THE TELEGRAPH, APRIL, 1971
PAKISTAN’S PATH TO BLOODSHED
The macabre efficiency with which the West Pakistan army last week all but snuffed out the life of the independence movement of East Pakistan, seeking its selfdetermination as the people’s republic of Bangladesh, was the outcome of two years of the most careful planning by Pakistan’s generals and colonels, many of them Britishtrained, many of them in outward manner, though not inward mildness “more British then the British
These senior officers are the elite of Pakistan’s rigidly stratified society and the core of the military leadership which two years ago pushed the army commander-inchief. General Yahya Khan, reluctantly into the presidency. These men never believed in the democratic process that Yahya set in motion.
They did not believe in it because they are not democrats by nature, by upbringing or by belief, but autocratic, patriarchal and patrician contemptuous of “the mob”, more of the 18th century than the 20th.
They did not believe in it because they saw the power of the East Pakistan popular movement that toppled president Ayub Khan in March 1969. They realized then that unless that great popular nationalist groundswell were contained it would engulf them too.
They realized that their whole future as the dominant group in Pakistan was threatened by another upsurge or even by a peaceful transition to civilian government like the one which, only a month ago, seemed (but never was )so near.
To them, the precisely phased programme that President Yahya and his civilian Cabinet devised for the transfer of power to an elected assembly, was never more then a cloak for the realities of the power structure in Pakistan.
They were counting on December’s election producing an indecisive result. This would have provided the most legitimate possible excuse for prolonging military rule.
Instead, it gave an absolute majority to one man and one party, the east wing leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League. From that day, December 6, the generals and colonels knew what they had to do.
It was then simply a matter of wailing for the occasion.
Even as he conferred with Mujib, President Yahya must have known of the preparations that the army was making. It seems hard, on the evidence of the sequence of events to acquit the President of charges of the deepest treachery.