India

Chapter 3

The Bangladesh War

Prelude to the 1971 war

Sometime in the early 60's, Ayub Khan's son, Gauhar Ayub, led a procession through the streets of Karachi, a city where Ayub Khan had lost in the elections. The procession turned violent and the resulting killings sowed the seeds of ethnic polarization. It completely alienated Pakistan's largest city from Ayub Khan, and accelerated his downfall in 1969. The revolt was especially strong in East Pakistan since it had been seriously neglected during Ayub's period. The gap in per capita income between the two wings had doubled in percentage terms, so that in 1969/70 the per capita income in the West was 61% higher than in the East.

Constitutionally, Ayub Khan should have turned over power to the speaker of the Assembly. However, he stated that the prevailing conditions of lawlessness did not permit the convening of the National Assembly, and that he was turning over power to the Army chief, General Yahya Khan. Curiously, Ayub Khan asked Yahya Khan to "fulfill his constitutional responsibility" and impose martial law. He closed with a wish that "we continue to march towards progress and prosperity along the path of democracy." In despair, Ayub Khan said, it "is impossible for me to preside over the destruction of our country." Privately, he confided that he had failed, and added that there was no leader in the opposition who would rise above his self-interest. He stated that keeping the country together for the past 10 years "was like keeping a number of frogs in one basket". And he spoke ominously about East Pakistan: "The East will last a few years and the West will drag on...There is no communication between the two parts. Let us hope some miracle will save us from complete separation."

His handpicked successor, General Yahya Khan, suspended this constitution in 1969. Pakistan got its current constitution in 1973.

1971 India-Pakistan War:

The partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 created two independent countries: India and Pakistan. India, which became independent on Aug. 15, 1947, stood for an equitable polity based on the universally accepted idea that all men were created equal and should be treated as such. Pakistan, which officially came into existence a day earlier, was based on the premise that Hindus and Muslims of the Subcontinent constituted two different nationalities and could not co-exist. The Partition created two different countries with most Muslim majority areas of undivided India going to the newly created nation,

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Pakistan (Land of the Pure). Pakistan was originally made up of two distinct and geographically unconnected parts termed West and East Pakistan. West Pakistan was made up of a number of races including the Punjabis (the most numerous), Sindhis, Pathans, Balochis, Mohajirs (Muslim refugees from India) and others. East Pakistan, on the other hand, was much more homogeneous and had an overwhelming Bengali-speaking population.

The Roots of Discord

Although the Eastern wing of Pakistan was more populous than the Western one, political power since independence rested with the Western elite. This caused considerable resentment in East Pakistan and a charismatic Bengali leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, most forcefully articulated that resentment by forming an opposition political party called the Awami League and demanding more autonomy for East Pakistan within the Pakistani Federation. In the Pakistani general elections held in 1970, the Sheikh's party won the majority of seats, securing a complete majority in East Pakistan. In all fairness, the Sheikh should have been Prime Minister of Pakistan, or at least the ruler of his province. But the ruling elite of West Pakistan was so dismayed by the turn of events and by the Sheikh's demands for autonomy that instead of allowing him to rule East Pakistan, they put him in jail.

Origins of the Crisis

The dawn of 1971 saw a great human tragedy unfolding in erstwhile East Pakistan. Entire East Pakistan was in revolt. In the West, General Yahya Khan, who had appointed himself President in 1969, had given the job of pacifying East Pakistan to his junior, General Tikka Khan. The crackdown of Mar. 25, 1971, ordered by Tikka Khan, left thousands of Bengalis dead and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was arrested the next day. The same day, the Pakistani Army began airlifting two of its divisions plus a brigade strength formation to its Eastern Wing. Attempts to disarm the Bengali troops were not entirely successful and within weeks of the March 25 massacres, many former Bengali officers and troops of the Pakistani Army had joined Bengali resistance fighters in different parts of East Pakistan.

The Pakistani Army conducted several crackdowns in different parts of Bangladesh, leading to massive loss of civilian life. The details of those horrific massacres, in which defenceless people were trapped and machine-gunned, is part of Bangladeshi history. Survivors compare it to the Nazi extermination of Jews.

At the same time, the Pakistani Administration in Dhaka thought it could pacify the Bengali peasantry by appropriating the land of the Hindu population and gifting it to Muslims. While this did not impress the peasantry, it led to the exodus of more than eight million refugees (more than half of them Hindus) to neighbouring India. West Bengal was the worst affected by the refugee problem and the Indian government was left holding the enormous burden. Repeated appeals by the Indian government failed to elicit any response from the international community and by April 1971, the then Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, decided that the only solution lay in helping the Bengali freedom fighters, especially the Mukti Bahini, to liberate East Pakistan, which had already been re-christened Bangladesh by its people. Pakistan felt it could dissuade India from helping the Mukti Bahini by being provocative. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) in East Pakistan took to attacking suspected Mukti Bahini camps located inside Indian Territory in the state of West Bengal. In the Western and Northern sectors too, occasional

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clashes, some of them quite bloody, took place. Pakistan suggested that should India continue with its plans it should expect total war as in 1965. Only this time, the Pakistanis would concentrate their forces in the West and thereby aim at capturing as much as Indian Territory as possible. The Indians, on the other hand, would be fighting a war on two fronts (while at the same time keeping a watchful eye on the Chinese borders). Given this scenario, the Pakistanis felt that India at best would be able to capture some territory in East Pakistan and lose quite a bit in the West. In the end, the Pakistanis knew that the Western powers would intervene to stop the war and what would matter was who had the most of the other's territory. Confident that another war would be as much of a stalemate as the 1965 Conflict, the Pakistanis got increasingly bold and finally on Dec. 3, 1971, reacted with a massive co-ordinated air strike on several Indian Air Force stations in the West. At midnight, the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, in a broadcast to the nation declared that India was at war with Pakistan. As her words came on in million of Indian homes across the Subcontinent, the men at the front were already engaged in bitter combat...

The war lasted for 13 days precisely. To cut a long story short, the Pakistan Army in the East surrendered on Dec. 16, and on the Dec. 17 India declared a cease-fire.

In June 1971, The Mother had written in a letter to a disciple:

La disparition du Pakistan est inevitable; elle aurait pu deja se produire, mais l'ignorance

humaine l'a retardee.

The English translation is as follows:

The disappearance of Pakistan is inevitable; this could have already happened, but human ignorance has retarded it.

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Let us now look at the position of the Mother regarding the Bangladesh problem. On Apr. 3, just seven days after the crackdown, Mother sent a message to Indira Gandhi, "The urgent recognition of Bangladesh is imperative".

As already seen, the conflict had its genesis in March when the Pakistani President and his tough military regime moved to crush the East Pakistani movement for greater autonomy, outlawed the Awami League, which had just won a majority in the nation's first free election, arrested its leader, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, and launched a repressive campaign that turned into a civil war with East Pakistan's Bengalis fighting to set up an independent Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation).

Nearly 1,000,000 people were killed and 10 million refugees streamed into India. "We have borne the heaviest of burdens", Mrs. Gandhi said, "and withstood the greatest of pressure in a tremendous effort to urge the world to help in bringing about a peaceful solution and preventing the annihilation of an entire people whose only crime was to vote democratically. But the world ignored the basic causes and concerned itself only with certain repercussions. Today the war in Bangla Desh has become a war on India."

On Dec. 16, the war was over. Within hours of the surrender of the Pakistan Army in East Pakistan, Indira Gandhi called a cease-fire. Mother said: "Again it won't be for this time. It won't be done that way. I've seen how. It won't be through battle. The different parts of Pakistan will demand separation. There are five of them and by separating, they will join India - to form a sort of confederation. That is how it will be done. It is not for this time also. It will take some more time". And She added: "One of the things foreseen is the conversion of America, the United States, but it will take time". Later, She said: "We are plainly heading for the disintegration of Pakistan". Thus what was said was that these five parts would secede and that there would be a conversion of America. Then there would be a Confederation of India and then the work of Sri Aurobindo would start in a big way.

Six months after the cease-fire, on Jul. 2, 1972, Mrs Indira Gandhi and the Pakistan Prime Minister, Z.A.Bhutto, signed the Shimla Agreement. That Agreement settled a few points once and for all. First of all, it categorically drew the line of cease-fire.

The line of control was clearly demarcated first on the map, and then on the ground. This work of demarcating the Line of Control was entrusted to delegations of the two armies led by two of the most respected officers of the two armies, Lt General PS Bhagat and Lt General Abdul Hameed Khan. They held several meetings and demarcated the Line of Control not only on the map but on the ground also. The second thing that was agreed upon was that there would be no third party intervention and that all problems between India and Pakistan would be solved bilaterally and that even the United Nations would not intervene. Evidently there were many other points, which were discussed and agreed upon. After the Bangladesh war, India had taken 93,000 prisoners who had surrendered in East Pakistan. In a moment of extreme generosity, India released all the prisoners and in another moment of extreme generosity, she withdrew all her troops from Bangladesh. That was the beginning of the end. Within a few months, other foreign powers came, and took over control. Soon tragedy struck. On Aug. 15, 1975, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and his whole family were assassinated; the only person left alive was his daughter, who happened to be somewhere outside Bangladesh at that time. She later became the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

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Once more, there was a failure on the part of the Government of India to pursue a sound and rational policy. This failure was the direct outcome of a deliberate decision by the Government of India led by Mrs Indira Gandhi. It was the decision not to pursue the trials of the Pakistani military prisoners on charges of crimes against humanity, a decision to which Bangladesh acquiesced, and the politicians and people of India barely paid attention. On hindsight, this was an incredible and tragic omission. Consider that, conservatively speaking, the Pakistani military murdered a million people within a span of nine months. If we go by the reputed number of six million murdered in the Nazi holocaust over a period of at least six years, it follows that the Pakistani military's "kill rate" exceeded that of the Nazis by at least 33%. Yet neither the world community nor the Government of India even raised a whimper; a blind eye was turned to the genocide. And most unfortunately, even India's own political parties failed to appreciate the political gains to be had from protesting this impunity. Despite the Pakistani military's deliberate targeting of Hindus, the Indian political parties showed no particular interest in making the criminals answer for their crimes. Even the Communist parties in Bengal were not moved to denounce this failure to punish the fascist murderers of innocent Bengali peasants. Incredibly, there was no voice of consequence anywhere demanding from the Pakistani military even so much as an acknowledgement of, and apology for, their atrocities. Needless to say, the question of forcing Pakistan to make reparation to Bangladesh was not seriously considered either. It seemed that practically everyone in India was content with the mere pleasure of defeating an enemy in war. No one thought of seizing the history of the moment, and putting it through the judicial system and other apparatus of a civilized society. Had the Government of India and the political parties taken these steps, it would have been much less thinkable in the subcontinent for anyone to flaunt retrograde values of the kind embodied by the Pakistani military.

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