India Mujibur Rahman Bangladesh Liberation Pakistan A Political Treatise Sashanka S. Banerjee

India Mujibur Rahman Bangladesh Liberation Pakistan A Political Treatise Sashanka S. Banerjee

Introduction

I have authored two books in the recent past discussing the broad strategic aspects of the triangular relationship between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh-in other words, the partitioned cluster of countries born out of the old British Empire known as the Indian subcontinent, since renamed on considerations of political sensitivities as South Asia. My first publication was captioned India’s Security Dilemmas: Pakistan and Bangladesh, published in India in 2006. The second book was titled A Long Journey Together: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, published in the United States in mid-2008. In these two books I have in the main discussed the adversarial India-Pakistan relationship at some length. The period covered is from mid-1947 to mid-2008. Recently I was approached by several senior Bangladeshi historians and journalists, including my two good friends Abdul Matin and Sanchita, requesting me to write a book focussed exclusively on my association with the leaders of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle and my involvement in it. It was to be my personal account and not a work of deep research and scholarship. Although there would be references to historical source material, there would be no bibliography or footnotes. I was deeply touched by that request and with much humility, I agreed to pick up my pen once again and take to writing the book. I have given it a wholesome title: India, Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh Liberation & Pakistan (A political treatise). The book would be a history of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle, beginning in 1962 when it was conceptualised and the first contacts made between the leaders of the freedom movement and India’s political leadership, and ending in 2011 when after a chequered history the country settled down to a peaceful, democratic way of life at ease with itself and its neighbourhood.

Bangladesh represents a page out of the history of the Indian subcontinent, or South Asia, soaked in blood. The birth of India and Pakistan in 1947 was followed by mass massacre sbloodshed of unimaginable monstrosity in which an estimated three to four million people lost their lives. Twenty-five million people were uprooted from their hearths and homes, moving across the borders in mass migration a phenomenon the world had never seen before. Fast-forward this history to 1971 when Bangladesh was born. Determined to kill the liberation struggle, Pakistan Army had launched a brutal genocide, killing over one and a half million people in Bangladesh in a period of nine months. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand young women were raped in the trenches and bunkers dug for war. Genocide apart, Pakistan used this heinous crime against womanhood as a doctrine of war to dampen the revolutionary zeal of the freedom fighters and demotivate them. Despite such brutalities, Pakistan failed to kill the aroused revolutionary fervour and Bangladesh was born dripping in blood. The genocide represented the unmourned holocaust of South Asia. It is unforgivable that the perpetrators of the twin crimes against humanity have gone unpunished.
The post-colonial history of the South Asian subcontinent is a history of bloodshed where blood never dries. Pakistan’s proxy war running in continuum against India ensures that the blood keeps flowing.

It will therefore be appropriate to discuss briefly, in the first few paragraphs of my “Introduction”, the many-splendoured thing that the India-Pakistan relationship is and how it cast its long shadow in the making of Bangladesh. My story of Bangladesh will therefore be incomplete without a reference to the Pakistan angle. The relationship between India and Pakistan is founded on an ideological struggle. Pakistan has embraced the ideology of religious obscurantism, intolerance, and violence while India is an ardent practitioner of the ideals of secular democracy, pluralism, and liberalism and is committed to the idealism of an open society.
The thirteen-day India-Pakistan War of 1971 led to Bangladesh breaking away from Pakistan. Truncated Pakistan didn’t lose much time to fight back in an attempt to regain its diminished influence in the region, but as it happened, that chapter is a heart-breaking horror story. Pakistan under its military rulers became a safe haven and play ground of global terrorism. Thanks to Pakistan’s sponsorship of terror, hundreds and thousands of innocent men, women, and children got killed in India, Afghanistan, the US, and elsewhere. Soon Pakistan achieved the dubious distinction of being variously regarded as a terrorist state, a failed state, even a pariah state.

Secular democratic Bangladesh on the other hand has become a beacon of hope in the region. I have dealt with the Bangladesh Story in detail in the main text of the book. Pakistan is the most avowedly proactive practitioner of hard power driven by militarism and religious extremism among the threesome. Islamabad’s unbridled projection of hard power has, however, an inherent emptiness at its core. Hard power cannot be sustained without high levels of educational achievement, quality scientific and technological backup, and strong economic performance.
In the case of Pakistan, illiteracy is rampant. It is a void taken over by the religious seminaries. The one education that is available to most children is religious education. This has produced a huge underclass of unemployable youth that has created an inexhaustible storehouse and a recruiting ground for terrorism. This is a man-made disaster which for Pakistan may turn out to be a suicidal dance of death. Even though the country has an arsenal of top secret nuclear weapons and missile silos, expanding at a breakneck speed with the fourth nuclear reactor nearly ready for commission, its scientific and technological prowess is suspect.
There is a strong suspicion that both the nuclear and the missile programmes are run and tightly controlled by the Chinese authorities, over whom Islamabad has no control. Pakistan does not have a sound industrial base either. Its economy is sustained by handouts from the US, China, and Saudi Arabia. If only one in the list of the aforesaid powers decides to back off from its commitments of funding assistance, the country will teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.

In its governance, Pakistan’s military represents the country’s fulcrum of power. It has no one to answer to for what it does or does not do, it is virtually above the law of the land, it is the source of repression of the ethnic minorities and the exploiter of the weaker sections of the nation, and its officers and men are rolling in undeclared wealth. Pakistan’s democracy is a charade; the civilian government has no power. In terms of its national ambition, India is in a different league altogether. It is a multitiered polity. Conscious of its size and potential, it aspires to be a superpower both economically and militarily. It is expanding its educational resources and investing heavily in scientific and technological Research & Development (R&D) capacities and in its health care facilities. It wants to be a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), for which it is campaigning hard. The nation is proud of its vibrant democratic system of governance and its inclusive secularism. India’s brand equities are its open society, pluralism, and liberalism.

Thanks to its commitments to nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition, India is essentially a pacifist nation built on an advocacy of soft power. According to the Swedish thinker Gunnar Myrdal, India is a “soft state” not ready yet to flex its military muscle, although the need for this muscle exists because the country is located in the world’s most troubled neighbourhood” as described by P. Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister. Although it has the capability to assert itself militarily, India is almost always reactive in its responses, particularly when it comes to issues of national security and diplomacy. The Kashmir problem could have been solved at least twice in the past as in 1948 and in 1971 but it was left festering, entirely through gestures of excessive generosity. The Indians hope that the future will not be as bad as the past.

On the lighter side, left to themselves the Indians like to spend their quality time in what they love most for the sake of fun-namely, watching rowdy members of Parliament debating on non-issues in Parliament, tirelessly watching Bollywood dance sequences come rain or shine, making money by hook or by crook and stashing it away illegally to distant destinations, and more seriously the rich aspiring to live in the lap of luxury within gated communities, ignoring the filth and squalor lying outside the compound walls in public places where the poor eke out an existence in desperate poverty. It is not in the interest of the Indians to gratuitously interfere in the affairs of other nations because it could have the potential to disrupt or destroy their settled lifestyle. It was only once that India had tumed assertive-in 1971 when it stepped forward and supported the kindred causes of democracy and secularism in Bangladesh. The Indians pride themselves in claiming that Mrs Indira Gandhi had introduced democracy and secularism in a Muslim country at least thirty years before George W Bush did in Iraq in 2003.
When US President Bill Clinton described South Asia in the wake of the Kargil conflict of 1999 as “the most dangerous place on earth”, I felt satisfied even vindicated that his thinking was on the same lines as I had articulated in my books. The striking historical convergence in these assertions was the time period in which they were made. Clinton’s 1999 warning came prior to the al Qaeda-planned terror attacks on New York and Washington of 9/11 of 2001, while my books were written prior to the Mumbai terror attack of 26/11 of 2008. The Mumbai terror attack of 26/11 was India’s 9/11. But in asserting that South Asia is the most dangerous place on earth, Clinton missed the main point, namely that he did not or was unwilling to ask who was really to blame for triggering the dangerous tensions and the perennial volatility in the region. From historical experience, one may say with some confidence that it is none other than India’s western neighbour who has a penchant for keeping company with dangerous elements and habitually promoting violence, instability and insecurity in the region. Pakistan’s proxy war against India has left an estimated eighty thousand dead since 1989.

Pakistan’s targeted arc of conflict gradually extends beyond the State of Jammu and Kashmir its primary object of desire. The terror attacks in Mumbai in 1993 orchestrated by the D-Company of Dawood Ibrahim, the attack on the Indian Parliament of 13 December 2001 planned and implemented jointly by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-eMohammad, the 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul by the Haqqani Network carried out under the instructions of the ISI and the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack of 2008 perpetrated by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba under the direction of the ISI are only a few instances among many of how the conflict has spread to other parts of India. The terror attacks of 9/11 of 2001 shifted one part of the arc of terror from the shores of India and Afghanistan to the US. It was a wakeup call for Washington.

Islamabad has many military objectives in conducting its proxy war against India but the overall aim seems to be to destabilise the country to the point of making it ungovernable and hopefully unravel the nation. Revenge against India’s support to Bangladesh liberation is
what security experts claim drives Pakistan’s hostility. In subtle protest, a significant section of the security community in India keeps raising its voice that New Delhi’s response to this firestorm that refuses to die down has been much too soft, forgiving, and accommodating. It has made no impact on Rawalpindi’s command and control centre. And the murder and mayhem continues unabated.
The unfortunate truth in the run of the events, however, is that Pakistan could never have been so aggressive had it not been for the support received from great powers like the United States and China and no less from Saudi Arabia
The United States has argued over the years that it needed Pakistan as its handmaiden in its war on terror, irrespective of the fact that the country’s powerful intelligence agency provided safe haven and active material support to large numbers of terrorists hostile to America active on its soil. However, following the killing by the US Special Forces of the world’s most wanted terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, hiding within a stone’s throw from the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, Abbottabad, concerns began haunting the policy makers in Washington of whether it would be appropriate to trust Pakistan anymore. What was now acknowledged more openly than before was that Pakistan represented a serious security threat to the peace and tranquillity of the entire civilised world, including the interests of the United States as indeed the whole of the South and Central Asia.

According to Christian Science Monitor, a leading US news magazine, Pakistan had received over $20 billion in aid from the United States in the last decade between 2001 and 2011 as an inducement to eliminate the terror masterminds Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and Mullah Mohammad Omar, but what America got instead was a venomous snake in the grass. Two-thirds of that money was spent on purchasing arms for use against India and only £100 million was spent on the war on terror. But no Osama bin Laden. It was left to the United States to seek him out.

So it comes down to a trust deficit between India and Pakistan and between the United States and Pakistan. India’s trust deficit vis-à-vis Pakistan is nearly sixty-five years old. Pakistan was born out of distrust of India. As someone has said, “nothing is more difficult to accomplish than building trust between two neighbours born out of distrust. If trust breaks out between them, the whole rationale for the existence of Pakistan will be called in question.”

Trust deficit and confrontational interactions go hand in hand. An example of a confrontational encounter between India and Pakistan may be instructive to read. India’s Home Secretary G.K Pillai had made a remark that the Government of India had unassailable proof that the ISI was controlling and coordinating the entire Mumbai terror attack of 26/11 of 2008 from beginning till the end.” In his vitriolic response, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi equated the hate speeches of Jamaat-ud-Dawa Chief Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, the mastermind of 26/11 Mumbai attack, with the Indian Home Secretary’s aforesaid remarks, almost asking if there was any difference between the two?

A second example is more illuminating. To a question of what was the rationale behind India’s decision to resume the composite dialogue with Pakistan after the terror attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001, Shiv Shankar Menon, India’s National Security Adviser, said at the end of a security dialogue with the US National Security Adviser held in New Delhi, that India restarted the dialogue process on the basis of President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf’s assurance that India would not be targeted by terrorists as long as the dialogue process continued. Is Pakistan guiding the shaping of India’s foreign policy? Is India willing and ready to be misguided by Pakistan’s subterfuges, past experience being
of no consequence?

This has something to do with the midnight children of the partition generation
Dr Manmohan Singh hails from Punjab in Pakistan just as General Pervez Musharraf’s ancestral home can still be seen in Darya Gunj in old Delhi in India. They like to keep in touch with the old boys of their generation on the other side of the border in an exercise in nostalgia. The strange mix of vituperation and bonhomie, like the one I have quoted above, is likely to continue for another half a century till this generation bids adieu. Meanwhile, allowing my poetical tendency to assert itself, the two countries would have to keep dancing around fresh piles of olive branches and releasing white doves in droves, keeping war at bay if that is possible, and perhaps secretly agreeing on some future date to convert the Line of Control into an International Border. The old generation would however have to keep in mind that modern India would not have anything to do with peace with Pakistan at the cost of its security.

The apparent trust deficit between the United States and Pakistan was a post-2 May 2011 phenomenon when Osama bin Laden was tracked and killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In an opinion poll undertaken by Fox TV channel in the United States on 18 May 2011, it was revealed that three out of four Americans didn’t trust Pakistan as an ally and wanted all US aid to the country be stopped. In 2011, there was a sweeping tide of popular distaste for Pakistan in the United States.

Bill Clinton could have done better than just making a statement, by suggesting or contributing something tangible to the solution of the Pakistan problem without involving India in it. But maybe the time was not ripe in 1999. In 2011, President Barack Obama, if he wanted to in the interest of security, peace, and harmony in the region as indeed the wider world, could consider manipulating the financial levers and bring the prodigal son to heel. The world is waiting to hear at least some reassuring pointers in that direction.

The argument is that you cannot allow a nuclear-armed Islamic fundamentalist state to fail because if such a thing happens, the network of al Qaeda-Taliban-Haqqani combined may take over Pakistan’s nuclear assets. It would be catastrophic in its consequences. This would mean that the United States would be prepared to go the extra mile to defend Pakistan’s territorial integrity.
To prevent such a feared takeover of the nuclear arsenal by al Qaeda or the Taliban or the Haqqanis, is it not opportune for the US-it is the only power who can do it as an alternative to put punitive pressure on Pakistan to dismantle the terror infrastructure active on its soil, enforcing a clean sweep of those elements. Perhaps the appropriate step in this direction would be for the United Nations to consider declaring the ISI as a terrorist organisation, also imposing sanctions on its financial resources The international community has witnessed Pakistan’s high security military establishments coming under a number of daring terrorist attacks, the last one being at the Mehran naval base near Karachi on 22 May 2011. It saw the destruction of at least two Orion PC3 naval reconnaissance aircraft and more than ten deaths of naval personnel. How could the terrorists enter the supposedly heavily protected military “Restricted Area”? These were pretty sure signs that the security arrangements in the military establishments were inefficient or that moles were working inside who might have been acting as scouts helping such terrorist raids. Relate these chinks in the armour to the nuclear facilities. It must be a matter of grave concem to both India and the United States. In spite of all the assurances given by the Pakistani military authorities and all the claims made by them that the nuclear arsenal were safely guarded and dispersed in bits and pieces beyond the reach of the terror gangs, there was no guarantee whatsoever that these arrangements were fool proof. Such a gravely dangerous existential situation warranted an urgent action on a war footing on the part of the international community, and that was to seek the denuclearisation of Pakistan in the interest of the safety and security of humankind.

However, if Pakistan was to prove too intransigent in regard to dismantling the terror infrastructure active on its soil, it could be reminded of the referendum held in South Sudan under the auspices of the UN to ascertain whether the people wished to separate on grounds of ethnicity from Northern Sudan. The positive outcome of the referendum laid the groundwork for a formal partition of Sudan between North and South Sudan.

A referendum in Pakistan on the claims of ethno-national minorities, namely the Pashtuns, the Baloch, and the Sindhis, whether they would like to stay on in Pakistan or go their own ways to freedom would be the most democratic solution to their long-standing aspirations and long-running struggles for self-determination, giving them a chance to live in peace and harmony.
This suggestion should be read as a sequel to the proposals made in Foreign Affairs by Robert Blackwill, former US Ambassador to India in regard to multi-ethnic Afghanistan. His suggestion was to partition restless Afghanistan on ethnic lines, creating conditions for peaceful coexistence among the ethnically different people-namely the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Shiite Hazaras, and the Chinese-origin Uighurs.

Today, by all accounts, the polity of Pakistan is driven most powerfully by the divisive demands of ethno-nationalism of the minority provinces and is no more united by the old glue of religion as much as it was in the past. The breaking away of Bangladesh could well be the first domino to have fallen. Speaking about myself, I was born in Calcutta when it was the imperial capital of the British Empire in India and brought up in Nizam’s Hyderabad, now the capital of Andhra Pradesh and the seat of Osmania University, a centre of Islamic learning and culture in South Asia. I spent the better part of my life working in the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, the capital of emerging India. I have spent nearly five politically enriching years of my working life in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. There I met and made so many friends in the political world, the most prominent among them being Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the inspiring mass leader of the Liberation Struggle of Bangladesh. Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury, leading the liberation struggle from his base in London, was a family friend.
I have also lived in the historic city of Baghdad, the land of the Euphrates and the Tigris and a city associated with Chengiz Khan and Kublai Khan, where I learnt Arabic and the history of the Arab Muslim people. I have spent the later part of my life in England the epicentre of Western civilisation. Living more than one half of my life in the East and a little less than the other half in the West have left their impact on my way of thinking and articulation in more ways than one.
I must however admit that I am still very much rooted in India and having worked in the diplomatic service, my mind-set is unshakably moulded in the work culture of that pristine foreign policy institution of India, the Ministry of External Affairs. I am a frequent visitor to New Delhi and Calcutta. Therefore I am more than likely to have a pro-India bias in the interpretation of historical events relating to the region, however diluted my views might have become after living so long in the West and travelling round the world ten times over.

My views in respect of Bangladesh and Pakistan, after having worked there for so many years, are influenced by my personal knowledge and experience of those countries and my interaction with the people there. My attachment and affection for the people of Bangladesh are deeply emotional, founded on linguistic affinity. I developed a soft spot for the Islamic civilisation and culture after having lived during my student days in Hyderabad in India, a seat of Islamic culture and later lived and worked in East Pakistan and Iraq. I am fascinated by the Urdu language (the national language of Pakistan) which is like my second language after my mother tongue Bengali. I feel so comfortable interacting with the highly cultured people of Islam, particularly those speaking Bengali and Urdu.

I however feel strongly about the fate of the people of Pakistan for them having had to suffer military dictatorships perennially, either directly or indirectly, for the last sixty-five years. I have a theory that if Pakistan were a genuine democracy like India or like Bangladesh as it is today, having a government accountable to the people – a pluralist society – it would have remained a united country. Perhaps there would not have been the popular call for a liberation struggle. There would not have been one and a half million fellow citizens massacred in a genocide nor a quarter of a million young Muslim women subjected to the heinous crime of mass gang rape by the soldiers of the Pakistan Army.

It still rings in my ears what Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury had said of Pakistan Army at the height of Bangladesh Liberation War: “From what the Pakistanis have done to my country Bangladesh, I would be right in saying that Pakistan Army, forgive my harsh language, is an army of murderers and rapists. They killed and raped nearly two million innocent people of Bangladesh, mostly Muslim people, and we are supposed to acknowledge that it is an Islamic Army. They are worse than animals.” Strong words, uncharacteristic of the man, but they were the outpourings of a hurt mind.

The Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was a key component of the struggles of the ethnonational people of the minority regions against the repressive Punjabis of Pakistan. My references to the struggles of the Balochis, the Sindhis, and the Pashtuns must be read in the Bangladesh context. Since India became an independent nation, New Delhi had extended moral support to several anticolonial national liberation struggles. The glaring examples were the National Front for the Liberation of Algeria (FNLA) led by Ben Bella in French speaking Algeria and Palestine Liberation Organisation led by Yasser Arafat and others.
The Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was the first freedom movement to which India decided to extend a comprehensive “no-holds-barred” support including moral and diplomatic backing, providing funding, training, and arming, allowing safe haven, and so on. It changed the history of South Asia.

In the early fifties after the Waziri tribal invasion of Kashmir sponsored by Pakistan, New Delhi had formulated a policy framework of conditionalities before a foreign freedom movement could be supported. The invitation or the request for support had to come from the movement’s leadership. The founding principles on which the movement would be led and conducted were: a commitment to the principles of liberalism, democracy, pluralism, secularism, and socialism; and the rejection of the ideology of religious orthodoxy, intolerance, and violence.
What India preferred most was leading by example. In this paradigm, India would build a system of democratic governance that would become a beacon of hope in the restless region.

This would avoid bloodshed and would be seen as a nonviolent route to the spread of democracy in the region. India’s role in creating a suitable ambience in the South Asian region in favour of democracy would be comparable to a phenomenon in the natural world called the “flying geese model”. When the leader of the flock takes to the skies, the rest follow, soaring up and flying in formation like a squadron of jet fighters. The flying geese model has its application in the political world as well, it being of particular relevance to the spread of democracy, with the potential for inspiring the entire South Asian group of nations in SAARC (The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), sign-posting the nations to the democratic destination. Thus by following India’s example, as do the geese their leader, these nations would embrace democracy and make a success of it.

Consider the list of democracies flourishing in South Asia today: led by India there is Bangladesh followed by Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives. Afghanistan is consolidating its initial steps towards a full-fledged democracy. Pakistan however presents a different case study. Its military-backed democracy doesn’t come under the accepted or the standard norms of democracy as we know it.

I have been associated with the Bangladesh freedom movement since Christmas Day of 1962 when Mujibur Rahman made his first appeal to India for support to the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle. I stood witness when India agreed to extend support on grounds of Mujib’s commitments to the ideals of inclusive secularism, liberal democracy, pluralism, and Bengali nationalism. I knew Mujibur Rahman personally all those years as a friend. I couldn’t contain my emotions on the day when he was brutally murdered on 15 August 1975 by Colonel Farook Rahman and Major Shariful Haq Dalim of the Bangladesh Army. Both were products of and trained by Pakistan Army before Bangladesh’s liberation.
When Farook and Dalim were busy committing the heinous crime of killing Mujibur Rahman and his family in an early morning coup, General Ziaur Rahman, also a product of the very same military training institutions in Pakistan, was seated in his army regalia in the command centre of the Dhaka Cantonment. After the killing, General Ziaur Rahman installed himself as the Military Dictator of Bangladesh in November 1975.
When I met Farook Rahman and Ziaur Rahman in London respectively in 1971 and 1973, I was seized with a suspicion that these two shifty-eyed military men were not quite trustworthy characters. I had wamed Mujibur Rahman in a letter sent through the diplomatic channels of my fears and apprehensions about Farook Rahman and Ziaur Rahman, but he responded by saying that they were like my children and children don’t kill their parents.”
It would remain my life’s one great regret that Mujibur Rahman did not heed my warnings that his life was under threat and refused to have high security cover. Although forewarned, I could not save his life. He will be remembered at the political level as a great democratic leader and at the personal level as a good man.
Bangladesh was my personal journey observed from very close quarters. While I have discussed various facets of the strategic issues flowing from Bangladesh breaking away from Pakistan, at the end of it all my association with the Liberation Struggle had an emotional content and appeal tempered by love and affection for the people. That is why I have dedicated my book respectfully to the secular and democratic aspirations of the people of Bangladesh.
I am confident that reading my Bangladesh Story will be an illuminating experience. Sashanka S Banerjee London 15 August 2011

1

Chalking the Road Map Conceptualisation of the idea of a Liberation Struggle of the people of East Pakistan. Search and identification of a trustworthy ally,
The two-pronged Chinese invasion of a militarily unprepared India, punching through Aksai Chin into the Ladakh region of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir in the western sector and into Tezpur in the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector across the Tibetan Plateau of the Himalayan mountain range in October 1962, illegally occupying large chunks of Indian territory, had ended in an embarrassment for New Delhi. The shock of defeat and the loss of territory had so devastated India that even to this day nearly half a century later, the nation seems to be in no mood to forget or forgive what harm the unpredictable Chinese had done to India’s pride and self-respect. Within two years, in 1964 India’s Prime Minister during the war, Jawaharlal Nehru, a highly respected figure in the world of international diplomacy, died amidst national shame and personal grief. A fall out of the war in the strategic context was that in the immediate aftermath, the decision-making processes in sulking New Delhi had come to a virtual standstill. The diplomatic setback suffered as a consequence was to take years to heal but, as it happened, in the context of the India-China relationship it was never more than partially achieved. China’s assertiveness towards India, which has increased over the years, has not proved helpful.

Never a proactive nation, for a reactive India the Chinese invasion was a wake-up call. India was still in a state of introspection when within about three months following China’s India War, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Awami League, the dominant political party in East Pakistan, who had already conceptualised in his mind a revolutionary idea for the liberation of his people, was deeply immersed in thought as to how to put his plan into action in such a complex and an adversarial South Asian situation. His biggest challenge was who to approach among the big powers for support and succour in this game plan. Important to note was that he was acutely sensitive to the idea that bringing the liberation struggle to a successful conclusion in the shortest possible time could not be achieved, given the fact of a hugely repressive military dictatorship hanging over his shoulders, entirely with the support base of a home grown revolution. Mujib needed big power support, Mujib’s sense of strategic thinking was fortified by a sharp intellectual asset. Employing this asset to its fullest extent, he put his mind into analysing who could be the most reliable ally or allies in the conduct of the liberation struggle. He was also fully conscious that whoever was the partner, the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was to have wide-ranging international strategic implications. The Cold War was the biggest concern.

Mujib feared that China, being a strategic ally of Pakistan, would not spare any opportunity arising out of an adversity to kill his dream of liberating the people of East Pakistan from the shackles of what, according to him, was the Punjab-driven exploitative and repressive military dictatorship remote controlled from Rawalpindi. But Mujib was a risk taker, not risk averse. China’s India War of 1962 was a wake-up call for India and as New Delhi began putting in place diplomatic initiatives to reassert itself, that point of time was seen by Mujib as the opportune moment to present India with an innovative and an untried policy option-namely supporting the cause of Bangladesh. This line of gut thinking, call it “Mujib Special” if you like, transformed Shaikh Mujibur Rahman into a man of destiny in a hurry. It would however be wrong to think that Mujib acted hastily and recklessly as he made up his mind to blow the bugle of independence as early as 1962. He was not unaware of the hazards of stirring the homet’s nest of the post-World War II phenomenon of the Cold War. Two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, armed to the teeth with massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet ten times over, were locked in a hostile ideological confrontation. Mujib was also acutely aware of the line-up of allies of the respective superpowers. What engaged his mind most was the question of what would be the place of the Bangladesh liberation struggle on this strategic chess board.

The United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, was busy safeguarding its own security interests by cultivating the most abominable military dictatorships, the most relevant among them none other than Pakistan itself, from whose shackles Mujib wanted Bangladesh to be torn apart. So to cut the long story short, the United States could not be an alliance partner in this adventure.

China’s evolving all-weather strategic friendship with Pakistan had already become wellknown. There was therefore no point in approaching Beijing for support or succour. An apprehension that gripped Mujib’s mind was that pushing China to stand guard in defence of Pakistan when the liberation struggle broke out in full force could spell harm to the cause of democratic aspiration of the people of East Pakistan for freedom stalling the movement on its tracks.

As Mujibur Rahman was doing his homework as to whose support he should seek, he took due note of China’s hostility towards India. Beijing’s choice of the year 1962 for launching its invasion of India was remarkable for its timing and calculation. It was the year of the Bay of Pigs crisis when the two superpowers had locked horns in an eyeball to eyeball nuclear confrontation over Cuba. China made sure that India’s unpreparedness for war was matched by the preoccupation of the United States and the Soviet Union with their own confrontation. It was therefore reasonable to assume that Washington and Moscow would be also unprepared, except if the situation had gone too much out of control, for intervention in the India-China Himalayan confrontation.

With so many negative vibes prevailing in the international arena, Mujib had all the more reason to tread his path extraordinarily carefully. What was reassuring was that the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was India’s most abiding friend and strategic partner during the Cold War. It mattered little that the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship. What mattered most was that India was the world’s largest democracy. But persuading over-cautious and pacifist India was no mean task. However, if he was to succeed in drawing New Delhi into the fray in support of Bangladesh in its liberation struggle, it could have the effect of pulling the Soviet Union, then a superpower, to Bangladesh’s side. It was a green shoot of strategic thinking on the part of Mujib that was waiting to be harvested in good time. It could be that Mujibur Rahman, more than any other contributing factor, became the catalyst that strengthened Indo-Soviet strategic alliance.

The Bangladesh leader had done his homework well, taking into account the permutation and combination of what he used to describe privately in his own words as “the South Asian Great Game”, and came to the conclusion that neither the United States nor China nor Britain -as the creator of Pakistan in 1947would support the fragmentation of Pakistan without which an independent Bangladesh could not see the light of day.

The most practical and the safest way forward before Mujib therefore was to seek India’s help and support. But the problem was that New Delhi, in all likelihood, without a firm commitment from the Soviet Union of its wholesome political and diplomatic support and strategic backing, could not be expected to step into the adventure of such great risk. Open support of India, without the backing of a superpower, had the potential to lead to a wider conflagration, threatening the country’s territorial integrity. A cautious reaction from New Delhi was to be expected, but a wholly negative response was not an option for Mujib.
Drawing India and the Soviet Union in tandem would be like one stone, two birds. Perhaps it was a long-term project, but it was the only viable proposition Mujib could visualise if Bangladesh was to see freedom. One can safely argue that forging such a triangular relationship between India and the Soviet Union standing up in support of the liberation struggle of the people of East Pakistan acted as a catalyst nine years later in forging the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Co-operation of 1971. It was to prove as a bulwark against potential US or Chinese intervention on Pakistan’s side in India’s Bangladesh War of the same year.
What stirred Mujib’s conviction was that apart from Indiaa soft power with no territorial ambition and committed to democracy and secularism in addition to having the advantage of its geopolitical location as the next door neighbour, who else could extend the much needed multi-tiered assistance in achieving what he wanted?

Having thus set his strategic sights on India, Mujib was not prepared to waste any time in going full steam ahead to open a line of communication with New Delhi. Catching India in its humble moment of defeat in 1962, seeking its support for the democratic aspirations of the people of East Pakistan for freedom, could not be a more opportune moment for Mujib, in his very personal way of thinking, in injecting a dollop of adrenaline to India’s self-esteem. In terms of realpolitik, Mujib was convinced that in the backdrop of Pakistan’s gratuitous belligerence towards India, New Delhi would not spurn a readymade opportunity, which was to contain in his appeal for help, whose end result would amount to tearing East Pakistan apart from West Pakistan.

With his penchant for long-term thinking, Mujib had in his mind decided to name the new nation of his dream, if ever it was to come into being, as “Bangladesh”. It was his idea that the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle and later the nation of Bangladesh would be founded on the cultural values of Bengali nationalism, strengthened by the democratic aspirations of the masses of the people, committed to freedom and secularism based on the pillar of IndoBangladesh friendship as equal sovereign nations. He believed in these values wholly and in full measure. He knew in his heart that because the fundamentals of the ensuing Bangladesh Liberation Struggle would be in sync with the values on which India stood its ground, it would be a sure shot for forging a partnership with this neighbouring nation in a common cause.

With these evolving thoughts in his mind, Shaikh Mujibur Rahman was now ready to make a move. To a question I had put to him a few months later if he had a Plan B in his mind should his Plan A proved unrealisable, his considered response was a polite but an emphatic no. “There is no Plan B. There is no alternative.”
2

Mujibur Rahman chooses India as the alliance partner, 25 December 1962–Christmas Day Mujibur Rahman appeals to India for support to the cause of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle. Conceived in secrecy, the day turns out to be a momentous turning
point in the history of South Asia.
Mujib chose Christmas Day of 1962 to open his first line of communication with India. Simply said, it symbolised his commitment, a devout Muslim by religious faith, to secularism.
I was a resident in Chakrabarty Villa in old Dhaka, living there in my capacity as a political officer at the Indian Diplomatic Mission in East Pakistan. The residential premise was surrounded by a compound wall which separated my residence from the offices of the nationalist Bengali newspaper The Daily Ittefaq next door.
It was just past midnight after Christmas Eve and my family and I had just returned from a traditional Christmas party at a colleague’s home. After I closed the door behind me, I heard a knock. I was petrified, not being sure who was calling at that time of the night. Was somebody following me? I wondered. I was serving a posting in Pakistan. I was duly briefed to be extra careful about my personal security and that of my family. However, I pulled up my socks and decided to open the door. There was a boy standing there, no more than fourteen years of age, carrying an errand. He greeted me with As Salaam Waleikum; 1 responded with a Waleikum Salaam. The nervous young lad told me that Manik Mia, the editor of The Daily Ittefaq, wanted to see me in his office, if it was not too inconvenient for me. I found the boy extremely courteous for his age. Before he left he gave me just one piece of information that there was another gentleman with him. He didn’t tell me who he was. I accepted the puzzling invitation, which was unconventional in every respect. I had decided to walk into the unknown whatever the consequences. I asked the boy to go back and inform Manik Mia that I would be coming over to meet him in a short while. I had never met Manik Mia before, although I knew that he was the editor of the influential The Daily Ittefaq, published from the office next door.

My other concern was that I was unprepared for the meeting with no backup of a brief, although I knew it would be a political meeting. I was very nervous. When I arrived, Manik Mia got up from the chair and thanked me with utmost politeness for taking the trouble of paying a visit to his office in such unusual circumstances.
As he introduced himself, he told me that he was also known as Tofazzal Hussain, the editor of The Daily Ittefaq. He addressed me by my name as he extended his hand for a handshake. Then he turned towards the gentleman standing next to him, gesturing as if to introduce me to him. I thought I had seen his pictures in the newspapers. He was a familiar face of a public figure and I felt he needed no introduction.

I met Shaikh Mujibur Rahman for the first time as I was formally introduced to him. I must admit that as I saw him from such close quarters, he impressed me almost instantly as one having an enormous presence. To quote a British journalist named Cyril Dunn who had met Mujib earlier, “Mujib was handsome and possessed a great personality.” He was right. I had seen and heard Mujib from a distance speaking at a mass rally at the Paltan Maidan in Dhaka and remembered his forceful oratory and his capacity to hold the audience in thrall. He gave me a firm and a vigorous handshake and looked straight into my eyes as if he was itching to say something important to me. I reciprocated with a smile and a twinkle in the eye, telling him what a great pleasure it was for me to be introduced to him. I asked him if it was a historic handshake. “Why not?” was his reply. What remained unspoken was a sentiment secretly welling up in my mind that resonated with what Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, had said after meeting Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, that “the West could do business with this Soviet Leader.” While it was true that the Thatcher-Gorbachev meeting formed part of a global summit of great powers and constituted another page in history that changed the world, it was also true, as I felt in my humble way, that “India could do business with Mujib” if he were to make an appeal for support and help in his mission for the restoration of democracy in East Pakistan. This would have the potential of changing the history of South Asia.

Although personally I had never met Manik Mia before, his name was not unknown to me. I never missed reading his politically astute polemical columns in Bengali in The Daily Ittefaq extolling the virtues of autonomy for East Pakistan. I could sense that he was shrewdly using the word autonomy as a camouflage but in reality he was building up a case for liberation. What surprised me was that the Pakistani security agencies were unable to figure out which direction Manik Mia was moving. They had taken no action against him for writing the seditious columns. Some of them were provocative enough to justify legal action. But there was no action taken against him. I suspected, as a figment of my imagination, that perhaps the Bengali translators in East Pakistan’s security establishment never submitted the true picture of what Manik Mia’s columns were supposed to be conveying. One wondered if this hypothetical phenomenon was read by the Awami League leadership as an early indication of the existence of a critical support base among the Bengalis against the ethnic Punjabi-dominated repressive regime in Pakistan. The Army and the Security Services were dominated by the Punjabis while ethno-national people in the minority provinces like the Bengalis, the Baluchis, the Sindhis, and the Pashtuns suffered perceived exploitation and repression at the hands of the dominant Punjabis.

To a query why the military authorities had not taken any legal action against him for his writings demanding autonomy, his reply was that he never indulged in schoolboy provocations and took no chances. He reiterated that playing safe while making his point in a low-key manner was his public style. The ardent patriot that he was, I had absolutely no doubt that he was a literary genius and a master of pun and measured sarcasm. His powerful Bengali prose had a uniquely lyrical quality. Amidst the din of strong language used in the newspapers published from Dhaka in the sixties targeting India, Manik Mia’s carefully crafted prose was a model of balanced reporting and comment. It was only occasionally that one sensed a partisan context in his writings.
As an intellectual and an enlightened thinker, Manik Mia belonged to a different world. A comparison with Allama Mohammad Iqbal may be in order. Iqbal was the author of the famous collection of Urdu poetry Baang-e-Dara. Uniquely, he also composed the Urdu lyric: Saare Jahan se Achcha Hindustan Hamara, translated into English: There is no country in the world as good (meaning as beautiful) as our Hindustan (meaning India). The lyric Saare Jahan se Achcha has become some sort of a national song in India sung by school children all over the country. The Indian Army band also plays the tune. Iqbal was undoubtedly a literary genius.

However, the fundamental difference between these two remarkable personalities Manik Mia and Allama Mohammad Iqbal-was that Iqbal took up the advocacy of an Islamic Pakistan in an effort to position it outside the broad framework of India’s secular democratic freedom struggle. Manik Mia on the other hand became an ideologue of freedom and democracy inspired by the enlightened liberalism of John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher, and the ideals of the rights of man by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French political thinker who fired the French Revolution. Iqbal was an enigma, perhaps an enigma within an enigma. He loved India, his poetry suggested that, but he also wanted Pakistan as a homeland of the Muslims of the subcontinent, which would by definition be a theocratic state.
Even as I met them for the first time, it was like love at first sight. I was convinced that Mujib as the charismatic mass leader of a political party, endowed with the power of his oratory, and Manik Mia, the editor of a loyal newspaper, an intellectual and a political thinker with a command over the written word, could together create and lead a revolution. I had already drawn a picture in my mind’s eye as to why I was called and what proposal they were going to come up with. I was already thinking what they needed was political, diplomatic, material support from a committed foreign power which, in this case, could be none other than India to succeed in their daunting and daring campaign. That was my very own humble thought. The final decision was for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to take.
Our meeting lasted about two hours into the night. So much politics was discussed, which included big issues like the Cuban Missile Crisis, how the Chinese shrewdly used the moment as an window of opportunity for its invasion of India, its strategic implications, the widening network of US-led “collective security alliances like Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) which were put in place like garlands of thoms around the necks of the Soviet Union and India, America’s dalliance with military dictators and how it impacted on the strategic scenario in the region, what the third world countries were to expect from the Soviet Union in their anticolonial national liberation struggles, what changes in South Asian security could be brought about through joint collaboration between political parties like the Awami League and non-aligned India and so on. Out of these discussions, I had the unique good fortune of benefiting from the valuable insights into the minds of the two towering political figures in East Pakistan that I was sitting with at a late hour of the night already breaking into Christmas Day morning. I detected from the conversations that both the Bangladesh leaders maintained a certain maturity and balance some sort of an equidistance-in their positions with regard to the superpowers.

As the discussions headed towards a conclusion, I noticed a shuffle on the part of both Mujib and Manik Mia, indicating that they wanted to say or show something. I took the initiative and asked if there was a message they wanted to convey to me to be passed on to a higher authority. Mujib instantly opened up.

Mujibur Rahman was now in his elements. He said that the purpose of calling the meeting was to hand over to me a top secret letter to be forwarded to the Prime Minister of India in a diplomatic bag. As he handed me the letter, he gave me an indication that he was a man in a hurry. I told him that apart from me, more importantly, it would be seen by two other officers in the Indian Diplomatic Mission in Dhaka before it was forwarded to the Prime Minister. It would then directly reach the PM’s table with copies endorsed to the Foreign Secretary and the Director of Intelligence Bureau in New Delhi. As a first step, the full text of the letter would be forwarded in the form of a triple-coded cypher message. The original letter would follow the cypher telegram in a diplomatic bag. Mujib asked who the two officers would be in the High Commission in Dhaka. With some hesitation but only to earn their trust I gave Mujib and Manik Mia the names: Mr Sourja Kumar Choudhury, the Deputy High Commissioner of India who was the Head of Mission in Dhaka and Colonel SC Ghosh, the Station Chief of Indian Intelligence in East Pakistan. As we turned a page in history, we had now committed ourselves as comrades in keeping secrets in mutual interest.
Mujib’s top secret letter was addressed personally by name to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India. After a short introductory paragraph, the letter went straight into a business-like narrative of a plan of action, drafted, according to Mujib’s own admission, in consultation with his trusted friend and advisor Manik Mia, to herald the start of a Bangladesh Liberation Struggle.

In what looked like a vision statement, the letter emphasised that it would mean East Pakistan ultimately breaking free from the twin shackles of slavery of the mercilessly exploitative ethnic Punjabi Muslims of West Pakistan and the repressive military dictatorship of Rawalpindi, thereby creating a sovereign independent homeland of the Bengali-speaking people of East Pakistan.
Going into the logistics of the operation, it was Mujib’s intention, the letter said that given the oppressively uncongenial and adversarial conditions prevailing in Pakistan which prevented open political activity of any kind, he wanted to move his base from Dhaka to London and from there he would direct the liberation struggle back home in East Pakistan, He concluded by laying down a road map with a time table. Mujib wanted to shift his base from Dhaka to London as early as possible. Manik Mia would remain behind in Dhaka, carrying on with his awareness campaign, writing his regular columns in The Daily Ittefaq demanding autonomy for East Pakistan. Mujib would declare the independence of Bangladesh from London at the earliest by 1 February 1963 or latest by 1 March 1963, setting up a Provisional Government of a Sovereign Democratic Republic of Bangladesh in exile in London. The final paragraph contained a personal appeal to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru asking for India’s abiding and unequivocal moral, political, diplomatic, logistical, and material support to the cause of the liberation of Bangladesh. To discuss matters arising, Mujib volunteered that he would be delighted to have a personal meeting Minister in utmost secrecy.

Could there be any doubt that Mujibur Rahman’s top secret letter to Jawaharlal Nehru was pure dynamite? What would the Prime Minister decide was one thing: working on the implementation part of it would be a complex challenge of Himalayan proportions. All in all, the letter had the potential of shaking the Government of India to its roots. At the Dhaka end, things moved pretty fast after this explosive letter was submitted to the Head of Mission and the Station Chief of Intelligence. Between the five of us, namely the head of mission, the intelligence chief, Mujibur Rahman, Manik Mia and myself at least two meetings were held in quick succession in utmost secrecy. The purpose was to get a better understanding of what the Bangladesh leaders expected from India. What did they mean by India’s material support? Was there any flexibility in their approach?

Meanwhile the text of the letter was despatched by triple-coded cypher telegram to the Prime Minister (PM) in his office in South Bloc on the Raisina Hill, New Delhi. The original letter was despatched immediately thereafter strictly for the personal attention of the PM. We all knew that the Prime Minister was in a state of personal shock after the disastrous Chinese invasion, yet he saw to it that there was no delay in calling a meeting of his top security advisers. He wanted to discuss with the experts in every minute detail the implications of extending long-term support to Mujibur Rahman’s call for help in the liberation struggle of the people of East Pakistan. The key figures were not in station and were travelling, some abroad, and as a consequence it took a bit of a time for the high-level meeting to take place. we were instructed from Delni that as a matter of courtesy, Mujib should be advised that his proposals were receiving the PM’s attention and he would respond at the earliest. As the waiting for a decision from Delhi got longer-I like to think that it was not entirely attributable to bureaucratic shenanigans but to the time taken to consider very carefully the widest possible range of issues and challenges that India might have to face while supporting Bangladesh-Mujib became impatient.

Mujib felt that dealing with the bureaucrats in Dhaka was getting him nowhere. He decided to change course and pay a secret visit to the bordering State of Agartala in India. He crossed the borders in utmost secrecy without a passport. There he had a few meetings with Sachin Singh, the Chief Minister of Agartala, and put across his request for political support to the cause of Bangladesh Liberation to be passed on to the Prime Minister of India. Mujib did not fail to inform the Chief Minister of Agartala that he had also contacted India’s Diplomatic Mission in Dhaka but complained that they were taking too much time to respond. He was in a hurry.
I think Mujib believed that a politician like Sachin Singh would be able to understand or empathise with the concerns of another politician like himself better than the bureaucrats. After a short wait in Agartala, Mujib got a response from Delhi conveying an apology from the Indian Prime Minister for the delay in his response. The PM also advised that it would be best for him to work through one channel only and that was the Indian Mission in Dhaka and not Agartala. Mujib was informed while he was still in Agartala that the decision to extend support to him was already taken and forwarded to Dhaka for his information.
On his way back, the East Pakistan’s Provincial Intelligence Branch, having got wind of Mujib’s secret visit to Agartala, arrested him and registered a police case against him under a First Information Report (FIR), calling it Agartala Conspiracy Case. The trial in the law courts in East Pakistan ran for nearly five years, hogging headlines in the newspapers and raising emotions. As it turned out, it was as much a trial by the right-wing media as it was a trial by the courts. Mujib was dragged through the courts and during his long detention he was subjected to extraordinary suffering. However, for lack of sufficient tangible evidence there was nothing to prove that he actually visited India the case against Mujib was unconditionally dropped on 21 February 1969.

East Pakistan was under the charge of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) headquartered in West Pakistan. After his release from the Agartala Conspiracy Case, the IB was not convinced that Mujib was innocent. They smelt a rat and in an angry response, following an unusual development, took the decision to start a destabilisation campaign against India, launching an insurgency among the Mizos in the northeastern region of India. I will refer to it in greater detail in a later chapter.
Awami League’s Six-Point Programme, defining its demand for autonomy Mujibur Rahman’s bruising experience with the Pakistani security forces known for their third degree methods of torture in the Agartala Conspiracy Case matured him as a revolutionary leader. But the real reason why the Pakistani police and intelligence were bent upon punishing him was not so much the unproved secret visit to Agartala in India but his Six-Point Programme in which he issued a clarion call for autonomy”. The Pakistan generals were convinced that Mujib’s Six-Point Programme was a camouflage of his intention for separation of East Bengal from the body politic of Pakistan itself. Such fears came out in the open when General Ayub Khan, the Military Dictator of Pakistan, in a broadcast to the nation on 15 March 1969 declared, “It is impossible for me to preside over the destruction of our country.” He simultaneously announced his decision to hand over power to General Yahya Khan. On the same day, Yahya Khan assumed charge as the Chief Martial Law Administrator and on 31 March 1969 he self-appointed himself as the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, abrogating the Constitution and proclaiming Martial Law.

What was Shaikh Mujib’s Six Points Programme? When did Mujib present his “Chhoy Dofa”, Bengali words of the said Six-Point Programme, before the nation?
It was from 1966 to December 1970 when Yahya Khan announced general elections that politics in East Pakistan was principally driven by the Awami League’s Six-Point Programme.

The six points were: 1. Pakistan would be a federation where the legislature, directly elected by the people on the basis of universal adult franchise, would be supreme 2. The Federal Government would deal with only three subjects namely, Defence, Foreign Affairs and Currency and suggested devolution of powers between West Pakistan and East Pakistan, 3. There would be two separate but freely convertible currencies for the two wings of the country with a separate fiscal and monetary policy for East Pakistan, 4. The power of taxation and revenue collection would vest in the federating units, 5. There would be two separate accounts for foreign exchange reserves of the two wings. Domestic products would move freely between the two wings. The Constitution would empower the unit governments to establish trade and commercial relations, including setting up trade missions and entering into agreements with foreign countries and 6. There would be a separate militia or a paramilitary force for East Pakistan.

The basic objectives of the Six-Point Programme or “Chhoy Dofa”, as Mujibur Rahman explained to the people, were to guarantee to all the Constituents of the Federation justice, equality, and fair play. It was a call for autonomy, not independence. The Six Point Programme faded away on 7 March 1971 when Mujib gave a call for independence. More on that later. Mujib’s appeal to India for support and New Delhi’s response. Pitted against Mujib’s road map to freedom, Nehru’s response to the Bangladesh leader at first sight looked somewhat disappointing. The Indian PM conveyed that the international situation was neither propitious nor opportune for Mujib to declare independence just at that time. After the humiliation suffered at the hands of China, New Delhi was in no position and certainly in no mood to effectively come to the support of Bangladesh at that very moment. If Mujib wanted India’s support to be effective and resolute, India’s thinking was that he would have to wait for the right moment. Nehru had meanwhile taken the decision to extend India’s long-term strategic support to the Mujibur Rahman-led liberation struggle because he sensed that Mujib was a charismatic mass leader and in the mould of Kemal Ataturk of Turkey was committed to secular idealism apart from democratic values and Bengali nationalism. Nehru was convinced that Mujib did not carry the baggage of the traditional right-wing Pakistani version of religious extremism and violent fundamentalism.

Meanwhile, a comprehensive package of a long-term engagement between India and the Awami League was waiting to be conveyed in Dhaka. The package was based on a commitment to shared values and an appreciation of each other’s positions founded on ground realities. The terms of engagement looked like a political testament. I must add, as I recount the terms of the memorandum of understanding that these should not be read as exact quotations from a confidential government document, a copy of which I don’t have with me, but have been drawn from my memory as faithfully as I possibly could and have been scripted in my own language. I am confident that given the strength of my memory for
remembering the historic events particularly relating to Bangladesh Liberation Movement the scope for inaccuracies is tew and far between Founded on its very own value systems as enshrined in the nation’s constitution and heritage, India traditionally extended support to those anticolonial national liberation struggles which were anchored on commitments publicly made to democracy, secularism, socialism, and respect for each other’s broad civilisational identities such as Bengali nationalism as in the case of Bangladesh. On the basis of the shared value systems between Bangladesh and India, New Delhi stood ready to extend multi-tiered moral, political, and material support as needed. For the safety and security of the leadership, the strategic partnership must be run within a framework of utmost secrecy with a right of denial as and when required.

India conveyed in a fraternal capacity that Mujib’s road map to freedom should not be rushed. It must be properly calibrated to avoid pitfalls. Heading for London would not serve any purpose. An empty podium of the top leadership at the operational base would be highly unproductive. Mujib must be all the time available to stand up and lead from where he was needed most-namely, the top of his citadel.

Mujib was to be advised that when he was talking of democracy he would have to spend a few years building his mass base on a countrywide basis to uphold and strengthen his democratic credentials. The road to freedom would be strewn with many hurdles. His capacity to overcome the roadblocks and help create congenial conditions for political action would prove his true mettle as a freedom fighter.
Mujib was told that as and when a million people would start assembling to hear him speak in his public rallies – that would be the moment when the world would acknowledge that he was truly a mass leader of a democratic freedom movement. For this he should hone and be prepared to employ his oratorical skills to their fullest extent to sway the people popularising his party, its ideals, and the commitment of the leadership. He was lucky to have near at hand a loyal newspaper and its editor, a forceful and a committed ideologue who was already busy conducting the campaign of awareness for “autonomy of East Pakistan.
India was ready to give advice, if asked, on how to conduct campaigns for enhanced mass membership of the Awami League in the rural heartland of East Pakistan, and also how to raise money through door-to-door collections of small amounts of donations to fund the party machinery. Mass awareness campaigns were most essential and the party leaders at various levels should be prepared to hold public rallies up and down the country.
India would be ready to come forward to offer a wholesome strategic support when a critical mass was achieved. But the task of creating a revolution was that of Mujib and his Awami League alone and no one else.
It was amazing that the road map laid on the table by India and agreed to by Mujib happened to tick like clockwork. From conceptualisation to completion of the mission, both sides worked smartly and with dedication, which helped the liberation struggle take a little over seven short years, beginning in 1963 and ending in 1971, to complete its mission.
India’s decision makers had an interesting thought in their minds, but I think it was no more than loud thinking. At such a nascent stage of the struggle, namely the early sixties, the question was: would it be possible for Mujib to consider employing a Gandhian style political action wedded to nonviolence deploying political tools like non-cooperation and civil disobedience? The thinking was that adopting nonviolence and non-cooperation as paths to
freedom against Pakistan’s hard-boiled extremist ideology could perhaps create an early potential for wider acceptability of the struggle in the international community. Mujib came a bit unstuck with this idea. He privately told me in confidence that honestly he admired Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, a national hero of India’s freedom movement, who did not quite agree with Mohandas K Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violence of offering the left cheek when slapped on the right however noble that spirit was. Mujib was convinced that adopting non-violence the creed or the methodology of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was not quite suitable in the case of Pakistan. He felt that there was a heaven and hell difference between the Pakistani Military Dictatorship, a brutal force of evil, in his way of thinking and British Imperialism, certainly an engine of exploitation, but under popular pressure open to persuasion and reason.
The British understood the power of nonviolent mass struggle for freedom and had respect for Mohandas Gandhi, but the Pakistan Army-essentially a killing machine driven by bigotry-would have no clue what it was all about.
The Bangladesh leader, however, knew that he had to strike a tactical compromise as a compulsion of realpolitik given that he was dealing with Nehru, a Gandhian by conviction.
Mujib was well aware of the references made by Subhas Chandra Bose in his speeches broadcast in 1943/1944 from occupied Singapore during World War II of his high regard for Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership of India’s freedom struggle founded on nonviolence, noncooperation and civil disobedience. Mujib, however, thought that the broadcasts of Bose were in reality also tactical ploys employed by him to keep criticism on the home front at bay while the armed struggle led by the Azad Hind Fauj-Liberation Army of India created by Bose – continued its military campaign in full vigour against British Imperial Army.
Mujib decided to pick and choose from Bose’s model in that he would make references in his speeches, when occasion arose, extolling the virtues of “peaceful non-cooperation” with the military dictatorship during the course of the liberation struggle. This meant dropping the word “nonviolence” for fear of alienating the rank and file of the party. The use of the expression “nonviolence” would look like an unduly strong Indian influence at play. Mujib was not slow to adopt this new tactical change of course and made discreet references in his speeches in public rallies during the entire seven-year period of his political campaign to the need to follow the path of peaceful non-cooperation with the military authorities.
Come 1971, a floodgate of opportunities opened for Mujib to test his doctrine of “peaceful non-cooperation” with the Military Dictatorship of Pakistan. However, he was convinced secretly in his mind that the final push would have to be recourse to armed struggle and military action if the liberation struggle were to succeed.
3
The unfolding final phase

March 1971. Mujib calls a national shut down a Hartal in Bengali – from 2 to 6 March, 1971 and goes on to hold a mass rally in Paltan Maidan. Dhaka on 3 March 1971. He calls the mother of all mass rallies on 7 March 1971. It proved to be a watershed event. Mujib and his Awami League (AL) had spent years working hard on mass mobilisation of the people towards achieving “autonomy” for East Pakistan. There was no hint of an armed struggle. However, for reasons best known to General Yahya Khan, the Military Dictator ordered general elections. These were to be held in two parts: one for West Pakistan and the other for East Pakistan. The dates announced for East Pakistan were from 7 December 1970 to 17 January 1971. It was remarkable that the elections were free and fair. Nobody raised voices of criticism claiming that they were otherwise. The AL won 167 seats out of a total of 169 allotted for East Pakistan. This massive electoral win transformed Mujib into the unchallenged supreme leader of the people of East Pakistan. As the explosive political situation headed towards a crescendo, he dropped the word “autonomy” and replaced it with “emancipation”.
Mujib was now ready to move forward to the next stage of the struggle. He felt that his political position was now strong enough to experiment with something like Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India Movement of 1942. He called a Hartal or a national shutdown of the civil administration of East Pakistan for five days from 2 March to 6 March 1971. It was supposed to be a mass political action and to make it a total success he appealed for national unity.
Following the example of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s slogan “Give me blood, I will give you freedom”, Mujib coined a slogan of his own: “Give me unity, I will give you liberty.”
The Hartal was a complete success. For five days nothing moved in East Pakistan. Mujib called a mass rally at the Paltan Maidan, Dhaka, first on 3 March 1971 in the midst of the Hartal and the next one on 7 March after the Hartal was over.
Addressing a mass rally at the Paltan Maidan Dhaka on 3 March under the auspices of the Students League, the youth wing of the AL, Mujib asked the people in his words all the seventy-five million Bengalis of East Pakistan-to stop paying taxes. He appealed to all employees of the government and semi-government bodies, autonomous corporations and other public and private offices, the High Court, and all other law courts in the land to abstain from attending their offices. Shops, cinemas houses, schools, and colleges were to remain closed; all public transport had to be off the roads in a show of “peaceful non-cooperation” and civil disobedience. It was a call to shut down the country for five days. The Hartal was Mujib’s way to place Pakistan Army on notice to quit East Pakistan and leave the country to the people to run.
Fluttering black flags were held aloft by hundreds and thousands of the assembled crowd proclaiming defiance. These were punctuated by the chanting of slogans like “Joy Bangla” Long live Bangladesh – “Bongo Bondhu Mujibur Rahman Zindabad”, Bongo Bondhu in Bengali meaning the Friend of Bangladesh and Zindabad meaning Long Live. Creating an electrifying atmosphere, raising his voice Mujib went on to say that the Bengalis could no more be suppressed into submission because now they were determined to be “free citizens of a free country.”

On 6 March 1971, General Yahya Khan declared that he had decided to summon the National Assembly on 25 March 1971 and also announced the appointment of Lieutenant General Tikka Khan as the Governor of East Pakistan. Lieutenant General Tikka Khan was a hated figure among the Bengalis, who knew him as the “Butcher of Balochistan” for having ordered as the military governor of Baluchistan a heavy crackdown on the civilian population for daring to lead a rebellion demanding “independence” resulting in huge mortality. Mujib saw the summoning of the National Assembly as a mask to delay what his demand was namely the transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people of East Pakistan. He decided to boycott both the calls announced by General Yahya Khan.
The second mass rally, called on 7 March 1971 at the Paltan Maidan, Dhaka, turned out to be a watershed moment. Conscious that the matter was coming to a head and ignoring the fear of death if disturbances were to break out, a million people gathered to have a “darshan” meaning to see Mujibur Rahman in person and hear him speak.
For the first time, a new flag of Bangladesh was unfurled to a thunderous applause. The flag was bottle green in colour, with a red sun in the middle and a map of Bangladesh superimposed on the red sun. The fluttering flag was cleverly placed next to where Mujib was to stand and speak. It represented raising the banner of revolution.
In the charged atmosphere, with his soaring oratory Mujib declared, “The genocide must stop forthwith. Martial Law must be withdrawn immediately. Power to the elected representatives of the people must be transferred here and now. Until these objectives are attained our struggle must continue. This struggle is the struggle for emancipation. This struggle is the struggle for independence. Prepare yourselves for a long struggle. Turn every house into a fortress of resistance. Resist the enemy with whatever you have.” The speech, which came to be known as the “Voice of Thunder” speech, sounded like a clarion call for independence. Its live transmission was banned by Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, so a taped version was broadcast shortly after the rally over the underground radio station Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra, translated into English it was the “Radio Free Bangladesh.” The radio station broadcast Mujib’s “Voice of Thunder” speech once every evening from 7 March 1971 to 16 December 1971.
That those eighteen days from 7 March 1971 to 25 March 1971 would turn out to be an ominous lull before the coming storm everybody had foreseen.
As the Liberation Struggle headed towards the final phase, 25 March 1971 turned out to be the official starting point of a brutal military crackdown on the civilian population of East Pakistan, described by the world at large as a Genocide which lasted nine months. The momentous day, the horrendous bloodbath at Dhaka University, built up a head of steam of great power, transforming the liberation struggle into a surging mass of mobilisation of people power. What surprised the world and shocked the military authorities in Rawalpindi was the unexpectedly determined response of the proverbial “meek Bengalis to the bloody onslaught. It triggered the beginnings of a ferocious guerrilla warfare, led by the Awami League’s armed militia the Mukti Bahini, the Soldiers of Freedom. As the Mukti Bahini’s firepower increased in its intensity, it emerged as a serious military threat source of attrition targeting the troops of the Pakistan Army. As the insurgency began bleeding the military having been pushed to the corner Pakistan was left with no alternative except to go headlong to launch a pre-emptive strike on the western sector of India as a diversionary tactic. In response, India unreservedly committed all its tactical reserves into the war effort while the Mukti Bahini provided the iron fist of a strategic thrust that rapidly crippled the
Pakistan Army’s fighting capabilities. The war against Pakistan Army was now being fought at two levels. It was like two separate explosive eruptions of a volcano working in tandem, gushing out hot lava at an uncontrollable speed. There was no stopping until it reached the decisive final moment.
The unfolding story The Military Dictator General Yahya Khan had announced on 6 March that he would summon the National Assembly on 25 March 1971 in Dhaka. Thus 25 March became the DDay in the chronology of events. Veiled in secrecy, when the announcement was made, there was no word about who would be appointed as the Prime Minister. Suspecting that the minority leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto would be installed as the Prime Minister of Pakistan in a last-minute announcement, Mujibur Rahman decided to boycott the National Assembly’s extraordinary session and declared that the Awami League would not allow the session to be held.

Mujib’s Awami League had secured an absolute majority in the National Assembly while Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was a clear runner-up. The rules of engagement in the formation of government in the Army-backed Pakistani version of democracy being different from the conventional ones, the PPP laid its claim to be chosen as the ruling party, saying that it represented a larger territorial area comprising four provinces of West Pakistan-namely the Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and North West Frontier Province.
Bhutto had argued that the Awami League, although it had the numbers on its side, represented only one province-namely East Pakistan. How then could Mujib, the leader of just one province, rule over the people of four other provinces of the republic? The PPP leader had therefore the right of first refusal in the formation of the Federal Government in Islamabad.
Bhutto’s standpoint was accepted by the military authorities as legitimate while Mujib’s claim to form the federal government was dismissed as untenable.
Meanwhile Bhutto undertook a whirlwind tour through town and country, spreading his word, justifying why he should be made the Prime Minister and not Mujib. It was incredible that Bhutto, who endlessly boasted that he was the beacon of democracy in Pakistan, had by then lost his democratic legitimacy with the people of East Pakistan and earned for himself accolades like the running dog of American imperialism”, “a Chinese lackey”, or “a poodle of the Pakistan Army”.
In the highly surcharged internal political atmosphere in Pakistan, Bhutto, a past master in coining catchy slogans, also took a swipe and described in a fit of angry overstatement that the Awami League was a paid agent of India. The ultimate justification for denying Mujib his rightful place as the Prime Minister of Pakistan was the suspicion that the Awami League enjoyed the support and backing of India, Pakistan’s arch-rival and enemy number one. There was no question of reposing trust on Mujib, a Bengali and never a true Muslim nor a loyal Pakistani. He could not therefore be the Prime Minister.
The nervousness of the military authorities in facing Mujib’s one-upmanship was quite palpable. In what looked comical in style and content, the Martial Law authorities spread a politically motivated distortion that the Bengali Muslims followed certain rituals in their daily practice of Islam which reflected the existence of a residual influence of Hinduism on them. That made the Punjabi Muslims, mainly orthodox Deobandis in their religious orientation, dismissive of the credentials of the Bengalis as true Muslims or Haqiqi Momins. How could
then the representatives of these “half Muslims” of East Pakistan a phrase coined in West Pakistan rule over the Islamic Republic? Every dirty trick that was available with the Army in its political armoury was employed to prevent Mujib from becoming the Prime Minister.
The sordid saga of attempting to tamper with the popular will freely expressed, which was something of a rare commodity in army-ruled Pakistan, was handled by the politically inept military brass with such spiteful clumsiness and naivety that the General Head Quarter (GHQ’s) dirty tricks split political Pakistan right in the middle. The fundamental reality of the existence of ethnic divisions in the Pakistani polity–which had so long remained hidden under the carpet-was now out in the open for anybody to see.
The creation of an awareness of the existence of ethnic schisms in Pakistan resulting from the mishandling of the Bangladesh crisis for which the Pakistan Army cannot but take the full blame, was to prove to be far more of a potent force than the religious unity of the Islamic nation. Bangladesh was the first casualty.
The outbreak of separatist movements of the Balochis, the Sindhis, and the Pashtuns founded on simmering discontent against alleged repression and exploitation of the politically dominant Punjabi elements in Pakistani politics was waiting to happen. The Bangladesh Liberation Struggle only hastened the process of separatism among the other subnational groups in Pakistan.
The rise of ethno-nationalism would remain the most damaging security legacy of the Pakistan Army. It sowed the seeds of an implosion and the destruction of Pakistan’s unity and territorial integrity in the long run.
I wish to quote the instance of an interesting discussion held in the seventies that Dr Henry Kissinger, then America’s National Security Adviser had with Deng Xio Ping, the Chinese Supreme Leader known for introducing market reforms in the Chinese economy that changed the world. Dr Kissinger asked Deng what he thought of the French Revolution, to which Deng is said to have replied, “It is too early to say.” Did he hear the question properly? He confirmed, yes he did. Although quite old, he was certainly not senile. Was he trying to make a point in his own way with Chinese characteristics? Maybe, maybe not. Whatever might have been the case, I for one would like to rephrase Deng’s alleged reply and relate it to the Bangladesh experience. Like Deng. I also think that it is too early to say what impact the horrifying brutality of the genocide and the heinous crime of mass rape of the women of Bangladesh in 1971 perpetrated by the Pakistan Army would have on the future of Pakistan as a nation. If there is something called natural justice, most God-fearing men with their sense of humanity are likely to nurture a thought deep in their minds that one day sometime in the future Pakistan would be called upon to pay a heavy price for the enormous crime committed by its soldiers under orders from the top against their fellow citizens who were none other than their own co-religionists.
In political Pakistan, irrespective of the benefit of hindsight forty years after the event, there is till a determined tendency on the part of the ruling elite to reject charges blaming the generals for the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The generals would never accept that it was their own goal” that led to the strategic disaster of 1971. They wholly blame India for it. The thinking in the GHQ in Rawalpindi is: Pakistan would never forget nor forgive India for its perfidious intervention in the internal affairs of Pakistan in 1971 and it must and would do everything possible to take revenge on India. Granted that Pakistan lost East Pakistan in 1971, but make no mistake: India too would have to lose sooner than later a large part of its territory to Pakistan. The State of Jammu and Kashmir for instance was what was in their mind.

In addition to the military ambition of grabbing Kashmir, one can also catch glimpses of a broader aim to escalate the conflict with India with a view to dismember the country. Pakistan’s territorial ambitions on India may or may not be realistic, but one thing is certain: that its line of assertiveness certainly serves a purpose-namely to keep Pakistan Army at the centre stage of Pakistani politics.
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4
Enter General Tikka Khan
“The Butcher of Bangladesh On 6 March 1971 General Tikka Khan took over as the Military Governor of East Pakistan. He arrived in Dhaka with a detailed brief in his pocket given by the GHQ in Rawalpindi that he should waste no time in getting reinforcements from West Pakistan and deploy the troops with no loss of time. Within just a few days after his arrival, two full Pakistan Army divisions were airlifted to East Pakistan. Lieutenant General AAK Niazi was appointed General Officer Commanding, Eastern Command, Pakistan Army and was posted in Dhaka. The military was provided with an order of battle under the command of Lieutenant General AAK Niazi while full compliments of heavily armed paramilitary forces were sent out to the districts. It soon became obvious that preparations for a military crackdown were now under way.
25 March 1971 Operation Searchlight. The military crackdown begins,
In an ominous show of force, the Army and the paramilitary forces were deployed in full strength on the roads of Dhaka on 25 March 1971. From very early in the moming there was a foreboding among the citizenry, who saw from what was happening on the streets that something horrible was about to take place. Unafraid of the heavy army presence on the Dday 25 March 1971 when Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code was imposed on the city banning the assembly of more than five people together, the students of Dhaka University, challenging the authority of the Army, started a pro-democracy protest rally within the compound of the University.
The troops moved in with their heavy weaponry, all guns blazing. Automatic weapons like thomson submachine carbine guns were used which could fire seven hundred fifty rounds in a minute. The noisy crowd of thousands of unarmed sloganeering young men and women who had gathered in the university precincts were mowed down mercilessly. One of those who survived the blood bath later described it as Dhaka’s equivalent of Jalianwalla Bagh Massacre in India of the empire days. Those who died included students of Dhaka University and other colleges in the city, professors, the university’s admin staff, party political activists of various hues, rickshaw pullers and taxi drivers, onlookers and passers by and a whole lot of other ordinary people. According to independent estimates between six and seven thousand people lay dead on the ground. The massacre of 25 March ’71 in Dhaka produced the critical mass of the Bangladesh Revolution.
Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury, the Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University, was on a visit to London on a lecture tour. When he heard the news of the massacre of his students he was so overwhelmed with grief and anger that he called a press conference in London and declared, “It is genocide. Today, I renounce the citizenship of Pakistan and declare my allegiance to the liberation of Bangladesh. He did not even think for a minute about his family and their livelihood. He just resigned from his Vice Chancellorship of the Dhaka University. He showed a rare degree of moral conviction and commitment.
Shaikh Mujibur Rahman was in Dhaka on 25 March 1971. He was an eyewitness to the gruesome mass murder, the scale of which was never seen before. According to authoritative reports, Mujib was so moved when he saw the hundreds of dead bodies of mostly young people lying on the road soaked in blood that he became emotional and broke down into tears.
He quickly called an emergency meeting of Awami League’s senior leadership. A day later on 26 March 1971 he called a press conference and declared the “Independence of Bangladesh”.
It was an act of great courage on the part of Mujib because he made his independence declaration while standing on the soil of East Pakistan. He knew that the military authorities would see his declaration of independence as an act of treason. He was, however, prepared for the consequences. In fact he had warned his people in his speeches of 4, 6, and 7 March that soon the time would come when he would be taken into military custody and whisked away from his people to West Pakistan. He said that he was unlikely to return home alive. There was a possibility that he could be hanged on charges of treason and exhorted the people that even without him the liberation struggle must go on relentlessly till freedom was achieved. His declaration was a clarion call for the start of an armed struggle against the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan Army. His call to arms transformed the street protests into a fullfledged revolution.
Nobody was surprised when news broke out a day later on 27 March 1971 that Shaikh Mujibur Rahman was arrested from his residence at 32 Dhanmondi Residential Area in Dhaka and put on a military flight and taken to Karachi where he was placed under house arrest. Shortly thereafter he was moved to Mianwali and incarcerated in a prison cell as a political prisoner in solitary confinement. The description of the prison cell as given by Mujib himself after his release was the stuff of goose pimples. He was locked up in a small room and was not allowed to read newspapers, books, or magazines, there was no TV in his room, nobody to talk to. There was a hangman’s noose menacingly hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell. To add to the sense of morbidity, a grave was dug just outside his prison cell warning him that his time was up.
After Mujib was taken under military custody and flown to West Pakistan on 26 March 1971, the elected members of the National Assembly representing the Awami League all 167 of themmet at a secretly held conclave on 10 April 1971 at Baidyanathtala, Meherpur.
The newly designed Bangladesh national flag was unfurled and a proclamation was adopted dating it 10 April 1971 a) confirming the declaration of independence of Bangladesh made by Shaikh Mujibur Rahman on 26 March 1971 in Dhaka, b) declaring and constituting Bangladesh to be a Sovereign People’s Democratic Republic and c) resolving that till such time that a constitution was framed Shaikh Mujibur Rahman would remain the President of the Republic and Syed Nazrul Islam the Vice President of the Republic.
This historic proclamation was incorporated as a separate chapter in the constitution of Bangladesh of 1973. It was, however, expunged by the Bangladesh National Party (BNP-led) Government of Begum Khaleda Zia (2001-2006), arguing that the declaration was merely a news item and could not form part of the Constitution. A Special Committee for drafting a constitutional amendment was appointed in February 2011 by the Awami League-led government of Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina, whose job would be to decide on how to incorporate the chapter with the required amendment at an appropriate slot in the constitution.
The Army top brass who were handling the Bangladesh crisis-General Yahya Khan, the Military Dictator’: General Tikka Khan, the Military Governor of East Pakistan; and General AAK Niazi, the GOC Eastern Command Dhaka-were from the very beginning feeling unequal to the task facing them. Mujibur Rahman’s strategy and tactics adopted for conducting the Liberation Struggle which he had launched with India’s backing and support were proving too much for the generals.
Trained to fight wars, the generals were unable to figure out the finer points of the Bangladesh leader’s mass political campaign for freedom. Arresting Mujib and hanging him could prove too explosive considering his mass popularity. The minority leader Zulfiqar Al Bhutto, an establishment figure and a politician, could be taken on board and perhaps also serve a useful purpose to understand the nuances of Mujib’s political frolics, but the generals were not quite sure that he would be a trustworthy partner. They were aware that Bhutto had one problem: he was focussed far too much on his own political agenda than would be helpful to the generals.

Tied down with so many constraints, the Army decided to go in for desperate remedies to meet a desperate situation. The country had to be saved from disintegration. It would be a two-tier policy response to the crisis. The political response would be to launch a massive military crackdown on the unarmed civilian population. This should go concurrently with a no-holds-barred operation letting loose the army troops to drag Bengali women into the bunkers and trenches dug for war and subjecting them to rape. It was to be on such a scale that the liberation struggle would be killed once and for all.
Exercising the military option by going to war with India would help cut off the supply lines of material support. Mujib’s campaign would therefore be weakened.
It was noteworthy that Mujib, while addressing a million strong mass rally at Paltan Maidan in Dhaka 7 March 1971, had demanded of the military government to stop the “Genocide” in the countryside. It was for the first time that the international community heard that Pakistan Army had launched itself into a campaign of mass murder and mayhem in East Pakistan. It was on such a mass scale that the leader of the liberation struggle could not find a word other than to describe it as genocide.
According to other reports filtering out of the heavily censored environment in the provinces, the military had dug trenches all over the countryside in preparation for a full blown war with India. Reports had already started coming out that the troops of Pakistan Army deployed in the rural heartland had taken Bengali women as prisoners of war (before even the war began) and literally dragged them into the trenches and bunkers, forcibly and subjected them to mass rape. Needless to reiterate, the intention of committing such a heinous and despicable crime on the womenfolk on such a mass scale obviously was to demoralise and de-motivate the freedom fighters and dampen their vigour and enthusiasm as a fighting force.
The tally of civilian casualties of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle according to the figures compiled by the Government of Bangladesh was three million dead. However, according to other sources the figure was more like one and a half million dead. And nearly a quarter of a million women were raped in the trenches and bunkers dug for war by Pakistan Army troops. The perpetrators of the crimes were said to be troops of ethnic Punjabi origin. Later in a count collected from hospitals, rural primary health care centres, and homes of the victims all across Bangladesh, it was revealed that about two hundred thousand illegitimate children were born to these women victims of rape committed by the Pakistani troops. It was this head count of illegitimate children that confirmed the enormity of the crime.
There were also reports that during the period when a wave of religious extremism was sweeping Bangladesh in the nineties of the last century and the first decade of the new millennium, some of the terrorist outfits based in the Punjab Province of Pakistan like Harkat ul Jihad e Islami (HUJI) which has a strong base in Bangladesh, Lashkar e Tayyaba (LeT). Jaish e Mohammad, as indeed al Qaeda and others had recruited from this pool of illegitimate progenies, both boys and girls, for terrorist activities against India and elsewhere.

It is a matter of great regret that none of the Western Governments who are always the first to come out with condemnations when even minor politically hyped instances of human rights violations occur in the third world countries-take for example the constant bashing the Indian security forces get in the State of Jammu and Kashmir on this issue chose to take no notice of the crimes of genocide and mass rape committed by the troops of Pakistan Army.
The one exception however was the stand taken by the UN Agency on Universal Human Rights in 1981. It honestly acknowledged the enormity of the crime of Genocide committed by the Pakistan Army in Bangladesh. It stated in a narrative, “Among the genocides in human history the highest number of people killed in such a short span of time (nine months) was in Bangladesh in 1971. An average of 6,000 to 12,000 people were killed every single day. This was the highest daily average in history.” A lower estimate shows that one and a half million were killed, majority of whom were Hindus. A Commission of Enquiry appointed by the Pakistan Government, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, recorded testimonies of Pakistan Army field commanders who quoted General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, General Officer Commanding, Eastern Command of Pakistan Army in 1971, as asking the question “How many Hindus have you killed today?” as a matter of routine.
As a matter of comparison of the play of realpolitik, witness the February 2011 outbreak of the pro-democracy protest movement in Libya demanding the ouster of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi when five to ten thousand people were killed in the confrontations between the protagonists of the revolution and the government forces. The UN Security Council passed an unanimous resolution seizing the assets of Libyan President Qaddafi and his family, authorised imposition of a nofly zone over Libya, slammed an arms embargo on Libya and declared that Qaddafi and his henchmen would have to face prosecution in the International Criminal Court at the Hague. In contrast the military top brass in Pakistan as indeed ZA Bhutto, who were collectively responsible for killing over a million and a half men and women and raping a quarter of a million women were provided protection instead.
It is heart-breaking to see that the international community has never thought of taking up the cases during the last forty years since 1971 for bringing the perpetrators of this extreme kind of violence against humanity to justice. It is therefore left to Prime Minister Hasina Wajed to take up the cases of crimes against humanity and bring them to justice.
Adolf Hitler took six years (1939-1945) to kill six million Jews in the gas chambers. The Jewish people have neither forgiven nor forgotten the event. They have done everything possible to keep alive the memory of those who died and worked hard to bring the perpetrators to justice. The Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War had committed the most heinous crime by using Chinese and Korean women in their thousands as prostitutes, in other words raping them. These women were given the name “comfort girls”. Both China and South Korea forced Japan after so many years to apologise and pay compensation to the families of these “comfort girls”.
There is a strong case for compensating the families of the dead and the victims of rape in Bangladesh. I have seen media reports recently that some women’s organisations in Bangladesh as indeed India have come together and are trying to raise these issues in international forums like the UN and the International Criminal Court. I hope they succeed in their efforts and get Pakistan Army to stand trial for War Crimes. There are clear provisions in international law to initiate criminal proceedings against the perpetrators of the crime and bring them to justice even at this late stage. There is no denying that there is an imperative need to raise the awareness of the international community, under Article 1 of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, about the denial of justice to the victims of the Bangladesh
Genocide of 1971. For evidence, the reference in the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights of 1981 will be sufficient to prove the case. There is also the absolute need to seek redress under Article 2 of the UN Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948, holding the parties in power accountable for their gross violations of human rights and also offering protection to deter future abuse. It is better late than never.

It has remained in the history of mankind the most grievous travesty of justice that the Holocaust of South Asia in 1971 has gone unmourned and the perpetrators of the horrendous crime have gone unpunished at the altar of real politik and the cold war compulsions of the Superpowers. Their pretensions as the upholders of universal human rights were exposed to be no more than hollow slogan mongering. Forget the superpowers; future generations of humankind would surely remember and honour the dead and the victims of rape with utmost dignity. Many in Bangladesh believe that if there were no war crimes tribunals set up to bring
erpetrators of the crimes to justice, it was because Bangladesh is a poor nation and has no oil in the ground, which is why the West turned its face the other way.
5
Justice Abu Sayeed
Choudhury Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury calls on Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi in London in the autumn of 1971 and discusses the question of the recognition by India of Bangladesh as a sovereign independent nation, It was the autumn of 1971. After having visited Bonn and Paris, the Indian Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi was in London on a mission to deliver a warning to her British counterpart, as she had done in the earlier stages of her tour to the German Chancellor and the French President, that unless the West demonstrated its sincerity of purpose and took radical steps to stop the genocide in East Pakistan, she would be left with no alternative but to take suitable action to defend India’s interests. Her concern was that having to take care of over ten million refugees fleeing the genocide in East Pakistan was too onerous an economic burden for India. It was imperative that the situation be reversed as quickly as possible.
Justice Choudhury, who was campaigning with the Senators and Representatives in the US Congress in Washington and lobbying delegates of member nations of the UN in New York-particularly the Islamic countries and mobilising their support for the cause of an independent Bangladesh, had just returned to his base in London. It was not a mere coincidence that Mrs Gandhi was visiting the British capital at that particular moment in time. In response to a personal request made by him to Apa B Pant, the Indian High Commissioner in London, a meeting was arranged for Justice Choudhury with the Indian PM at London’s elite Claridge Hotel where she was staying during her visit. Dictated by the need to keep the meeting a secret, Mrs Gandhi chose to meet Justice Choudhury in the small hours of the morning. The discussions started at two o’clock in the morning and lasted for three quarters of an hour.

Surprisingly, what Justice Choudhury disclosed in the course of his talks did not cause surprise or shock to Mrs Gandhi. He told the Indian PM that in a hurriedly convened meeting in Washington he had met US Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco presumably at his home. Sisco was accompanied by another gentleman who did not introduce himself. He was probably the CIA Chief. The twist in the tail was that after some pleasant casual talk, Joseph Sisco went on to plead quite seriously with him to abandon the Bangladesh Liberation Movement. In return, Justice Choudhury was promised a rich reward—namely the Presidency of Pakistan. Justice Choudhury was quite puzzled that such a suggestion could come from a middle-ranking officer of the US State Department on behalf of the State of Pakistan. But then those were the days of cold war and the moment was tense, calling for desperate remedies. It confirmed, if such a confirmation was needed, the rock solid permanence of the US-Pakistan strategic relationship, which has endured in fact flourished –to this day.

If Justice Choudhury had correctly interpreted what he had heard from the State Department official, it was obvious that Washington was engaged in a last ditch attempt at a political level that mattered to save Pakistan from disintegration.
Justice Choudhury was not a man to be swayed by inducements. He stayed composed, stood his ground and rejected the offer firmly. His sense of courtesy did not fail him either when he thanked the US officials for the high esteem in which they held him. He made a categorical statement to both the US officials, asserting that he was not seeking the prestige and the comfort of high political office but was merely an ordinary worker in the struggle for a sovereign independent state of Bangladesh; nothing would deviate him from his quest for the freedom of his people.

Justice Choudhury told Mrs Gandhi that the State Department official had also taken the line that the Hindu majority India could make it quite difficult for a breakaway Islamic East Pakistan to retain its independence if such a thing was ever achieved. Justice Choudhury politely reminded his interlocutor that if the people of Bangladesh could display such grit and determination as they had shown in their challenge to the might of a repressive military dictatorship like Pakistan, dealing with India, a secular liberal democracy, should pose no problem.
The Bangladesh leader also spoke of an earlier meeting he had, shrouded in secrecy, with Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the British Foreign Secretary in Edward Heath’s government. The Foreign Office had insisted on keeping the meeting under wraps because East Pakistan at that stage was still a part of Pakistan, a country with which the United Kingdom maintained excellent diplomatic relations. Sir Alec’s line of reasoning was not much different from the argument that he had encountered from Joseph Sisco, the US Assistant Secretary of State. The British Foreign Secretary raised with Justice Choudhury a point that, were Bangladesh to emerge sometime in the future as an independent state, had the leaders of a future Bangladesh ever taken into account what kind of a neighbourly relationship India would follow given its large Hindu majority population surrounding three quarters of the territory of Islamic Bangladesh? Had they factored in the kind of unease this new phenomenon would generate among the Bangladeshis? To these queries, Justice Choudhury’s reply was no different from the one he had given to Joseph Sisco later. An astute politician, Sir Alec was able to create an impression as the discussions proceeded that while he personally sympathised with the aspirations of the people, he was bound by his position to adhere to a policy of discretion, whereby his words should in no way convey anything resembling a commitment of support from the British Government. From what he told Mrs Gandhi, it was apparent that Justice Choudhury had found his meeting with Sir Alec Douglas-Home encouraging and felt grateful to the British government for the sympathy expressed, cautiously worded though it was, for the people of Bangladesh in their moment of crisis.

The Indian Prime Minister appreciated the discreet stand taken by the British Government. She also received Justice Choudhury’s unqualified consent to raise the subject, if circumstances permitted, of the proposal made by Joseph Sisco with US President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Dr Henry Kissinger in Washington, the next destination after London on her official itinerary.
In his books Dr Kissinger made references to Mrs Gandhi’s meeting with Richard Nixon, describing it as stormy. This is borne out by the declassified Bangladesh papers, which underscored the sharp differences over Bangladesh that existed between the US President and the National Security Adviser on the one hand and the Indian Prime Minister on the other.

That apart, Justice Choudhury’s real intention of meeting Mrs Gandhi was to ask her when she planned to “recognise” Bangladesh as a sovereign, independent nation. A man in a hurry, he sought India’s diplomatic recognition without any further delay, convinced that once obtained it would set the pace for other nations to follow suit.

Mrs Gandhi responded with a reciprocal question for Justice Choudhury. She enquired: when Bangladesh emerged as a free and an independent nation and if elevated to a position of power with the capacity to influence the formulation of policy, would he be able to provide her certain assurances on the future shape of policies in so far as it was possible for him to do and so far in advance? With that, Mrs Gandhi, who genuinely admired the revolutionary zeal of the people of Bangladesh for having raised the banner of revolt against military repression and genocide, unfurled her own vision of the new nation’s political future. It read like a political testament.

Mrs Indira Gandhi wanted from Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury a commitment written in stone that Bangladesh, after its creation as a sovereign independent nation, would be: committed to the ideals of freedom and democracy, pluralism, secularism and socialism; the government would be accountable to the people; a polity that would be founded on Bengali nationalism; a state that would abjure religious orthodoxy and intolerance; a non-aligned country in its foreign policy formulations, a friendly neighbour conducting a mutually beneficial relationship with India on the basis of sovereign equality. Pleasantly surprised that Mrs Gandhi was contemplating the political future of Bangladesh even before it had come into existence, Justice Choudhury was quite forthcoming in his reply. He assured the Prime Minister that Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the freedom struggle, had publicly made commitments several times over to all the policy positions she had mentioned. He felt that should power be vested in Mujib in post-independence Bangladesh, Mrs Gandhi need harbour no fears at all on the points raised by her not being followed through. Justice Choudhury did not however hide his deep misgivings about the possibility of Mujib being tried and punished for treason for his role in leading the separatist movement. If Bangladesh came into being, could it be without Mujib, an orphaned state? He sensed an element of fear and a foreboding lurking in Mrs Gandhi’s mind from the manner in which she sought assurances from him. On his part, Justice Choudhury was equally deeply distressed at the sad thought. To allay her anxieties on that score, Justice Choudhury gave his commitment, for whatever it was worth as he put it on the issues that aroused her concerns.

As the meeting was about to end, Justice Choudhury politely raised a point with Mrs Gandhi, asking her if she was aware that the words “secular” and “socialist” did not actually feature in the Constitution of India. Unwilling to be outwitted, Mrs Gandhi replied that she was not unaware of it and was working on it to rectify the omission as soon as circumstances permitted within the constraints of India’s parliamentary system of government.

Nearly five years had gone by when Mrs Gandhi was able to present in India’s lower House of Parliament, Lok Sabha, the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution of India, introducing the words “secular” and “socialist” in the preamble. The two critical words came into effect in 1977. Justice Choudhury’s intervention carried the day and may well be regarded as his personal contribution to the formalisation of the concepts of secularism and socialism in the Constitution of India twenty-seven years after its promulgation in 1950.
When I was invited to attend and record the minutes of the Indira Gandhi-Abu Sayeed Choudhury meeting in London in 1971, little did I visualise that it would turn out to be such a historic one.
At a dinner hosted in Banga Bhavan–the Presidential Palace in Dhaka on 18 March 1972 in honour of the visiting Indian Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi, Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury, now the President of Bangladesh, declared: “The return of Bongo Bondhu Shaikh Mujibur Rahman in our midst has brought to an end all our anxieties and nightmares. We are now in the midst of another struggle. This struggle is for the realisation of the ideals of democracy, socialism, secularism and Bengali nationalism as propounded by Bongo Bondhu. Under his bold and able leadership these will form the basis of our new State.”
6
The Gathering Storm

If one takes a long-term overview of the military thinking of the generals of the Pakistan Army, I am afraid, one gets a pretty poor impression of their strategic vision. It looks flawed at first sight. It is pathetic right to the end. They have waged too many wars in the last sixty. five years. The short list of target countries is restricted to India and Afghanistan. Left to themselves the Indians and the Afghans are essentially peaceful people. By waging wars, the men in uniform in Rawalpindi made the lives of the people in both these countries absolute hell. To what purpose? The irony is that they failed to win any one of the many wars they waged. In the Bangladesh War of 1971 they lost half their country. After 9/11 of 2001 the United States, Pakistan’s long-standing friend, was provoked to declare a war on terror, which ended the Pakistan-backed Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Nurtured by the ISI, the Taliban had provided the much sought-after strategic depth for Pakistan needed for a future war with India. The strategic depth was achieved by destabilising the country but it was lost like a flash in the pan. The defeat of Pakistan in 1971 and the fall of the Taliban in 2001 should have been lessons for Pakistan. But like the Bourbons, they learnt nothing and forgot nothing, Pakistan’s wars – they were serialised proxy wars – left in the targeted countries only memories of rivers of blood, terrible human suffering, broken economies, orphaned children, widowed women, and destroyed families. As for Pakistan, it was reduced to a nation perennially carrying the begging bowla state surviving on hand outs from the US, China, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, helped by China, Pakistan’s doctrine of minimum nuclear deterrence successfully prevented the victim nations from responding militarily to the provocations Waging of wars must be an option of the last resort. There are a million ways to settle disputes peacefully. These processes must be pursued till all avenues are exhausted. But Islamabad gives the impression that, at least in its relationship with India, it has hardly shown any interest in pursuing the path of peaceful coexistence seriously and sincerely. An example of this mind-set is evident from what General Pervez Musharraf in his capacity as the Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan Army had said on 11 April 1999 in a speech at the English Speaking Union in Karachi: “India is a hegemonic power. Low intensity conflict with India will continue even if the Kashmir dispute is resolved.” Evidently, Pakistan has a habit of inventing disputes where there are none. One can therefore surmise that traditionally Pakistan is a warmongering nation.

More recently Pakistan has earned the dubious distinction of being described as a “terrorist state”. This is how the distinguished author and thinker Salman Rushdie labelled Pakistan in the aftermath of the killing by US Special Forces of Osama bin Laden, the terror mastermind lodged in a million-dollar mansion right in front of the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, Abbottabad, on 2 May 2011. Pakistan is known to have given shelter to a whole range of dreaded terrorists on its soil actively pursuing their murderous activities. No other country has harboured terror gangs on such a large scale anywhere else on this planet. It is quite extraordinary how Pakistan’s terror industry has become a novel money-making machine for the military men and also a source of employment for the gun-toting underclass. The people of Pakistan do not deserve such insinuation.

Pakistan believes that it can grab the Indian part of Kashmir by running a proxy war against India. Islamabad claims Kashmir on religious grounds but for India, Kashmir lies at the heart of its secular democratic national identity. India is the home to 175 million Muslims. Kashmir is but a small part of the national sum total. It is difficult to visualise that Pakistan will be able to dislodge India from Kashmir even by waging a full-fledged conventional war. India is a much bigger economic and a military power and defeating India would not be an easy task. This is where Islamabad’s strategic vision-deficit lies. A nuclear exchange would not be worthwhile because it would incinerate most of the region and therefore it would not be worth having control over so much radioactive ash. India’s massive second strike nuclear capability, based on on land, air and sea, has a relevance of its own. It is supposed to be a doctrine of maximum deterrence.

The LOC is the solution; it is not the problem. So why does Pakistan continue its gratuitous belligerence against India? Why is it wasting its scarce resources arming itself for war with India? For what? It is for the people of Pakistan to ponder over this question.
On the domestic front, creating self-inflicted wounds like Bangladesh was Pakistan’s unmitigated strategic blunder. Mujib wanted autonomy and what the people of East Pakistan got in return was a savage military crackdown, a genocide and a campaign of mass rape. The atrocities triggered a revolution which led to the birth of a sovereign Bangladesh.
When Pakistan Air Force launched its pre-emptive strike across the international border on India in its western sector on 3 December 1971, it was supposed to be part of a ploy of distraction to disengage New Delhi from its suspected involvement in the on-going conflict in the country’s eastern wing, East Pakistan. The thinking was that provoking a limited conventional war in a theatre a thousand miles away from the hotspot of turmoil-punching India a bloody nose-should be sufficient to achieve the purpose of throwing India off balance and force the enemy to back off.
An audit of the military campaign indicated that it was certainly not well thought through and worse, it was reckless in its conceptualisation. A number of mistakes were made. Among them, what the in-house military think tank failed to take into account was the range of unintended consequences which could result from broadening the conflict.
Thus, for example, the generals could not visualise that as a consequence of the ninemonth-long campaign of atrocities, the population in the eastern wing of the country had turned hostile. The Pakistan Army now stood face-to-face with an uncompromisingly antagonistic population in East Pakistan, representing one half of the country.
If the generals thought that by employing a diversionary tactic they could quella genuine revolution which had erupted like a volcano, what better insight could one get of a complete lack of strategic vision on their part? They did not even seem to have the capacity for introspection of the mistakes they made in killing their own people and raping their own women. With their limited knowledge of the history of democratic mass movements, the military men of Rawalpindi, who represented the Punjabi ruling elite of Pakistan, believed that the Bangladesh revolution was a creation of India. They were proved completely wrong. It was a spontaneous mass uprising of a long-repressed people fired by democratic aspirations. If India had agreed to offer its sympathy and support, it was because the Bangladesh Revolution was seen as a democratic and a secular mass movement for freedom.
India’s idealism of the freedom of the human spirit was seen by enlightened sections of the global community as a winning argument against Pakistan’s tenet of religious fanaticism, violent intolerance, and uncompromising obscurantism.
The strange thing is that the Indians and the Pakistanis have the same DNA; but then why is it that such diametrically opposite ideological orientations exist between these two people passes comprehension.
The General Headquarters of Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi had waged two wars with India before one in 1947 and the other in 1965. Both these invasions were offensive in nature, meant to carry war into enemy territory, and were intended to beat India into submission and grab Kashmir, incorporating it into Pakistan. Despite meticulous planning and detailed preparations in each of these operations, Islamabad had failed to achieve its avowed military objectives.
The 1971 War was different from the earlier two encounters. It had nothing to do with Kashmir. This time round, Pakistan was left fighting to defend its own territorial integrity, threatened by a home-grown ethno-national liberation struggle whose aim was to break away from Pakistan and go its own way to freedom from the shackles of what was seen as slavery.
With the benefit of hindsight, provoking India to join the third India-Pakistan War, at a time when Pakistan was going through an internal turmoil driven by Bengali nationalism that had the potential to unravel the nation, was a high-risk gamble which Pakistan could have done without
A hark back to the first articulation in 1948 of India’s national security policy
in confronting the threat from Pakistan. India’s first articulation of its national security policy on Pakistan was formulated over half a century ago. Curiously the policy formulation has stayed relevant to this day. This was because of the never-changing hostility of Pakistan. It was penned by none other than Bhola Nath Mullik, better known as BN Mullik, the legendary and cerebral Director of Intelligence Bureau who held the post when the Pakistan-sponsored tribal invasion of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir was launched in 1947. The invasion was led mainly by the Waziri tribesmen owing allegiance to the Fakir of Ipi, the powerful clerical leader of the unruly region known as FATA, the Federally Administered Tribal Agency, located east of the Durand Line. The tribal invasion was funded and armed by the Pakistan Army. Mullik was the earliest among the senior advisers of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister after independence, to sense Pakistan’s evolving policy of perennial hostility towards India. He believed that the tribal invasion of Kashmir was not a one-off event but just the beginning of a long and sustained campaign to undermine India’s national security.
Pakistan’s challenge was based on the rising tide of a global ideology of high visibility, religious extremism and terrorist violence while India’s response was determinedly local, founded on the Gandhian principles of nonviolence and peaceful coexistence. The harsh reality was that Pakistan’s determined aggressiveness hogged the headlines in the world media while thanks to its low-key reactive responses, almost always adopting a defensive security posture particularly on the Kashmir question, India remained marginalised in the international stakes for a long time, confined to the footnotes of history.
Reflecting on his concerns in a demi-official note meant for the Prime Minister, the Intelligence Chiet BN Mullik wrote, “As long as Pakistan exists in its present form, it will remain the single most dangerous security threat to India’s territorial integrity.” Unless Pakistan formally abandoned its two nation theory—the ultimate justification of its existence – at some future date, an unlikely possibility by any account, the validity of Mullik’s comment surviving time and event could not be discounted.
The intelligence chief’s warning to the Prime Minister, conveyed as early as 1948, was that Pakistan’s belligerence towards India was likely to remain a permanent feature, a continuing phenomenon, even beyond Kashmir. He also made a pointed suggestion that as India faced Pakistan in future confrontations and along the line formulated its security responses in the light of changing times, New Delhi should “remain sensitive to the reality of the ethnic divisions in Pakistan’s polity.” No Indian Prime Minister has ever disowned this policy recommendation
In the backdrop of BN Mullik’s formulation of his strategic vision, highlighting the need for India to be sensitive to the reality of ethnic divisions in the neighbouring country, Pakistan Army’s crackdown on the Bengalis of East Pakistan seemed like a premonition come true, plunging the country into turmoil. It dragged India into the Bangladesh turmoil. This opened a window of opportunity for India to weaken the enemy by pulling down its much despised and divisive ideology known as Two Nation Theory or TNT that led to the partition of India in 1947 on religious lines. India never believed in the theory of clash of civilisations, although it was aware that strong views existed on this subject on both sides of the divide. Its overarching political conviction was that the planet was a big enough place where all religions, cultures, and civilisations could live together in peaceful coexistence and harmony, New Delhi’s perennial search has been for inputs to strengthen the core of its secular credentials and solidify its composite and inclusive national identity. If the divisive Two Nation Theory was to stand discredited and rubbished into the proverbial dustbin of history, supporting democracy and secularism in Bangladesh was an opportunity that India could not let go by.
The strategic dimension apart, at the personal level too, Mrs Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, had a uniquely sentimental attachment to Bengali culture and tradition. She had studied at Vishwa Bharati University in Santiniketan in West Bengal, sitting at the feet of Rabindranath Tagore, an icon of Bengali culture and India’s greatest humanist. And when East Pakistan’s Bengali-speaking people rose in revolt against the genocide, it was regarded by critics as natural for her to empathise with their cause and jump spontaneously into the fray in their support. Military considerations in extending succour and support to the cause of Bangladesh were weighty by any yardstick but these entered the picture only later, almost as a second thought.

That apart, Mrs Gandhi had taken note of the historic reality that commonalty of religious beliefs had failed to unite the two mutually exclusive ethnic groups-the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan and the Punjabi Muslims of West Pakistan. The truth was that the ethnic Bengalis and the ethnic Punjabis belonged to two different cultural traditions and these were to prove in time to be more of a potent force that set apart the multi-ethnic people of the country than what religion could do to unite them. The failure of religion to unite people into single political units was convincingly proved when more than half of India’s Muslim population refused to migrate to Pakistan in 1947 even though Pakistan was created as the homeland of the Muslims of the subcontinent. As a cultural entity, Indian Muslims felt comfortable to stay back in secular democratic India.
The other example is the Arabs. They are all devout followers of Prophet Muhammad but politically they are not one nation. The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Iraqis, and so on are culturally different people although they are all Muslims, even speaking variations of the same language. So if the Bengali Muslims, speaking a different language from the Punjabi Muslims, craved for a separate national status for themselves and aspired to live in peace with the people of their own faith and even people of other faiths it was their choice-why should one deny them their inalienable sovereign right? The same principle would apply to the other ethnic groups in Pakistan like the Pashtuns, the Balochis, and the Sindhis. If Pakistan was to have grown into a genuine, mature democracy abjuring military rule and
religious intolerance such internal divisions would not have arisen.
It is worthy of note that 25 March 1971 signified to Bangladesh what 11 September 2001 was to the United States. The former, a genocide of great brutality which triggered a liberation movement, changed the history of the region while the latter, an unprovoked terrorist atrocity of great intensity which led to the declaration of the longest running war (the war on terror) changed history itself. The first was a cold war phenomenon and the second a post-cold war seminal event. Though the circumstances were different, a common factor between them was the involvement of people of the same religious faith. But there was a difference. While the 1971 genocide was an outrage committed by Muslims against fellow Muslims, they were also citizens of the same country, while the other was an attack by Muslims intolerant of the Western world’s most prestigious icons of commercial success and military power. The world was stunned that such cruelties could happen and sadly they happened before our very own eyes.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had many robust leadership qualities but what made her stand head and shoulders above many Indian or for that matter other world leaders were 1. her strategic vision and 2. her daring and determination.
In a period of nine months from the moment the twin scourges of murder and rape had begun in East Pakistan, an exodus of over ten million people had taken place, streaming into the eastern region of India including West Bengal, Assam, Manipur, Mehgalay, Mizoram, etc. Mrs Gandhi paid personal visits to the refugee camps to make an assessment of the situation and came to the conclusion that while the refugees would have to go back to their home country, their plight and their very presence in India in such large numbers had to be highlighted before world leaders to impress upon them the gravity of the situation.
The majority of the ten million refugees from East Pakistan who had come over to India found refuge in West Bengal. The people of West Bengal welcomed them with open arms. To the protagonists of the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle it was a heart-warming experience. They felt so reassured that they decided to establish the seat of a provisional government in
alcutta, describing it as “The People’s Democratic Republic of Bangladesh”. All the 167 elected Awami League Members of the National Assembly (MNAS) out of the total of 313 representing the whole of Pakistan were present when the Government in exile was formed in Mujib Nagar in Calcutta, West Bengal, on 17 March 1971. A Secretariat was also set up to look after the day-to-day administrative work of the government in exile.

Among the Awami League leaders, the one who took the leadership role was Tajuddin Ahmed, elected as the Prime Minister-designate of the government in exile. Three other leaders who took prominent part in the provisional government were Nazrul Islam, elected as Vice President; Abdus Samad Azad, elected as the Foreign Minister, and Khandakar Mushtaq ugh given a cabinet portfolio, later turned against the Awami League on ideological grounds. His detractors gave him the name of a fifth column, meaning a betrayer. After liberation, Tajuddin Ahmed, denied of the office of the Prime Minister of the new nation, tried to form a new political party of his own in protest which was politically of a different orientation from the Awami League. Consequently he fell from grace and lost his position from the party hierarchy.

The Indian Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi undertook in September/October 1971 a tour of some of the major world capitals like London, Paris, Bonn, and Washington. It was a diplomatic mission of great importance. She asked the world leaders to come to India’s support and help stop the genocide, and sought their assistance in getting the ten million refugees sent back home. In simple language, Mrs Indira Gandhi seemed to be sending a warning signal to the international community that if help for the return of the refugees was not forthcoming and if genocide was not stopped in East Pakistan, the world should expect a war breaking out between India and Pakistan.

It was a measure of Mrs Indira Gandhi’s sharp sense of a strategic vision-admittedly she had the benefit of an insider’s access to vital information that as early as September 1969 she could foresee that the India-Pakistan adversarial relationship was heading towards a defining moment. She felt the need for specialised advice on how to run a brand new phase in the conduct of India’s foreign policy and conceptualised the idea of setting up an external intelligence gathering unit under her personal command to focus on India’s troubled neighbourhood in general and Pakistan, India’s perennial tormentor, in particular.
Thus on 21 September 1969 was born the Cabinet Secretariat’s Research and Analysis Wing, RAW for short. The unusual naming of the new organisation was attributable to the two stalwarts of India’s intelligence community of that eraRam Nath Kao and Sankaran Nair. Ironically, RAW sounded like an abridged version of Operation RAWalpindi, the operational headquarters of Pakistan Army. Read in the reverse it was WAR, Once formed RAW played a pivotal role in providing operational guide lines to the Liberation Struggle right to its successful conclusion.
Following the gruesome events of 25 March 1971 in East Pakistan, Mrs Indira Gandhi had assembled around her a war cabinet of intellectuals, each of whom was said to be endowed with a sharp diplomatic vision of the strategy and tactics of war. It was Mrs Gandhi’s phenomenal achievement that she ensured without an error of judgement that her advisers had, as the embedded men and women of the media claimed, higher than average diplomatic skills too. To name some of them, the front ranking stalwarts were: Durga Prasad Dhar, Minister for Policy Planning in the Ministry of External Affairs; PN Haksar, Political Adviser; Ram Nath Kao, Secretary RAW; Sankaran Nair, Additional Secretary RAW, Tikki Kaul, Foreign Secretary: General Sam Maneckshaw, Chief of Army Staff (he was supported by two of his outstanding deputies: Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora and Lieutenant General JFR Jacob).

Pakistan’s Military Dictator General Yahya Khan and his field commanders General Tikka Khan, General Rao Farman Ali, and General AAK Niazi were no match for the Indian line up. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was also taken on board for advice but was treated as an outsider Pakistan’s war cabinet within a short period of time proved itself to be morally bankrupt and politically inept.

The Pakistan Army used to boast of having soldiers who had warrior-like qualities with combat skills far superior to those of the Indian Army. Pakistan Army’s Training Manuals described one Pakistani soldier to be equal to five Indian soldiers. This claim lay open to ridicule when Pakistan’s General Officer Commanding. Eastern Command, General AAK Niazi sat down before the cameras of the world media and signed the Instrument of Surrender before the General Officer Commanding in Chief of the India-Bangladesh Joint Command, General Jagjit Singh Aurora on 16 December 1971 in Dhaka who then took 93,000 Pakistani soldiers as Prisoners of War (POWs). This was the last time in history that a highly trained Islamic professional army laid down its arms before a non-Islamic professional army.

The Taliban too were defeated in the poppy fields of Afghanistan by the forces of the “coalition of the willing” led by the United States in 2003 but had refused to lay down arms and surrender. They simply melted away to return to the battlefield once again to fight the allied forces at a later date.
Despite such adversities, Pakistan Army’s War on Two Fronts-with India on the eastern front and Afghanistan on the western front continued to rage to this day.
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7

India and the Soviet Union sign The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and
Cooperation August 1971 India’s big headache was that should an India-Pakistan war break out and escalate into an allout conventional war, with Bangladesh being at the heart of the conflict, there was the near certainty of a foreign intervention on the side of Pakistan in the middle of the war. Islamabad had a formidable line up of military allies forged since 1954 when the US-sponsored Collective Security Alliance was set up. The Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) – also known as Baghdad Pact-and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) had come into being, linked to the mother alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Pakistan had joined as a key military alliance partner in this Collective Security Alliance system created and led by the United States. The United States of America apart, the other most powerful allies of Pakistan were the People’s Republic of China, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern regimes overflowing with petro-dollars.

India’s only friend and strategic partner among the major world powers was the Soviet Union. India embarked on a great deal of introspection, threadbare internal analysis, and debate to conceptualising and forging a military partnership with a great power. New Delhi felt it was imperative to have a nuclear-armed superpower to provide an impregnable security umbrella in an emergency should it be required in a future war. Who else could it be other than the Soviet Union? The key was that such a cast-iron alliance should be in place well before the eventuality of war breaking out. It should also have sufficiently sharp teeth capable of warding off the pack of wolves from the door. Such an alliance should also not be overly incompatible with India’s long-standing foreign policy goal-namely, the pursuit of a policy of “nonalignment” in international relations.

The great advantage Prime Minister Gandhi had was that the members of her war cabinet to the last man had agreed to solidly stand by her side ready to embrace the Soviet Union as India’s alliance partner. The Soviet Union was seen as a trusted ally and an u strategic partner since the days of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Mrs Indira Gandhi.
Nehru was duly inspired by the egalitarian, socialist goals and aspirations of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Thus he became instrumental in introducing the socialist model of commanding heights and planned economic development in India after the Soviet model. After the humiliating 1962 Chinese invasion, India turned to the Soviet Union for building its military-industrial power base. Moscow on its part extended wide-ranging military support to India for which New Delhi has ever remained grateful.
Mrs Indira Gandhi, with the unanimous backing of her war cabinet, decided to enter into a treaty arrangement with the Soviet Union which came to be known as The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation, 1971. The treaty was quickly drafted, signed, sealed, and delivered in August 1971. The key mantra of the New Delhi-Moscow strategic partnership was that the Soviet Union would construe an attack on India as an attack on the Soviet Union and similarly an attack on the Soviet Union would be seen as an attack on India. In so signing the treaty, Mrs Gandhi succeeded in implementing a doctrine that would sustain the balance of terror between the superpowers in her South Asia-specific game plan. The Prime Minister seemed to have taken a leaf out of Dr Henry Kissinger’s doctrine of balance of power, a typical cold war concept. Instead of the doctrine serving a purpose as an instrument to maintain “status quo”, she chose to turn it on its head by deploying it as a “geopolitical game changer”. In De Kissinger’s uneasy peace mantra Mrs Gandhi detected the potential for its interpretation and use as a doctrine of war.

Washington and even Beijing would now have to think twice before making any attempt to intervene in the impending India-Pakistan war. A fall out of New Delhi forging a strategic relationship with Moscow, seen in India as an unavoidable necessity, was that both Beijing and Washington felt offended and started a process of reassessment of their diplomatic relationship with India. On a strictly personal note preceding the formal signing of the treaty, I confess I played a minor but certainly an important role, at least as far as I was concerned. It is worth recounting. In July 1971, Durga Prasad Dhar, Policy Planning Chief in the Ministry of External Affairs, arrived in London from Moscow carrying the draft of a document entitled “The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation, 1971”, signed in pencil by the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Mr DP Dhar called me to the High Commissioner’s room and handed over the document in an open envelope marked “top secret”, requesting me to personally take it and show it to General Sam Maneckshaw, India’s Chief of Army Staff. He was on a short visit to the United Kingdom, staying with his daughter in Twickenham, just outside London. Having been informed by Mr DP Dhar in advance of my arrival, the good general was waiting to receive me. After a firm handshake and the usual exchange of pleasantries, General Sam Maneckshaw sat down to read the document from Moscow. I noted that he read it thrice at end of which he signed the document on the margin in pencil without any comments and returned it to me. He asked me if I had read the document to which I replied in the affirmative. As was my instruction, I asked General Maneckshaw if he had any comments to make to be passed on to the PM. He replied, “Yes, it is a good document. It should serve us well.” That comment sealed the final approval of the Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army. I passed on the message duly to Mr DP Dhar, who asked me to forward the Army Chief’s approval through the cipher channel to the PM with a short note from him.

8
Pre-emptive strike by Pakistan Air Force on the western sector of India,
3 December 1971 Supposed to be a diversionary tactic, as the Pakistan Air Force began its pre-emptive strike against India in the early hours of the moming on 3 December 1971, it soon became obvious that Pakistan’s fumbling generals had failed to do their homework properly about war preparedness.
From the discovery of the political fault lines to the drawing of the battle lines, the progress of the warlike situation was now swift and decisive. Within hours, the subcontinental military clash assumed bitter and titanic proportions. As was to be expected the superpowers got involved in the India-Pakistan conflict but they took their own time.
The United States ordered its nuclear-armed 7th Fleet led by the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal, apparently aimed at stopping India’s advance and save Pakistan from disintegration. Curiously, the deployment was late in arriving at the battle station which was an indication that Pakistan had not consulted the Pentagon about its war plans.
The effectiveness of the security umbrella provided by the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation, 1971 was to come under a real test eight days after the war began. Ironically, it was on the day when Pakistan’s defeat in East Pakistan seemed almost certain. The war began on 3 December and lasted for thirteen days till 16 December 1971. It was only on 11 December, under orders of US President Richard Nixon, that the battle group led by the USS Enterprise of the 7th Fleet of the US Navy arrived at the battle station in the Bay of Bengal. The naval blockade imposed by the Indian Navy in the Bay of Bengal proved to be of no consequence to the USS Enterprise when she made her appearance.
Although late in coming. President Nixon’s decision to send the American nuclear-armed USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal struck terror in the hearts of India’s leaders and citizens. There were dark rumours floating around in India that the United States had ordered the 7th Fleet to be positioned in battle readiness, primed for an attack on India should it become necessary during the course of the conflict.
Such stories could well have been a plant by the US intelligence to keep at bay possible Pakistani anger at US inaction. Apparently the hope was also that the show of military muscle-flexing could restrain India from going too far in its adventure. US diplomats have reportedly argued privately that due to treaty obligations with Pakistan, the United States had no alternative but to deploy the battle group in the Bay of Bengal during the war, but it exercised utmost restraint by refraining from firing even a single shot in anger. This was entirely due to India’s status as a thriving secular democracy and because of the position of respect it enjoyed in international affairs. This was certainly not President Nixon’s view though. Were there differences of opinion on Bangladesh within the US Administration?
Following the declassification of the Bangladesh Papers by the US government, a confidential telegram which came to be known as “Blood Telegram”, dated 6 April 1971 and sent to the State Department in Washington DC by the US Consul General in Dacca Archer K
Blood, came to light. Since it gives a valuable insight into the existence of open dissent within the US foreign policy establishment on the East Pakistan question, it would be appropriate to quote the telegram verbatim.
Priority
Fm: AMCONGEN Dacca To: Sec State Washington DC CC: AM EMBASSY Islamabad Info: AMCONSUL Karachi Info: AMCONSUL Lahore Confidential Subject: Dissent from US policy towards East Pakistan. Joint State/Aid/USIS Message Aware of the task force proposals of “openness” in the foreign service and with the conviction that US policy related to recent developments in East Pakistan serves neither our moral interests broadly defined nor our national interests narrowly defined, numerous officers of AMCONGEN Dacca, USAID Dacca and USIS Dacca consider it their duty to register strong dissent with the fundamental aspects of this policy. Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy, our government has failed to denounce atrocities, our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pakistan-dominated government and to lessen likely negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy, ironically at a time when the USSR sent President Yahya Khan a message defending democracy, condemning arrest of the leader of a democratically elected majority party (incidentally pro-West) and calling for end to repressive measures and bloodshed. In our most recent policy paper for Pakistan our interests in Pakistan were defined as primarily humanitarian Confidential PS: The message as published ended abruptly.

That there was dissent within the foreign policy establishment in the Nixon Administration, the telegram quoted above was its glaring example.
Coming back to the issue of the deployment of the US 7th Fleet in the Bay of Bengal, a collective sigh of relief was clearly discernible in India and Bangladesh when the USS Enterprise was withdrawn from the Bay of Bengal without making a roar or a bite.
The balance of terror doctrine had come into full play when the Soviet Union, in response to US naval mobilisation, despatched from its naval base in Vladivostok two flotillas of warships and a nuclear submarine to trail the US Task Force deployed in the Indian Ocean The Soviet Navy also sent a nuclear submarine into the Bay of Bengal to help ward off the threat posed by the USS Enterprise battle group.
President Nixon dreaded that an Indian security presence in West Pakistan, followed by the expansion of its influence there piggybacking on the support of the Soviet Union, would mean the total domination of the Soviet Union in the region.
Apparently, given the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation and the
actual Soviet naval deployment in the Indian Ocean, President Nixon had decided not to flex America’s military muscle beyond a certain point and risk another Cuban-style missile crisis of the 1962 vintage.
The Soviet Union’s assurance to India that if a confrontation with the United States and China developed, it would take countermeasures to save the day for both India and Bangladesh was seen in New Delhi as a security umbrella of great value.
Pakistan on its part was deeply aggrieved that the US 7th Fleet returned to its base in Manila without causing any harm to India, thereby failing to prevent the disintegration of a friendly country, an alliance partner. For Islamabad it was a traumatic experience. For the Pakistani people it threw up bruising emotional issues including the one that questioned the self-esteem of a country continuing to trust its so called strategic ally after so bitter a letdown. There had been so much play-acting on the part of the Americans and so little concrete action taken to prevent Pakistan’s fragmentation at the hands of the wily Indians.
The general hostility of the people in Pakistan towards the United States starting from the years following 9/11 of 2001 up until today could to a large extent be traced back to the humiliating events of 1971. An aspect of this antagonism is that it has remained virulently alive at every level of Pakistani society from the gun-toting underclass to the privileged members of the society who had enriched themselves by misappropriating unending US bounties. After 1971, Pakistan’s alliance with the United States lost its strategic content, if ever there was any that is, and became wholly mercenary in nature. Fleecing Washington of the American taxpayers’ spare dollars became the be-all and end-all of Islamabad’s relationship with the United States. And the United States behaved like a matronly cow ready to be milked by the prodigal son.
At another level, given the nature of Pakistani hostility towards India, the true potential of an India-US strategic partnership would perhaps never be realised in full measure until and unless the US funding of Pakistan Army-which was tantamount to funding a terror machine did not come to an end.
The China story had different connotations. Given China’s officially proclaimed “allweather friendship” with Pakistan, it was difficult to imagine that China would not come forward in Pakistan’s support in the hour of its gravest existential crisis. The fact was that it did but it was no more than a token gesture. What could be the reason?

For India, the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation served a dual purpose. It not only provided an insurance cover against the threat from the United States, but also secured New Delhi’s position against its northern neighbour China with which it shared thirty-five hundred kilometres of common border.
When war broke out on 3 December 1971, China had moved small contingents of its troops along the Sino-Indian border. Apparently the purpose was to create the sense of a threat perception. Beijing refrained from taking any precipitate action which could have had an impact on India’s war effort. The reality was that Mother Nature did not allow Chinese troop movement deep into Indian territory. By December, deep winter had set in. The Himalayan mountain range was experiencing the heaviest snowfall of the season, as a result of which the entire stretch of the mountain range including the mountain passes most of them were located at 18,000 feet above sea level had become impassable. There was no question of launching an invasion in such impossible weather conditions.
The more important question that would come to one’s mind was that, given the deep friendship that tied the two nations together, why did Beijing not advise Islamabad against launching its pre-emptive strike against India in the month of December, knowing full well that the heavy snows of the deep winter on the Himalayas would stand in the way of China opening diversionary offensive fronts which could have contained India’s ground operations in its tracks in East Pakistan? It was obvious that China was not quite in favour of escalating the 1971 war for fear of widening it on a global scale. The weather conditions proved the saving grace for China, What else could one think of other than the scare that the alliance of the Indian Elephant and the Bangladesh Tiger backed by the nuclear-armed Russian Bear might have caused in the minds of the Chinese?

The failure of both the United States and China to stand up and provide material support to their alliance partner Pakistan in the 1971 war with India was a double blow for Islamabad. Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation in the international arena thus became complete and comprehensive.
The third front that India needed to be secured was the threat from the Islamic world. The relevant sources of threat from the Middle East were almost all military alliance partners of the United States. The threats emanated mainly from the following quarters: 1. Iran, ruled by the Shah of Iran, then a member of the US-sponsored Security Alliance CENTO, was a potential supplier of weapons across the land border as well as the air corridor. 2. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, linked by bonds of common religion, was a fund provider as well as an arms supplier. 3. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a close ally of the West, was a provider of military assistance to Pakistan, as and when it was asked by the Pentagon.
India chose to confront these threats as and when the war broke out and progressed.

The Iran-Pakistan freight corridor from Zahidan in Iran over the borders to Quetta in Balochistan was ready for instant use. The Zahidan-Quetta air corridor was put to use very early in the campaign, transferring munitions from the Iranian inventory to Pakistan. According to reports, urgent instructions were passed at the level of US President Nixon to the Shah of Iran. But Pakistan could not make good use of the supplies sent. A piece of actionable intelligence information provided in an one-time input by a Bangladeshi employee working in the PIA office in London with access to classified material helped block the movement of the munitions from Quetta to Lahore and Multan. The Indian Air Force (IAF), in a quick-action response, carried out an aerial raid of the railway wagons in Quetta station, destroying a large part of the supplies. The BBC confirmed the bombardment. The bombing shortened the duration of the war, saving many lives.
Saudi Arabia and Jordan were ready to despatch heavy-duty military supplies as well as large quantities of ammunition by sea, but the naval blockade imposed by the Indian Navy proved un-breachable. Consequently this route remained unused.
Sri Lanka had a good diplomatic relationship with Pakistan. Using this goodwill, Pakistan asked the Sri Lankan government for over-flying rights and permission to land in Colombo Airport. With permission secured, apart from ferrying one or two flights of military cargoes through Colombo, Pakistan could not make much use of this opening to significant advantage, primarily because the landing strips in Dhaka were rendered unusable because of air strafing by the IAF.
9
India Declares War on Pakistan

3 December 1971 A Joint Command of the Indian Armed Forces and the Bangladesh Liberation Forces, renamed during the war as Mitro Bahini or the Friendship Army, is set up. The IndiaBangladesh Joint Command defeats the Armed Forces of Pakistan in a short, swift war
lasting only thirteen days, one of history’s shortest wars ever fought 6 December 1971-New Delhi recognises East Pakistan as Bangladesh. India stirs the cauldron of Cold War and gets away with it.

The Front Lines.
The Air War. At about 6 am on Sunday 3 December 1971, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) launched a preemptive strike, code-named “Operation Chengiz Khan”, on eleven air bases in the northwestern part of India. The deepest penetration was up to the Indian Air Force (IAF) base in Agra, which was about four hundred eighty kilometres east of the border. The curious thing about the pre-emptive air strike was that it was not a massive assault. It was limited in scope and range, revealing an obvious weakness of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) firepower. The PAF’s strike squadrons consisted of US-made F-104 Star Fighters, Chinese-made F-6 Shenyang, and French-made Mirage III EPs. The PAF flew no more than fifty jets into India during the pre-emptive strike, which confirmed a shortage of the inventory of both fighter and bomber jets. It will remain a matter of much curiosity why Pakistan started the war in this state of short supply and unpreparedness. The sorties failed to inflict the desired level of damage to the ground assets of the IAF. The craters caused by the bombing to the runways were repaired quickly.
Deploying its conventional second strike capability, the IAF flew four thousand sorties into the airbases in Pakistan but the PAF offered little resistance from the beginning till the end of the war. The PAF suffered significant loss of assets at the very early stages of the conflict. When the Indian Navy raided the Naval Base in Karachi on 4 December 1971, the PAF did not intervene either nor go to defend Karachi Naval Base’s vital installations. The other problem was that the technical staff of the PAF were mostly Bengalis who had defected to the cause of Bangladesh or refused to work. Some were even secretly helping the Mukti Bahini or Mitro Bahini with intelligence inputs about the fast changing Order of Battle (ORBATS) etc.

Promptly within about three hours at 9 am on 3 December 1971, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, addressing the nation on the All India Radio, declared that Pakistan Air Force’s preemptive strikes were a declaration of war against India. In retaliation, the Indian Armed Forces had launched a full-scale invasion of Pakistan involving a coordinated massive air, land, and sea assault. The IAF achieved air superiority in no time. A full scale India-Pakistan War had now begun and was raging with no-holds-barred ferocity, India deployed overwhelming force hoping to bring the blood-letting to a quick end.

President Nixon, taking quick note of Pakistan’s aircraft shortage, requested the Shah of Iran to send an unspecified number of squadrons of F-86 and F-104 fighter jets from Iran’s CENTO inventories to help Pakistan. A similar request was conveyed to the King of Jordan to send from his country’s stocks a number of squadrons of fighter jets to Pakistan. Since the 1971 war was the shortest India-Pakistan war, lasting only thirteen days from 3 to 16 December, the fighter jets from Iran and Jordan failed to arrive.

In East Pakistan the PAF maintained a small air contingent called 14 Squadron. In a raid by the IAF, the Dhaka air base was destroyed and put out of commission, resulting in total air superiority of the IAF over East Pakistan.
A case study of how Riazul Alam, a Bengali patriot whose one-off voluntarily-made intelligence input contributed to shortening the course and the duration of the Bangladesh War. It saved many lives. He is a War Hero.
As the India-Pakistan War broke out, it had become obvious right from the beginning that the Pakistani armed forces were running short of hardware. The deficit was further accentuated by the losses suffered from the Indian attacks. To fill the gap and in the backdrop of the request made by President Richard Nixon to the Shah of Iran, Pakistan asked Iran to despatch urgent supplies of arms, ammunition, and equipment particularly artillery pieces, including other consignments from Iran’s CENTO inventory through the air corridor of Zahidan-Quetta-Zahidan. The ferrying was carried out by 1. Iranian Air Force’s cargo planes repainted into PAF livery, 2. converting PIA passenger jets into cargo carriers, and 3. pressing PAF’s military cargo carrier. Some flights were also chartered from friendly neighbouring Muslim countries. Within about two or three days, large consignments of military hardware had arrived in Quetta from Zahidan sufficient to equip at least one artillery division and may be an artillery brigade. These were ready to be transported by railroad to Lahore and Multan Cantonments.
At the Pakistan International Airways (PIA) office in London, a telex had arrived for the personal attention of Riazul Alam, a staff officer of the PIA. The message was quite out of the ordinary. It contained actionable intelligence about the flight details of the PIA’s carriage of cargo on the Zahidan/Quetta/Zahidan sector. It also contained information about the nature of the cargo transported from Iran. The curious thing was that the message included a railway timetable indicating the movements of the military hardware from Quetta to the designated garrisons. It was sent by a Bengali PIA officer based in Karachi. It was obvious that the Bengali PIA officer had sent the extraordinary telex with a sense of purpose.

Riazul Alam did not take much time to understand the meaning and purpose of the message. He quickly realised its importance and urgency and decided to pass on the information to the Indian authorities through the right channel for use by the IAF to take action in destroying the railway wagons while they were still at the Quetta Railway Station.
Alam was fired by a moral conviction that by getting the wagons carrying the military cargoes destroyed, the duration of the war could be shortened and the lives of so many people could be saved. Above all, by weakening Pakistan militarily, Bangladesh would be free sooner than later. It was an amazing line of thought. His sense of patriotism for the cause of Bangladesh’s freedom and his humanitarian convictions to save lives was the stuff of extraordinary bravery and folklore. It should impress anyone who will read this story.
I passed on the voluntarily conveyed message to the concerned quarters in New Delhi for urgent action. Two days later I heard over the BBC World Service broadcasting that the IAF had bombed the Quetta Railway Station and destroyed the waiting wagonloads of military equipment. Riazul Alam’s strength of conviction and his willingness to contribute to the war effort certainly helped cut short the duration of the war and bring forward Bangladesh’s tryst with freedom. Riazul Alam was a happy man, satisfied at the outcome of his work as a Good Samaritan. I strongly believe that Riazul Alam, who lives in London and is not keeping good
health, should be rewarded with a gallantry award by the Government of Bangladesh for his unique contribution to the war effort.
The War at Sea The first step that the Indian Navy (IN) took in the Arabian Sea was to impose a naval blockade against the Port of Karachi immediately after war broke out with Pakistan on 3 December 1971. A day later on the night of 4 December under the Command of Vice Admiral S.N. Kohli of the Western Naval Command, the IN launched a swift and a massive attack on Pakistan Navy’s Karachi Naval Base. It was code-named Operation Trident. The Pakistani Navy’s destroyer (Pakistan Naval Service) PNS Khyber and minesweeper PNS Muhafiz were sunk in the attack. PNS Shajehan was badly damaged and rendered out of action. About seven hundred twenty Pakistani sailors were killed or wounded. Pakistan Navy’s oil depot was badly damaged and along with it a substantial portion of the oil reserves was lost. Several merchant vessels were sunk. The Pakistan Navy was more or less crippled. The Indian naval action achieved such spectacular military success that the Government of India decided to observe the day – 4 December as the Navy Day. It has become an annual event and is celebrated in all naval establishments in India with much enthusiasm.
Four days later on the night of 8 December, the IN launched another attack on Karachi Port. Under code name Operation Python, a flotilla of six Osa class missile boats armed with Styx missiles set sail in the formations of two’s from the Port of Okha in Gujarat under the cover of darkness to evade detection. The missiles set Pakistan’s only oil refinery located in Karachi Port area ablaze. It burned for several days and was reduced to mangled metal. The runways at Karachi Airport and the Kiamari Airbase were among the other installations destroyed. The most curious thing was that the missile boats never came under retaliatory air or naval attack from the Pakistani forces. The Indian missile boats returned safely to their base to Okha.

Pakistan’s hardware deficit and consequently its apparent unpreparedness for war became apparent in another glaring instance. Within twenty-four hours of the declaration of war, the Indian Air Force sent half a dozen highly manoeuvrable light fighters/bombers in its inventory on a night bombing mission over the oil depots in Karachi Port area. Those were the days when radar-guided smart bombs of today were not developed yet or were not in the possession of the IAF. The bomb bays were wire connected and were meant to be manually operated. As the jets dived in a hurry to unload the bombs, the pilots noticed-not very clearly though since they had no proper night vision equipment that the oil depot was surrounded by long chains held up vertically by helium balloons. It was known as “balloon defence”. These were World War I vintage material and they could be bought from one source only and that was the Democratic Republic of Germany, or Communist East Germany.

Unable to measure the height of the chains, and with a view to be better safe than sorry, the pilots quickly decided to return to base without dropping the bombs. It was unbelievable that Pakistan, boasting of unparalleled military power over India’s in its possession, was so poorly equipped. And what was available was poor basic material. What was more the IAF’s fighter jets neither received ack-ack (anti-aircraft) gunfire from the ground nor were they fired upon from Pakistan’s own fighter jets. The deployment of bluff is useful in war but only up to a point.
Vice Admiral N. Krishnan, who commanded the Indian Navy’s Eastern Naval Command, imposed a naval blockade in the Bay of Bengal taking effect on the night of 3 December 1971 and isolating East Pakistan. The blockade trapped the modest number of motorboats and other small craft under the Pakistan Navy’s Eastern Naval Command.

The INS Vikrant, Indian Navy’s aircraft carrier with its fighter/bomber squadron of Sea Hawks on board, was swiftly deployed in the Bay of Bengal on 4 December 1971. The Sea Hawks went into action immediately and destroyed some of the key vital installations in the ports of Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar in East Pakistan.
Pakistan Navy’s submarine PNS Ghazi, which was in international waters of the Indian Ocean, was instructed to proceed to the waters of the Bay of Bengal and engage the battle group INS Vikrant, posing her a threat with firm instructions to sink her and no excuses would be entertained. Fed with actionable intelligence information about the presence of the submarine PNS Ghazi in the Bay of Bengal, Vice Admiral N. Krishnan sent the Indian Navy’s destroyer INS Rajput supported by a small flotilla of missile boats with instructions to lay a trap around PNS Ghazi with orders to sink the Pakistani submarine attacking her with depth charges. The PNS Ghazi was sunk off the coast of Vishakhapatnam along the eastern seaboard of India. Following the loss of PNS Ghazi, the East Pakistan coastline was now completely exposed. The sinking of PNS Ghazi in the 1971 War was the first submarine casualty in the waters around the Indian subcontinent.

According to Wikipedia free encyclopaedia (quoting bharat-rakshak.com). “On 9 December the Indian Navy suffered its biggest maritime loss when Pakistani submarine PNS Hangor sank the frigate INS Khukri in the Arabian Sea resulting in a loss of 18 officers and 176 sailors of the Indian Navy.” According to Wikipedia free encyclopaedia, the maritime losses suffered by Pakistan Navy stood at 1 submarine, 2 destroyers, I minesweeper, 7 gun boats, 3 patrol boats belonging to the Coast Guard, 18 cargo, supply and communication vessels and large-scale damage suffered at the naval base and docks in the port areas of Karachi and Chittagong. Three merchant ships MV Anwar Baksh, MV Pasni and MV Madhumati and 10 smaller vessels were captured. In his book published by Penguin Books, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (1983), Pakistani author Tariq Ali claimed that the Pakistan Navy lost a third of its force in the war.
The Ground Offensive At the very initial stage, the war was characterised by the twin objectives of Indianamely, 1. preventing Pakistan’s ground forces from entering and occupying Indian territory, and 2. it was to be combined with New Delhi’s very own decision not to conduct any major military offensive into West Pakistan. India’s aim was limited to liberating Bangladesh and not causing distractions by escalating the conflict into West Pakistan. But Rawalpindi was determined to attack Indian positions in the western sector and grab chunks of territory to be used as bargaining counters.

India was forced to respond and in a swift move captured fourteen thousand square kilometres of Pakistani territory spread over Punjab, Sindh, and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir or Azad Kashmir. These territories were later returned to Pakistan under the terms of the accord reached in the Simla Agreement of 1972.
In the eastern theatre, the GOC-in-Chief, Eastern Command of the Indian Army Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora was appointed as the GOC in Chief of the Joint Command of the Indian Armed Forces and the Bangladesh Liberation Forces. He took charge of leading the thrust into East Pakistan, commanding the 8th, 23rd, and 57th Divisions of the Indian Army and contingents of the Mukti Bahini, which was renamed during the War as Mitro Bahini, meaning the Friendship Army.
Pakistan had laid its battlefields in clusters of fortified formations of bunkers and trenched on the main road and rail routes from the Indian borders leading up to the capital Dhaka. The military strategy of laying such clusters to confront the enemy is known as “Fortress Defence”. Their function was to interdict the advance of the enemy columns with the use of overwhelming military force and mow the marching enemy troops to the ground.

India had advance intelligence information of the location of these Pakistani clusters of military formations. The inputs came from several sources but the most valuable flow of information was provided by the Bengali military officers and men of Pakistan Army who had defected to the cause of the liberation struggle. Some of these former Pakistani military officers, including those from armoured, artillery and infantry divisions or brigades now fighting on the side of Bangladesh, served as Scouts leading the charge to great effect all the way to capital Dhaka. The generals in Rawalpindi could not believe their eyes when they saw that Muslim officers trained to hate India had switched their allegiance to enemy India and were fighting alongside them for separation from Pakistan. In military parlance, the Indian campaign employed what is known as the “blitzkrieg technique” in its ground operations, adopting a swift, three-pronged ground assault mounted by six mountain divisions and three infantry divisions with attached armoured and close air support units converging on capital Dhaka. Essentially India exploited the gaps, bypassing the fortress defence clusters and advancing through alternative open routes unimpeded by enemy columns, rolling down the road on Russian-made T-55 tanks, armoured personnel carriers as also soft-skinners like military trucks, jeeps etc. Apart from General Jagjit Singh Aurora, the other officer who played a key role in the military campaign was Lieutenant General JFR Jacob, a brilliant cerebral commander.

The Mukti Bahini-Bangladesh’s very own Liberation Army. India’s armed forces were ably supported by the Mukti Bahini, Bangladesh’s very own Liberation Army. The Mukti Bahini constituted the hard-hitting guerrilla iron-fist of the Joint Command of the India-Bangladesh military offensive against Pakistan Army’s campaign for the defence of East Pakistan. Driven by patriotic fervour, the freedom fighters of Mukti Bahini had shown extraordinary bravery and gallantry. Some of their exploits in the battlefield were the stuff of legend and folklore, which would make the people of Bangladesh proud. The Mukti Bahini came into being officially on the day the Declaration of Independence was broadcast, 27 March 1971, over the Swadhin Bangladesh Betar Kendra or the Free Bangladesh Radio Station an underground broadcasting station-run by the Government of Bangladesh in exile operating from Mujib Nagar, a Calcutta suburb in West Bengal, India, The broadcast was made by one Major Zia. Nobody knew who Major Zia was or what was his true identity. General Ziaur Rahman, who later self-appointed himself as the Military Dictator of Bangladesh, claimed that Major Zia was none other than himself.

Colonel Mohammad Ataul Gani Osmani was appointed as the Commander in Chief of Bangladesh Armed Forces on 17 April 1971, when he was also promoted as a General The Bangladesh Armed Forces were divided into two wings-namely, the regular army and the irregular forces
.
The regular army was divided into three units/forces: 1. Z Force-led by Major Ziaur Rahman 2. K Force-led by Major General Khaled Mosharraf 3. S Force-led by Major General K.M. Shafiullah A Bangladesh Air Force (BDAF) Base was set up on 28 September 1971 with its Command Centre in Dimapur in Nagaland, India. Air Commodore AK Khandakar, who had defected from the PAF base in Peshawar, was put in charge. The BDAF initially had two fighter jets and one helicopter in its inventory. All the three aircraft-two fixed wing and one rotor wing-participated in the war effort. After air superiority was fully established over Bangladesh airspace, the Bangladesh Air Force had a free run of its own over the Bangladesh skies. Seventeen Officers and fifty technical personnel manned the base and the air operations.
A Bangladesh Naval Base operated secretly from Chittagong Port. Its vulnerability was exposed after a friendly fire on mistaken identity by the IAF destroyed one of its naval craft. The Indian Air Force profusely apologised for the tragedy of mistaken identity.
The irregular forces were trained for guerrilla warfare. Spread into different parts of the country, the guerrilla units were known by different names such as: 1. Mujib Bahini 2. Kaderi Bahini 3. Afsar Bahini 4. Himayat Bahini
There is no hard evidence of the strength of the Bangladesh Liberation Forces. However, there is one source: a book entitled Bangladesh Liberation War, written by Major General K.M Shafiullah who commanded the “S Force” of the Bangladesh Liberation Army during the War. According to his estimates, the regular army had a strength of eighty thousand. These regulars were under the overall control of General MAG Osmani, the commander-inchief, who had his office located in the premises of the Bangladesh Government in exile in Mujibnagar in Calcutta. The irregular forces had a strength of over 25,000 in which the Mukti Bahini had 10,000, Kedar Bahini had 5,000, Himayat Bahini 1500, and others 10,000.
In a period of only thirteen days in a situation of unbearable hardship, all officers and men of the Pakistani armed forces fighting in East Pakistan were totally exhausted. They were not prepared to continue the fight anymore. General Tikka Khan, the Military Governor of East Pakistan in common parlance he was known as the Butcher of Bangladesh, a nick name given for his cruelty-and General AAK Niazi, the General Officer Commanding, Eastern Command of Pakistan Army, were left with no choice but to bow to the repeated exhortations that were being made to the Pakistan Army commanders over All India Radio by the Indian Army Chief General Sam Maneckshaw to lay down arms and surrender. And so they did, ending the Bangladesh War.

Losses suffered in War. Estimates collected from various sources indicate that Pakistan had committed 365,000 officers and men into the war, out of which it suffered casualties in men of about 9,000 dead comprising the Army, Navy, and Air Force and 4,350 wounded. In terms of material it lost two destroyers, one submarine, one minesweeper, three petrol boats, and seven gunboats.
In comparison, India had committed 500,000 troops. The casualties in men suffered by India were 3,843 dead and 9,851 wounded and in material it lost one frigate and one naval plane.
There are no definitive figures available of the casualties suffered by the Bangladesh Liberation Army, including the Mukti Bahini; but according to an average of the estimates available, the number of dead was well over 10,000 and the number wounded was about 20,000.
10

General AAK Niazi, GOC. Eastern Command of Pakistani Armed Forces, signs the Instrument of Surrender at 16.30 hours, Indian Standard Time (IST) 16 December 1971 in Dhaka in the presence of General JS Aurora, GOC-in-Chief, Joint Command of the Indian Armed Forces and the Bangladesh Liberation Forces. A sovereign independent Bangladesh is born at 16.31 hours IST, 16 December 1971, Luis a dream fulfilled for the people of Bangladesh, India’s finest hour. The Instrument of Surrender was signed at 16.30 hours Indian Standard Time at the spacious Ramna Racecourse Grounds in Dhaka by Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niaz GOC Eastern Command, Pakistan Army. The ceremony was overseen and the surrender accepted by Lieutenant General Jagjit Sigh Aurora, GOC-in-Chief of the Joint Command of all Indian Armed Forces and the Bangladesh Liberation Forces.

The birth a minute later at 16.31 hours Indian Standard Time on 16 December 1971 of Bangladesh as a sovereign, independent nation-state in South Asia was a seminal event in the history of anticolonial freedom struggles of the post-World War II era. Hundreds of thousands of people of now free Bangladesh had gathered in Dhaka to witness the historic moment amidst slogans of “Joy Bangla”, “Joy Mujibur Rahman”, and “Joy Bongo Bondhu”.

There was one man not present at the ceremony. That was Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, the Father of the Nation, who remained incarcerated in the military prison in far away West Pakistan, waiting for his fate to be decided. The Indian Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi called a special session of Parliament late in the evening of 16 December 1971 and in a mood of jubilation declared on All India Radio, New Delhi: Dacca is now the free capital of a free country. We hail the people of Bangladesh in their hour of triumph. All nations who value the human spirit will recognise it as a significant milestone in man’s quest for liberty.
The loss of the eastern half of the country meant for Pakistan also the loss of more than half its population, breaking away from the founding political framework of the nation with one-third of its Army in captivity.

To quote Wikipedia free encyclopaedia: “For Pakistan it was a complete and a humiliating defeat, a psychological setback at the hands of its intense rival India. Pakistan lost nearly half its territory, significant portions of its economy, and its geopolitical role in South Asia, Pakistan feared that the Two Nation Theory was disproved and the Islamic ideology was proved insufficient to keep the East Bengal part of Pakistan.”

Yet India was restrained in its reactions. In a confidential circular sent out almost immediately after the conclusion of the war in December 1971 to all the concerned Ministries of the Government of India, State Governments and the Indian Embassies all over the world, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) forwarded an advisory that at no time should India nor the Indians take too much credit for the successful conclusion of the Bangladesh freedom movement. The liberation struggle was the struggle of the people of Bangladesh; the achievement of independence was their achievement. India extended an outsider’s support because the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was a struggle for democracy and secularism, freedom and Bengali nationalism.

New Delhi reclaimed its strategic power equation in Asia, leaving behind the memories of the military debacle of 1962. 16 December 1971 was a powerful moment for India. A comparison with the circumstances prevailing at the time of the Chinese invasion of India in 1962 with the international situation as it existed during India’s Bangladesh War of 1971 may be in order, China had timed its punishing invasion of a militarily unprepared India when both the Soviet Union and the United States were preoccupied with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This prevented either of the superpowers from intervening on the side of India when the India-China border skirmishes broke out. India got helplessly hammered. What was no less strategically significant was the promptness with which Beijing withdrew most of its troops almost to its pre-war positions. It revealed Mao ze Dong’s real military objective, which was to win an unassailable psychological dominance over India, relegating New Delhi behind in the military pecking order and establishing its own hegemony in Asia. In 1971, Mrs Indira Gandhi put the ball in the opposite court. The moment was opportune for New Delhi to reclaim its strategic power equation in Asia, leaving behind the bitter memories of the debacle of 1962. India timed the declaration of war pretty smartly. Pakistan’s “all-weather friend” China was exhausted after the Mao-inspired civil war of the Cultural Revolution Post-Vietnam United States was reduced to war-weariness. And for its part, Pakistan had lost its moral compass first by undermining an electoral verdict and then by committing the twin crimes of a horrendous genocide and mass gang rape. India, on the other hand, was energized on the back of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation and was rearing to go. The surrender ceremony in Dhaka left both China and the United States standing on the sidelines as mere onlookers. The military victory of India changed the history of South Asia. It was a powerful moment for India.

At the end of the war, India was burdened with the responsibility of registering a large number of POWs it had taken in East Pakistan. It was an intense clerical job of great responsibility needing meticulous recording of the personal details of each and every person-military and civilian and at the same time the Indians had to observe the obligations of the provisions of the Geneva Convention on POWs. The number counted by the Indian authorities was a total of approximately 93,000 POWs. The breakdown was as follows: 80,042 were prisoners in uniform, of which 55,692 were from the Army, 16,354 from the Paramilitary forces, 5,296 from the Police Force, 1,900 were from the Pakistan Navy, and 800 from the Pakistan Air Force. The remaining 12,958 of the 93,000 prisoners were civilians; included among them were the Razakar or the collaborators who fought alongside the government forces against the freedom fighters during the liberation war and finally there were the family members of the military personnel.

The Pakistan Government had instituted The Hamoodur Rahman Commission of Enquiry to investigate what went wrong for Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971. According to its report, the total number of Pakistani POWs captured by India at the end of the IndiaPakistan war of 1971 was 90,368. The breakdown is as follows: Army 54,154, Navy 1,381, Air Force 833, Para-military Forces including Police Personnel 22,000 and civilian personnel: 12,000.
The discrepancies in the figures were sorted out over several meetings of the representatives of both India and Pakistan in due course
Acting on a regulation that denied the general public access to confidential papers for thirty years from the date of origin, the US State Department in 2002 declassified documents relating to the India-Pakistan War of 1971. They were named Bangladesh Papers. A wealth of information was published, throwing light on the issues involved.
It is now well documented that US President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on the one hand and the Indian Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi on the other did not see eye to eye on the issues of the day. They were in fact divided by serious differences. The declassified Bangladesh Papers show Nixon and Kissinger in poor light, foul-mouthing the Indians in coarse undiplomatic language.
In a letter dated 15 December 1971, a day before Pakistan Army signed the Instrument of Surrender in Dhaka, Indian Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi penned a letter to US President Richard Nixon that was revealing. She wrote, “I am writing at a moment of deep anguish at the unhappy turn which the relations between our two countries have taken. I am setting aside all pride, prejudice and passion and trying as calmly as I can to analyse once again the origins of the tragedy which is being enacted. There are moments in history when a tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past.” Referring to the American Declaration of Independence she wrote, “The Declaration stated that whenever any form of government became destructive of man’s inalienable right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, it was the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” Continuing, she observed that “the grim events in Bangladesh since 25 March 1971 which had forced seventy-five million people to revolt were driven to the conclusion that neither their life nor their liberty to say nothing about the pursuit of happiness was available to them.” Mrs Gandhi reminded Nixon that the tragedy could have been averted if world leaders had paid attention to her pleas for justice on behalf of the people of East Pakistan. “War could have been avoided if the power, influence and authority of all states and above all the United States got Shaikh Mujibur Rahman released…. Our pleas that Shaikh Mujibur Rahman should be released were not considered practical on the ground that the United States could not urge policies which might lead to the overthrow of President Yahya Khan…. Was the release of Mujib more disastrous than the waging of war…? We want lasting peace with Pakistan. But will Pakistan give up its ceaseless agitation of the past twenty-four years over Kashmir?” She went on to add, “We are deeply hurt by the innuendoes that it is we who have precipitated the crisis and have thwarted the emergence of solutions….I would like to know where precisely we have gone wrong, before your representatives and spokesmen deal with us with such harshness of language.”
As the Pakistan Army surrendered in Dhaka, Nixon apparently told Kissinger, “If the Indians continue the course they are on, we may have to break diplomatic relations with them”, to which the National Security Advisor is said to have agreed. The US President is
also reported to have considered declaring India an aggressor. A few days later, declaring that India had no intention of invading West Pakistan, Mrs Indira Gandhi announced a unilateral ceasefire on the western front.”
The emergence of a democratic and secular free Bangladesh carved out of an obscurantist military dictatorship, against all odds, ushered a new political order in the South Asian subcontinent.
Let me tell you a truly human story which will gladden anybody’s hearts.
Field Marshall Sam Maneckshaw, who had led the Bangladesh operations in 1971, had an interesting personal experience. It is worth recalling.
Several years later after his retirement, FM Sam Maneckshaw paid a private visit to Pakistan at the invitation of the Pakistan Army Chief. The FM was being entertained by Pakistan Army’s top brass in one of Pakistan’s garrison headquarters, perhaps Lahore. According to his story, as he was having a social chat with the officers and men, a retired sergeant major of Pakistan Army came to him and in a gesture of great humility took his turban-called the Saafa in Punjabioff his head and placed it at the feet of General Sam Bahadur, as the FM was popularly known.
The FM was taken aback. What was the sergeant major doing-what was it for? The retired sergeant major in his best civilian attire told General Sam Bahadur that his son, a soldier of the 16′ Brigade of the 23 Division of Pakistan Army, was a POW in Delhi after the 1971 war. The POW son was to sleep on a bed on the floor in the detention centre’s dormitory while the Indian security guard was to sleep on a chaarpoy (a military barrack-type four-poster bedstead). The security guard in a personal gesture of social grace offered the POW to sleep on the chaarpoy while he slept on the floor. The Pakistani sergeant major’s gesture of taking the turban off his head was part of the Punjabi culture’s way of saying a huge thank you” with much humility for the affection shown to his son. General Sam Bahadur was deeply touched by the gesture. When it comes to human relations, politics is left far behind. It is this that builds bridges of friendship between nations.
Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw had every reason to be happy having his interaction with the retired Pakistani sergeant major. The story perfectly chimed with India’s soft diplomatic approach towards Pakistan. The Bangladesh episode was only an aberration and for India it was best forgotten as quickly as possible.
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Would the rising tide of ethno-nationalism reshape the political future of
Pakistan? Would the Domino Doctrine come into play? The defeat of Pakistan in the 1971 War and India taking into custody 93,000 POWs were in fact God-sent strategic opportunities for New Delhi, waiting to be used as diplomatic bargaining counters with Islamabad on a number of festering issues. But it needed clarity of vision and a steely political will, with a touch of Chanakya or Machiavelli, to be able to take control of the emerging situation and put the best foot forward to achieve what was best for the security and future well-being of India.
From all accounts, India looked more exhausted after the war than reenergized, possibly under the pressure of adversarial domestic politics. There were hardly any signs that the country was ready and willing to consolidate its newfound power.
Husain Haqqani, who was later appointed Pakistan’s Ambassador in Washington, in a frank admission of the ground realities in the aftermath of the war, wrote in his book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005), “The loss of East Pakistan shattered the prestige of Pakistan.” It was certainly a body blow, the magnitude of which was something that rarely happens in history. But Pakistan’s leaders were not prepared to be cowed down by misfortune. They pulled up their socks and started the process of rebuilding the country’s military might almost immediately after the war. They did not look back.
Tariq Ali, in his book Can Pakistan survive? The Death of a State wrote with his flair for detail, “Pakistan lost half its Navy, a quarter of its Air Force, and a third of its Army.”
Taking note of its location in a hostile neighbourhood, the mainstream security experts in various think tanks believed that the security threats that India was likely to face in the future were not going to go away nor diminish in a hurry despite the truncation of Pakistan. India, according to them, could therefore hardly afford an opportunity like this to go to ground with all the problems that remained festering in continuity.
Several years ago the US Congress Research Service had commissioned an enquiry on India. It had in its controversial conclusion claimed that the country’s political establishment, the ruling elite, had not yet evolved a clear strategic vision for the future. The report suggested that this ambiguity needed to be rectified for the sake of clarity of policy formulations. The sensitivity of the controversial report was such that it quickly found its rightful place where it belonged-namely, under the carpet.
Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury was leading an intense diplomatic campaign at the UN, focussing among others on the Islamic bloc of countries and the P5 nations: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, and China, in addition to Germany, Japan, and other leading member nations of the UN for the cause of the Liberation of Bangladesh. He was a great admirer of Indira Gandhi’s robust leadership qualities and knew her well. But he nourished a regret in his mind. He saw in Indira Gandhi’s decision to declare a unilateral ceasefire on the western front to be an unmitigated strategic blunder for not only India but also the whole of the South and Central Asia and beyond.

His regret was that the Indian Army stood at the gates of Lahore yet chose not to make an entry, and the Indian Air Force, after achieving total air superiority over West Pakistan’s air space, chose not to make a landing. He was fretting and fuming with the wounds still fresh in his mind that a country—he described it as a monster-which had killed over one and a half million people in a savage genocide and had ordered its Army to commit the heinous crime of mass rape involving quarter of a million young women of Bangladesh should not have been spared to remain intact.

He was strongly convinced that it was not enough that Pakistan was truncated into two halves. It needed to suffer more severe punishment. What worried him was that after the birth of Bangladesh, the other brother” ethno-nationalities like the Pashtuns, the Balochis, and the Sindhis were most likely to become the targets of even more intense political repression and loitation by the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan Army than even the Bengalis had suffered.

His view was that the time was now ripe to create sovereign independent nation-states of Balochistan, Sind, and Pashtunistan, cut away from Pakistan. I asked him if these were his personal views or those of his party, to which his reply was extremely cautious. He said that there was a strong conviction on this issue among most of the party’s rank and file; included among those were some top-ranking leadership but it was not yet the party line as such. He admitted that the impassioned plea was entirely his own born out of conviction.

Justice Choudhury’s bitterness of tone and hurt sentiment in his references to the brutal genocide and the lustful excesses of the extreme kind on the Bengali women perpetrated by the Punjabi soldiers had to be heard to be believed. He was sad that Pakistan had to fragment like this so ignominiously, but there was no alternative because the disintegration of Pakistan was the only way left for Bangladesh to emerge as a free nation. He firmly believed that a Pakistan territorially limited within the confines of the Punjab Province only was the best guarantee of permanent peace and harmony in the South Asian subcontinent.
Justice Choudhury had written a confidential personal letter to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in which he had expressed his regret that she had opted for unilateral cease-fire on the westem front much too hastily, describing the decision as an unmitigated strategic blunder. He quoted an earthy Bengali saying that chopping off the tail of a poisonous cobra and leaving its head alive and intact makes the snake several times more vengeful and venomous. He believed that a truncated Pakistan would soon turn into a more dangerous enemy for India, fired with intense hatred and a burning rage for revenge.

He took the view that Islamabad’s ire on Bangladesh was likely to be no less punishing He foresaw the growth of a Pakistani brand of religious intolerance and extremism regrouping in time and replicating itself in both India and Bangladesh in the future. I forwarded the letter to the Prime Minister in the diplomatic bag. Justice Choudhury did not expect a reply to his letter because he realised that it was despatched a bit too late in the day to secure an actionable outcome.
As it turned out, the run of events in the Indian subcontinent in the subsequent years proved that Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury was right and Indira Gandhi was wrong in their respective strategic assessments of the situation that they obtained in the closing days and hours of the seminal war of 1971.
It would however be historically incorrect to hold Indira Gandhi entirely responsible for the unilateral ceasefire. She had several other reasons why she could not decide otherwise, or as some of her advisers wanted to go for the jugular.
The London Conclave, 16 December 1971. In a related development of great strategic importance on the day of surrender of the Pakistan Army in Dhaka on 16 December 1971, unbeknown to Justice Choudhury on grounds of restrictive security, a one-man delegation comprising Abdus Samad Azad, designated as the Foreign Minister in the newly established Government of the People’s Democratic Republic of Bangladesh, had arrived in London.

Abdus Samad Azad had prearranged a closed-door top secret meeting at the Charing Cross Hotel near the Trafalgar Square in London with several senior leaders of West Pakistan’s ethno-national minority provinces who were camping in London for about a year in 1970-71 for fear of becoming victims in a possible military crackdown in their respective provinces, much like what had happened in East Pakistan.

Among those who attended the secret conclave were Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the cerebral Pakhtun leader from North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the son of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, an icon of nonviolence fondly known in India as Frontier Gandhi: Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the charismatic Baloch nationalist leader of the Bugti tribe: Khair Baksh Marri, the nationalist Baloch guerrilla leader of the Marri tribe; Ataullah Mengal, the Baloch nationalist leader of the Mengal tribe; and an unnamed representative of GM Syed, a Sindhi nationalist leader of the Jiye Sindh Mahaz (who had declared that he would settle for nothing short of the independence of Sindh and was serving a life imprisonment for sedition). The subject matter of the discussion was extraordinarily sensitive.
Abdus Samad Azad, his leader Mujibur Rahman, and their party the Awami League were congratulated wholeheartedly by all the assembled leaders for having successfully led the anticolonial struggle and created Bangladesh.
Azad, expressing his brotherly and fraternal sentiments, took the opportunity to convey the apprehension of the leadership of his political party that given the fact that Pakistan had disintegrated so ignominiously, Pakistan Army in distrust and anger could launch incremental phases of violent military crackdown on the Balochis, the Sindhis, and the Pakhtuns similar to what had happened in Bangladesh. Political repression, economic exploitation, social ostracisation, subjugation, and deprivation of the minority provinces could become intolerable. He wanted to know if the assembled leaders would agree with his aforesaid analysis, to which there was a chorus of approval. Azad’s next question was that if he made a suggestion that there was the need to forge a “joint liberation struggle” of the Balochis, the Sindhis, and the Pakhtuns to break away from Pakistan and become sovereign independent nation-states, would they approve of it? Pakistan in defeat was in disarray and this was the right moment to strike. And if they agreed, Bangladesh was ready to extend wholehearted support and succour including political and material backup to such a unified movement.
Quick came the poser in a chorus: what would be India’s stand? Azad assured that if they wanted India’s backing, which would be unavoidable according to him, the Awami League leadership could talk to New Delhi and hopefully secure it with utmost urgency. But to win India’s support they would have to declare their commitment to the values of freedom and democracy, pluralism, secularism, and their respective national aspirations, abjuring tendencies of religious intolerance and obscurantism.
All the leaders present in the meeting gave their unqualified commitment that their struggles embraced the values of secularism and democracy and were founded on the aspirations of their respective ethno-nationalism.
However, all the ethno-national minority leaders said in one voice, as Azad revealed later to me, that this issue should have been addressed much earlier so that they were ready with a “yes” answer. Now the time was too short. They were not ready at that point of time. The requisite administrative infrastructures were not in place.
Nawab Akbar Bugti broke ranks and said with a great amount of passion: “I am afraid India will have to fight another war with Pakistan for us to achieve our freedom.” In terms of their specifics, the talks failed. It was apparent that the secret plan was chalked out in haste and forged without prior consultations with the ethno-national leadership in Pakistan. The uncertainty over the outcome of the war was certainly the main reason why the idea was brought up in the secret confabulations so late in the day. The legacy of bitterness that had piled up in Dhaka against the Punjabi elements for their involvement in the horrendous atrocities of the Pakistani war machine in Bangladesh was the key contributing factor in the conceptualisation of the separatist sentiment. The chaos of war, the disintegration of Pakistan, and creation of a sovereign independent Bangladesh together provided the window of opportunity to raise the issue.

The subject matter of the discussions had far reaching geopolitical implications and if carried forward, the plan could very well have dismembered the rump of what was left of Pakistan. It is important to remember that the creation of Bangladesh was not a one-day affair. A report on the inconclusive London conclave was promptly passed on to Dhaka through the proper diplomatic channel. A copy of the message was shown to me, which made me privy to the conclave.
It would be unrealistic to assume that a summary of these discussions had not leaked to New Delhi. And it couldn’t be that it didn’t influence the Indian Prime Minister’s political decision to unilaterally declare a ceasefire on the western front, thus ending the IndiaPakistan war of 1971. The decision was not abrupt; in fact it was well considered and calibrated.
Among other considerations that probably influenced Mrs Indira Gandhi in declaring the unilateral ceasefire were the compulsions of military strategy. Had the Indian Army been ordered to march into Lahore and force the thoroughly demoralised Pakistan Army to lay down arms, what would have been the response of the people of Pakistan, pushed into such a supremely insulting and life threatening comer?
Needless to say that the triumphant Indian Army-which in 1947 had been denied permission by the Indian politicians to complete the job of repulsing the Pakistani tribal invaders and re-possessing the State of Jammu and Kashmir in its entirety-was raring to go. The matter engaged the most serious attention of the PM and her war cabinet.
After in-depth discussions, a view had emerged that Lahore represented the very heart of Pakistan’s national identity-to be more precise, its dominant Punjabi identity. An attack on that city or an attempt to occupy it could provoke the Punjabi heartland into putting up a fierce resistance followed by the launch of a determined insurgency. The World War II example of the heroic defence of Leningrad by its people in the face of a German attack was brought up during the discussions.
It was estimated that India risked endangering the lives of at least ten thousand of its own soldiers if it ventured into the cauldron of Lahore. Was it worth the effort considering that it would not have been possible to keep the city under Indian occupation for more than a few
months? India would have come under intense international pressure to hand Lahore back to Pakistan. There was therefore little point in incurring an avoidable loss of valuable human lives on such a large scale when the gains of victory were likely to be short-lived. This grim assessment of the situation had become a decisive factor in Mrs Gandhi’s declaration of the unilateral ceasefire.
Further, an armoured thrust across the Indian border into Sindh another alternative on the table leading right up to Karachi’s seafront would have cut the province off from the rest of Pakistan. This idea too was abandoned because of its lack of political viability. The Sindhis and the Balochis, it was felt, were not ready for freedom yet.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union have taken credit for the unilateral ceasefire declared by India on the western front, claiming the decision to be an outcome of pressure exerted by them on the Indian PM. The United States suggested that it had sent discreet signals to Mrs Gandhi wamning that it would not tolerate India going too far in its “adventurism” against Pakistan, which would harm the country’s territorial integrity even further. Sending the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal was cited as the example.
It is quite likely that Washington and Moscow had consulted each other on the issue and come to a consensus to stop India from advancing further. I do not intend for a moment to suggest that these stories about the United States and the Soviet Union bringing pressure to bear on the Indian PM were entirely without substance. What I am certain of, however, is that Mrs Gandhi was not a person to give in so easily to pressure from outsiders. It is far more likely that she did what she thought was best for the country and what was possible under the given circumstances.
Although the 16 December 1971 secret confabulations in London had ended in failure. Dhaka’s political leadership did not allow the matter to rest. The bitterness of feeling against the Pakistani military for its excesses was refusing to die down. The subject was picked up once again by the supreme leader himself. When Mujibur Rahman came to London for his gallbladder operation in 1973 Mujib invited Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the Pakhtun nationalist leader, and Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the Baloch nationalist leader, who were still camping in London, for a private and a confidential meeting. The threesome had a heart-to-heart talk between them lasting nearly an hour. After the confabulations were over, Mujib wanted me to see him in the hospital. He told me that he had revived the topic of a joint liberation struggle for the people of Balochistan and Sindh and the Pakhtuns of NWFP, reiterating his party’s promise of support to their cause. I understood that the discussions were quite wide-ranging. However, the talks once again failed to produce any concrete results. By inviting both the leaders together for the meeting, ignoring the likelihood of leakage, I felt Mujib wanted the world to know that his Pakistan plan was not meant for hiding and would better be in the public domain. There were charges of treason against him anyway in Pakistani courts and now that Bangladesh was free, why should he be afraid of the Pakistani authorities anymore?

Mujib was left having a bitter taste in his mouth for his failure to persuade Wali Khan and Akbar Bugti to join a consolidated liberation struggle. He told me later what had happened in the meeting and confided with an element of desperation, saying something like this: “We Bengalis are a lot more courageous than the warrior races of West Pakistan. We ventured, we fought, and we won. I offered the Balochis and the Pashtuns the framework of a larger united platform with the Sindhis included in it, but they are not prepared to venture into it at least just as yet. They think the time is not ripe. I am convinced that this is the right moment to strike. They don’t realise how bitter I am as indeed the people of Bangladesh
are, about the genocide and the mass rape perpetrated by Pakistan Army against my people.” He threw his arms up and said, “It is a funny old world!”
At this point I sought his permission to share my thoughts with him on the subject. He agreed to listen to me. I told him that incidentally I happened to personally know both Khan Abdul Wali Khan and Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti. From my close interactions with them, knew exactly what was going on between them. Both had agreed that the Pakistani Balochis and the Pakistani Pakhtuns of NWFP would one day separate from the repressive militaryruled Pakistan. It was only a matter of time. Not if but when. That apart, there were certain deep cultural differences founded on territorial claims of a geopolitical nature that existed between the two ethno-national peoples. These were not resolved yet as they stood in the seventies. The bone of contention was in regard to the definition of their respective ideas of nationhood. What would be their long-term destinies? Would they go their separate ways or tie up as one nation?

Khan Abdul Wali Khan dreamt of a Greater Pashtunistan that included 1. the Pashtun part of Afghanistan, 2. the Pakistani Province of NWFP (recently renamed as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) where the Pakistani Pakhtuns or the Pashtuns lived, and 3. the Pakistani Province of Balochistan. Abdul Wali Khan, who had founded the left-wing National Awami Party of Pakistan, since renamed as Awami National Party (which in 2011 rules in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly NWFP, led by Abdul Wali Khan’s son Isfandyar Wali Khan). rejected the existence of the Durand Line that separated Afghanistan from Pakistan. The Pashtuns were one nation according to him and they could not be divided by an arbitrary line drawn by Imperial Britain. (Incidentally, much later in the 1990s, the Taliban too did not accept the validity of the Durand Line either but their vision was different; they wanted Afghanistan to merge with Pakistan). Wali Khan’s vision was that NWFP would separate from Pakistan and join Afghanistan into a unified nation. It could not be the other way round, The one highly controversial issue was his description of Balochistan as “Junubi Pashtunistan” or Southern Pashtunistan. The Pashtuns and the Baluchis were brothers in arm and have no separate cultural identities. His strategic vision was that the State of Greater Pashtunistan could not remain landlocked. To realise its full potential it needed access to the “warm waters of the Gulf of Hormuz”, a strategic term coined by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It had connotations of an expanded Soviet Empire that would extend right up to the Persian Gulf. Describing Balochistan as Southern Pashtunistan meant the articulation of the vision of a Greater Pashtunistan, with Balochistan forming a part of it. Did the Soviet Union’s extension of support to the cause of Bangladesh separation mean an indirect backdoor support to the cause of the Pashtuns and the Balochis on grounds of ethnicity? Did that mean that Moscow was dreaming of the domino doctrine coming into play by a long shot? Perhaps, but such a theory must be categorised as one of those proverbial “ifs” of history; it has no answer.
Wali Khan’s vision was not acceptable to the Balochis. The Balochi leadership across the board stood firm on preserving their exclusive national identity. They certainly sympathised with the aspirations of the Pashtuns and supported their cause but to tie Pashtun destinies with theirs would complicate their own national identity, which they would not allow to be diluted. The debate was still raging as Mujib and I sat down together to discuss the geopolitical issues of Central and South Asia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, this debate has taken a backseat but it is not buried yet.

The Jiye Sindh Mahaz led by GM Syed provided leadership to the Sindhis. GM Syed had declared that he would not accept anything short of full independence, and for this he was arrested and put behind bars for life. He died in prison. As long as he was alive, he was guiding the liberation struggle of the Sindhis from jail. His one aim was to net the Bhutto family into the struggle, but Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had other ambitions. GM Syed believed that one day the Bhuttos would be left with no choice but to join the Sindh liberation struggle. Before his death, GM Syed had passed an edict advising the rank and file of the Jiye Sindh Mahaz to surreptitiously infiltrate the Pakistan People’s Party, the ruling Party in Pakistan today (2011) and quietly build secret cells within it to be activated sometime in the future.

I was somewhat surprised to note that Mujib listened to my assessment of the ethnicitydriven highly charged security situation in Pakistan with patience. I could sense that Mujib was acutely aware that the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was only one part of the larger struggle of the minority regions of Pakistan against Military Dictatorship. The liberation of Bangladesh was not the end of the story. The full story was yet to unfold. Mujib smiled when I said that the birth of Bangladesh had opened a Pandora’s Box for military-ruled Pakistan.

A bloody military coup took place in Dhaka on 15 August 1975 in which Mujibur Rahman was assassinated. This was followed by the serial killings of almost the entire front-ranking political leadership of the Awami League. It would be nalve to rule out a possible link between these political murders in post-independence Bangladesh and the secret conclaves in London of 1971, 1972, and 1973. The Awami League’s offer of help to the leadership of the Baloch, the Pakhtuns, and the Sindhis for their self-determination, given the potential of information leaks from the overenthusiastic and inexperienced politicians playing games with the territorial integrity of a nation, had the potential of playing into the hands of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency the ISI remote-controlling these political murders.

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The politics of the POWs 2 July 1972-The Simla Conference India failed to negotiate a bard bargain with Pakistan on the POW issue, Indira Gandhi wins the war but loses the peace. On the issue of the Pakistani POWS, Mrs Indira Gandhi had at least two options before her to choose from.

The first option was that she could use the POW issue in a give-and-take transaction or a quid pro quo to get Mujibur Rahman released from military custody in Rawalpindi and returned to Dhaka to take his rightful place as the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. In return, India would release the Pakistani POWs, allowing them to return home. A matter to seriously ponder over was that if Mujibur Rahman, the Father of the Nation, was hanged by the Pakistan Army–there was already a verdict of death penalty on grounds of treason against him pronounced by a military court the new nation of Bangladesh would have emerged as an orphaned state from day one. This option to secure the release of Mujib in a POW barter deal was on the table in New Delhi.
On his part, Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, who had just taken over as the Chief Martial Law Administrator of Pakistan, was in too much of a hurry to let go an opportunity like this to secure the release of the 93,000 POWs from Indian custody and get them back home. For Bhutto, releasing Mujib before India asked for it, was like mounting a moral pressure on Mrs Indira Gandhi that would leave India with no viable option but to allow the POWs to return home.

Apparently Bhutto did not leave a second option open to India by so producing this fait accompli. It was left to Mrs Gandhi to either gracefully respond or be damned before the international community.
The release of Mujibur Rahman from Pakistan’s custody was certainly the highest priority for Indira Gandhi. For without Mujib assuming power in person in Dhaka, her decision to stand up and support the birth of a secular democratic Bangladesh carved out of an intolerant fundamentalist country would have remained a mission not fully accomplished. The second option was dead even before it was taken up for discussion in the PM’s kitchen cabinet.
The POW issue could have been a golden opportunity for India to impose on Pakistan, in its moment of weakness at the time of its military defeat, a sustainable and permanent solution to the Kashmir problem.
When the time came for India, in 1972 leading up to the Simla Conference, to take its vital decision on matters of its highest national interest, New Delhi chose to secure Mujibur Rahman’s life as its top priority and pushed Kashmir to take a backseat.
As the Prime Minister took her decision one way or the other, which was to leave an impact on India’s long-term national security, the nation was divided right in the middle on its choices. Those who wanted the Kashmir problem to be solved on a priority basis on the back of the POW issue, were convinced that while securing Mujib’s life was of utmost importance both for India and Bangladesh, the Pakistan Army-after having committed the
stigmatising crimes of horrendous genocide and mass rape of Bengali women-would never have dared to hang the immensely popular Bangladesh leader who was also a world statesman. According to this section of opinion, since there was no question of Pakistan hanging Mujib, settling the Kashmir question should have been the top most priority f India.
Under the terms of the Simla Agreement signed on 2 July 1972, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in her very own personal way of saying “thank you to President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto for having released Mujibur Rahman from Pakistan’s military custody ignoring the death sentence passed by a Court Martial in Rawalpindi, decided to release the 93,000 Pakistani POWs. The POWs were in Indian custody for five months.
Bhutto’s decision to release Mujib was unilateral. He had taken the decision before India had sent in its official request in this matter. Consequently there were no prior negotiations on the issue. India was therefore under no obligation to respond with a special favour to Bhutto’s decision. New Delhi was free to make its own choices keeping in mind the security interests of the nation. Instead, Indira Gandhi chose to demonstrate India’s gesture of goodwill towards Pakistan keeping in mind the need to re-building future relationship.

Mrs Gandhi had come under enormous pressure from the strategic community in India not to release the POWs without negotiating a settlement of the Kashmir issue but she stood her ground. Once decided, she did not backtrack on the issue under pressure. Although it spoke highly of her graciousness as indeed her courage and determination, the accord squandered a great opportunity to settle the Kashmir problem. According to the hardliners, Indira Gandhi won the war but lost the peace.
After having lost the bargaining power, India proposed to Pakistan in glaring naivety that bilaterally the two nations should consider a final solution of the Kashmir problem on the basis of mutually accepting the Line of Control (LOC) or the Ceasefire Line as the International Border. Hardheaded Pakistan treated India’s proposal with disdain. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, on his return to Pakistan after Simla, ridiculed the idea of converting the LOC into an International Border and instead declared that Pakistan would eat grass but spare no effort to make an Islamic Bomb, meaning the Atom Bomb, for the defence of Pakistan against “infidel India. He also warned the world that Pakistan was ready to fight a thousand years war with India.
It was many years later that General Pervez Musharraf, the Military Dictator of Pakistan in the nineties, articulated Pakistan’s position on the LOC more colourfully than Bhutto did. He said that the LOC or the Line of Control was indeed the problem, it couldn’t be the solution.
In signing the Simla Agreement, Pakistan recognised what was formerly known as East Pakistan as the newly independent and sovereign state of Bangladesh. The language used in recognising Bangladesh lacked grace and was not straightforward. The accord established an agreed framework for negotiated settlement of all future conflicts between the two countries. Pakistan hardly ever took notice of this provision for future dealings with India. Under the agreement, India also returned 13,000 square kilometres of Pakistani territory that its troops had seized during the course of the war.
According to Husain Haqqani in his book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, India showed leniency towards Bhutto, responding to his pleadings that the fragile democracy in Pakistan would crumble if the accord was perceived by Pakistanis as too harsh. Bhutto was also reported to have said that if leniency were not shown to him, he would be accused of losing Kashmir in addition to the loss of East Pakistan. It would be suicidal for him.

The inconclusive Simla Agreement had another unfortunate aspect for Bhutto. It cost him his life. He shouldn’t have pleaded for leniency-it was demeaning. He should have used the opportunity to settle the Kashmir problem with India by agreeing to convert the LOC into an International Border, a proposal that was on the table at the Simla Conference. It was spurned by him in an exercise in skulduggery. His decision to keep the Kashmir problem festering ensured the return of the generals to the centre stage of Pakistani politics once again, despite the debacle of Dhaka. When Bhutto was hanged in 1979 by General Zia ul Huque, the ruthless Military Dictator of Pakistan, no one shed tears for him except his daughter Benazir who described it colourfully as “Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s judicial murder”. Shaheed meant a martyr.
With the benefit of hindsight, one gets the feeling that the Simla Conference should have been used by Bhutto to send the Pakistan Army back to the barracks permanently. cutting it into an inconsequential political force and strengthening democratic institutions. Forty years down the line in the year 2011, the Pakistan Army continues to be the powerful backseat driver in a cosy arrangement where there is the charade of a so-called democratic government but the real power lies in the hands of the Chief of Army Staff. It was Bhutto’s lack strategic vision that squandered such a golden opportunity of comprehensively clipping the political wings of Pakistan Army and left the posterity in Pakistan to suffer so much under serial military dictatorships. Had he done so, at least his life would have been spared.
13

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto ZA Bhutto quietly puts in a word in Begum Laila Hussain’s ears in London, confiding his decision to release Mujibur Rahman on his return to Islamabad, Shrewdly, he wants this message to be passed on to Delhi, which is done with utmost urgency. It heralds the beginning of POW Diplomacy, While on a short visit to London, Begum Laila Hussain, the pretty wife of the then-Chief Secretary of the Government of East Pakistan, found herself in November 1971 having to extend her stay for reasons beyond her control. Her husband Mr M Hussain had been taken as POW by India following the surrender of Pakistan Army in Dhaka on 16 December 1971, Because of his high official status, the Chief Secretary on his arrival in New Delhi was lodged as a personal guest at the residence of Durga Prasad Dhar, the Policy Planning Minister in the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.
DP Dhar, a Kashmiri Pandit, was a man of enormous charm, steeped in the knowledge of the finest literary traditions of Urdu and Persian poetry. Since I had been once a student of the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and learnt and loved Urdu poetry as well, we had on several occasions when we met, recited Urdu and Persian poetry to each other.

One day in early January 1972 DP Dhar, bypassing the stifling bureaucratic channels, sent me a personal message directly, requesting me to meet Begum Laila Hussain and deliver a personal letter in a sealed cover from her husband. The letter assured her that he was in good health and cheer and was being well looked after by none other than DP Dhar himself in Delhi, In the course of running back and forth with a few more of those messages between the two Hussains, I found myself in the position of a diplomatic go-between. Laila and I became good friends and had endless discussions on India-Pakistan affairs and world politics.
Meanwhile the news had broken with stunning suddenness that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was at the UN in New York, would be passing through London on his way back home to take over the reins of power from General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s Military Dictator. It was a vitally important piece of news for India because Bhutto was to take charge as the Chief Martial Law Administrator of Pakistan and would therefore be the one person in whose hands would lie the fate of Mujibur Rahman, who was still in military custody in Rawalpindi. There was deep anxiety over the matter in India and the government was beset by the following concerns: Would Mujib be hanged for treason? Would he be sentenced to life imprisonment? Or would he be set free as a matter of political expediency although he was under a sentence of death by hanging in a military court in Pakistan?
How to get an insight into Islamabad’s perspective on the matter was a concern uppermost in the minds of those holding fort in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) including political advisers and members of security organisations. Many channels were opened in order to position listening posts around the outgoing General Yahya Khan, the Pakistan Army GHQ, as also most importantly the incoming Chief Martial Law Administrator Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. There was a near stampede over who would be the first to get the information to Delhi.
Meanwhile, K Sankaran Nair, RAW’s second-in-command, had come up with a bright idea in New Delhi. Why not persuade Laila Hussain in London to tactfully broach the subject of Mujib’s release with Bhutto during his stopover in London on his way back from the US? Nair’s suggestion had merit because of his knowledge of Laila’s personal background. On first-name terms with each other, Laila Hussain and Zulfi Bhutto were long-standing friends who moved in the rarefied circles of Pakistani high society.
I was chosen to be the man for the occasion. I was convinced that there was mileage to be gained from the delicate operation. I swung into action mode immediately. My initial concern was the manner in which I should couch my articulation to ensure that she did not turn down the request. If I did manage to successfully persuade her to do the job, the next step would be to determine how she should put the question to Bhutto and not arouse his suspicion about her real motive. The modus operandi was chalked out and the operation was ready to be launched.

Laila was so excited about the mission assigned to her that she had brought with her a bugging device which she was wearing on herself. She made it look like a perfect intelligence operation. May be the upper crust of Pakistani society was made like that. The bugging device in the possession of Laila Hussain made me think, what kind of a police state Pakistan was? The operational part was put in motion satisfactorily without too much of a hitch. Laila met “Zulfi” (for that was how she was accustomed to addressing him affectionately) on his arrival at the Alcock and Brown Suite, which was the VIP Lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport. She went straight into the subject of her husband being held as a POW in India and asked if he could for old time’s sake make an exception and ask Indira Gandhi for his out of turn release as a special case. After a pause she thoughtfully added in a piece of innovative thinking: that it might help her husband’s case better as indeed would the cases of all the POWs held in India if he combined Mujibur Rahman’s release with those of the POWs, thus establishing a quid pro quo. Laila’s articulation of such original thinking without the backup of a professional brief was a delight to hear. It must have stirred the brain cells of Bhutto and as always he was quick on the uptake. His reply was sharp, brusque, and marked by a twist of frivolity. Taking her aside to a corner of the lounge, Bhutto told her in a whisper: “Laila! Why are you worried about your husband so much? I will get you another one more handsome than Hussain. Well,frivolities apart, now to respond to your suggestion. You can inform you “masters” in Delhi that I will release Mujib soon after I take charge. I mean it. I will expect the Indians to release your husband immediately thereafter and I will settle with Indira Gandhi what I really want in return.” It was obvious he had the hope of the release of the 93,000 POWs in his mind. Laila’s concern for her husband’s release was beyond belief. She wanted instant action on Bhutto’s explosive disclosure and to make the point emphatically she handed over to me her private bugging device with the recordings in it.
The sensational “breaking news” item was communicated to Delhi through the fastest diplomatic channel available. The first to receive it was Sankaran Nair, the RAW second-incommand, with copies endorsed to RN Kao and DP Dhar at the Ministry of External Affairs. When the news reached the table of PM Indira Gandhi in her South Bloc office, her reaction was cautious: “Let us wait and see.”
The waiting game started immediately. It turned out to be among the longest and most agonising in India’s diplomatic history till that day. Harold Wilson’s famous statement “A week is a long time in politics” looked like small change in comparison. In Delhi’s highly charged atmosphere, waiting for the actual news of the release was getting unbearable.

True to his word, though he was not quite known for keeping his promises, Bhutto had Mujib released from military prison within the broad time frame he had indicted to Laila Hussain in London. Mujib was set free on 8 January 1972. It was quite obvious that Bhutto meant serious business. Getting the POWs released in return was certainly uppermost in his mind.

New Delhi was not unaware of the secret game plan of Bhutto India on its part was also not unprepared to respond positively to Bhutto’s gesture of goodwill. India’s sentimental journey with Mujib found a fulfilment and a consummation in his release alive from prison in Rawalpindi. The kind of euphoric celebration that followed in the corridors of power in Delhi’s South Block, the Secretariat building housing the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of External Affairs, had rarely been seen or heard before or since except at the time of the Independence celebrations on 15 August 1947. The gratitude Bhutto’s gesture generated in Delhi was profound. Indira Gandhi had meanwhile decided what grand gesture she would make to reciprocate Bhutto’s generosity.

At the Simla talks in the summer of 1972, Bhutto brought up with Mrs Indira Gandhi the favour he had done India and successfully used Mujib’s release from detention he was to be hanged in the light of a military court’s verdict of treason as an instrument of moral pressure and a quid pro quo for facilitating the return of the 93,000 Pakistani POWs held in India. For its part, India ensured that the Pakistani military men and civilians in India’s custody were treated not merely as POWs but as guests deserving respect more than was due to them under the Geneva Convention, but also agreed to release them from custody, setting them free to return home with honour.

On Mujib’s release from detention, Bhutto, who was on a personal visit to the prison, greeted him with the declaration that he was now the Prime Minister of East Pakistan. To this Mujib objected, saying that as the majority leader, he could only be the Prime Minister of Pakistan, not East Pakistan. Frivolity over, Bhutto clarified that East Pakistan was now Bangladesh and that Mujib could now go back to Dhaka and stake his claim as the leader of the new nation. To match the occasion, Bhutto had asked his office to procure for Mujib a couple of buttoned-up dark bespoke suits so that he would be properly dressed when inspecting the guard of honour at the New Delhi’s International Airport, Mujib’s Indian-style buttoned up suit did not go unnoticed or without comment by the chattering classes when he arrived in Delhi. As a parting shot, Bhutto asked Mujib with great circumspection whether he would ever be averse to the idea of Bangladesh and Pakistan coming together again to form a “Confederation”. Mujib wisely kept his counsel and refrained from offering a response.

During the course of a chat a few days later, I asked Mujib out of curiosity what his reply would be on the “Confederation issue, now that some time had elapsed for him to think things through. His answer was categorical: “Over my dead body.” Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s dream of a Pakistan-Bangladesh Confederation has remained elusive.
14

Mujibur Rahman is set free from Pakistani military prison 8 January 1972. He returns home to Dhaka on 10 January 1972 to a hero’s welcome with stopovers in London and Delhi. His historic summit meeting with Mrs Indira Gandhi in Delhi
heralds a new political order in South Asia. In a sequence of fast-moving events, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto returns home from the UN Security Council meetings in New York, but not before having met President Richard Nixon in Washington. In a hurried changeover of power he was sworn in on 20 December 1971 as the first civilian Chief Martial Law Administrator and the President of Pakistan.

When the news of Pakistan Army laying down arms before the Indian Army in Dhaka was announced, the people in what was left of Pakistan-West Pakistan was now the truncated Pakistan in its new incarnation could not easily come to terms with the magnitude of the defeat. Mass protests and demonstrations erupted all over the country. The law and order situation had spiralled almost out of control. Husain Haqqani, the Pakistan Ambassador in Washington in 2011 and the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, wrote: “Pakistan Army had failed to fulfil its promise of fighting to the last man. The war had exposed the shortcoming of Rawalpindi’s declared strategic doctrine that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan. Pakistan Army’s Eastern Command had laid down arms after losing about 1300 men in battle while the Army’s Western Command in a lacklustre performance suffering nearly 1200 military deaths felt relieved to be informed of India’s decision of a unilateral ceasefire on the western front.” Haqqani’s figures were too conservative.
Finding himself unable to contain the increasingly uncontrollable situation of street protest and violence, a demoralised “wartime President General Yahya Khan decided to step down and hand over power to Zulfiqar Al Bhutto. As they say, the chief witch fell from the broomstick. The man who presided over the disintegration of Pakistan, General Yahya Khan, was now left with nowhere to go but to walk the road to oblivion.

A man known for his giant ego and high ambition, Bhutto was not prepared to waste much time, lest someone else usurp the office he was to hold. At the first sound of a call from the GHQ in Rawalpindi, he rushed back to Islamabad post haste and within four days of the surrender ceremony in Dhaka he assumed charge of the high office on 20 December 1971. Although confronted with the chaos of a devastating defeat in war, Bhutto had made it a point not to forget what he had promised Laila Hussain in London that he would release Mujib at the earliest possible opportunity after his return to Islamabad. He had set his sights on how to get the 93,000 Pakistani POWs back home in return for the release of Mujib. Bhutto was obviously pinning his hope on Mujib’s release from military captivity by building moral pressure on Mrs Indira Gandhi. His line of thinking was, if he could get the POWS quickly back home, he would be able to consolidate himself in his seat of power early and also begin the process of restoring Pakistan’s image before the international community simultaneously.

The key question was: would India play ball? In a strange mix of carrot and stick approaches, Bhutto had decided in order to achieve his objective to unabashedly kowtow before Indira Gandhi at the Simla Conference and typical of the man post-Simla after he was back in Islamabad, he would roar like a lion, threatening to teach India a lesson for its alleged excesses. Bhutto had decided to take the gamble, whatever the outcome. With such a clearly chalked out road map in his mind, ZA Bhutto released Mujibur Rahman from military custody on 8 January 1972, making all necessary arrangements for his passage to London on a special PIA flight. Thirteen hours with Mujibur Rahman. Mujibur Rahman arrived in London 9 January 1972 at 06.00 am to a quiet welcome in the Alcock and Brown Suite, Heathrow Airport’s VIP Lounge. Apart from Ian Sutherland, the Head of the India Desk at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, among those present included Apa B Pant, the High Commissioner for India in London. Sutherland quickly arranged a meeting between Mujib and Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, at 10 Downing Street. Mujib later described the meeting as promising and substantive. More on this later.

Apa B Pant, on his part, called Indira Gandhi on the telephone in Delhi and put her in touch with Mujibur Rahman in London. The Gandhi-Mujib discussions lasted half an hour. Apart from conveying her congratulations on the birth of Bangladesh as a sovereign independent nation, his life’s most cherished dream, she expressed her great relief at his release and warmly extended an invitation to him to pay a visit to Delhi on his way to Dhaka. Mujib accepted her invitation. Mrs Gandhi also informed Mujib that she had arranged his flight on a special Air India VIP flight. As Mujib’s flight was being made ready, Mrs Gandhi phoned him a second time to convey that she had changed her mind about his flight by Air India and rearranged it with Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, to fly him to Delhi on a Royal Air Force (RAF) military jet from London. She explained to him discreetly the purposes behind the change of flight details.
Mrs Indira Gandhi feared that the Air India flight could be booby trapped by enemy agents. Using her instinct of abundant precaution and keeping other weighty considerations in mind, she decided to change tack and requested Edward Heath to provide a RAF planea VIP jet-to fly the Bangladesh leader from London to Delhi and then on to Dhaka with a stopover in Calcutta, leaving it to the Bangladesh leader to exercise the option if he so wished.
It was an astute move. The personal request made by the Indian Prime Minister to the British Prime Minister, given that Britain had not yet established diplomatic relations with Bangladesh and Edward Heath’s acceptance of the request in protocol terms, had far-reaching diplomatic implications. On his part, the British PM did not let the opportunity pass, despite the constraints of diplomatic niceties, in playing a little diplomatic game, obviously aware of Mrs Gandhi’s real intentions of making British recognition of Bangladesh as fait accompli. The overall mood was that both Indira Gandhi and Edward Heath were in a great and good mood to help Mujib to put his house in order and begin the process of governing his new nation ruined and devastated by war.
Now the question was who should accompany Mujib on his flight. It was Durga Prasad Dhar, the Policy Planning Minister in the Ministry of External Affairs; in consultation with Ram Nath Kao, the Intelligence Chief; TN Kaul, Foreign Secretary; and K Sankaran Nair, the number two man in RAW who together proposed to the PM that yours truly should accompany Mujib on the RAF flight. The reasons advanced were that I had known Mujib for a long time-almost from his early years in politics and that I was also intimately associated with the liberation struggle both in Dhaka and London. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi accepted the high-powered proposal and personally authorised the tour of duty for me. I was handed a brief from the Prime Minister containing guidance and instructions about what I was expected to say to Mujib.
The opportunity to fly with Mujib on the RAF Comet jet-it was a thirteen-hour journey which included two refuelling stop-overs-turned out for me to be my life’s most important political mission Ian Sutherland asked me to take my seat next to Mujib. The twin seats were behind a working desk, a characteristic of VIP flights. The desk was very useful because important reference papers could be spread out on it. The Bangladesh leader also used the desk to park his smoker’s pipe on it. His favourite tobacco was the perfumed brand “Erinmore”. Just before stepping off the aircraft as it was getting ready for take-off, Sutherland asked me if I had any “objection to being photographed with Mujib, to which I replied “No, I have certainly no objection.” He told me that the pilot would take two photographs with me and Mujib in the picture when the aircraft would be in flight. A copy each would be handed over to me before landing in Delhi. One of the photographs is reprinted in the book. I thanked him for all the care he had taken of me.
Something interesting happened just before the flight was to take off. Ian Sutherland came up to me near the door of the aircraft where I was standing as the flight was being prepared and wished me “A happy journey”. Using body language with no use of words he asked me to look after the guest. I assured him also using body language that there was no need for him to worry about that I could detect a twinkle in his eye as if he knew what I was up to. I shook his hand and thanked him for his good wishes.
After a session of cheerful banter and a drink of orange juice, as the flight progressed, Mujib took me into confidence and in a whisper asked me if he could ask me a big favour. There was no hesitation in his demeanour. I replied in the affirmative, subject however to my capacity and reach to do it.
Opening up, he told me that he wanted me to convey a very important personal message from him to Mrs Indira Gandhi promptly on arrival in Delhi before he could make a request to her in his talks at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Presidential Palace. I was nervous for the first few seconds. What was the mission? Would I be able to reach the heights to the Prime Minister’s ears in the celebratory atmosphere of his arrival in Delhi? Mujib wanted me to do, in his own words, a bit of “advance spadework” by conveying a personal request from him to the Indian PM to reconsider her decision about the timetable of the troop withdrawal.
He confided in me that the background of this appeal was a wish expressed by the British Prime Minister Edward Heath that if India were to agree to amend its decision to withdraw its troops from Bangladesh by 31 March 1972, that is, three months before the deadline of 30 June 1972 publicly announced by Indira Gandhi, it would pave the way for Britain to promptly extend its diplomatic recognition to Bangladesh as a sovereign independent nation. Mujib added his own wish to the above request. He wanted this decision to get reflected in the Indira Gandhi-Mujibur Rahman Joint Communiqué, which was to be issued at the end of their Delhi talks. On arrival at the Delhi International Airport as we were getting down the flight of stairs, I saw the President of India VV Giri accompanied by his wife, Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi, and Foreign Minister DP Dhar among many other dignitaries waiting on the ground to accord a warm welcome to the Bangladesh leader. After an emotional exchange of greetings, Mujib was directed towards the venue where he was to be presented with a ceremonial Guard of Honour jointly by the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, and the Indian Air Force. It was a fine sunny winter morning and a grand spectacle to watch.
DP Dhar’s mind was concentrated elsewhere. While still on the tarmac at the foot of the comet jet, Dhar took me aside and in a business-like manner asked me to highlight what was the core of the discussions I had with the Bangladesh leader.
Aware that Britain’s recognition of Bangladesh was a matter of crucial importance to both New Delhi and Dhaka, I went straight into the heart of the issue raised by Mujib in flight. I articulated somewhat like this: “Edward Heath had expressed a wish to Mujib that he might like to take up with Mrs Gandhi the issue of India withdrawing its troops from Bangladesh by 31 March 1972, which would mean advancing the date by three months from what was announced earlier which was 30 June 1972. This would pave the way promptly for British recognition of Bangladesh as a sovereign, independent nation. Mujib would raise this issue with our PM in his summit talks with her shortly thereafter.” I conveyed quite firmly to Dhar that Mujib would regard this issue as the most critical subject for discussion with the PM and might even treat it almost as a litmus test. India’s commitment to this effect in a joint communiqué would help him greatly in consolidating his own position with his people. I also conveyed to DP Dhar that the Bangladesh leader Bongo Bondhu Mujibur Rahman had been persuaded to adopt a parliamentary system of government for the new nation and accepted that Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury would be appointed the President, as the ceremonial head of state, and that he (Mujib) would himself assume charge as the Prime Minister, the executive head of government. The swearing in ceremony would take place on 12 January 1972.

Following his arrival at the Rashtrapati Bhavan from the airport, with clockwork efficiency, DP Dhar requested for a quick meeting with the PM Indira Gandhi and reported on the basis of my submission that Mujib would raise the issue of the withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladesh by 31 March 1972, advancing the date by three months from 30 June 1972. The request needed detailed security assessment but instant response was of the essence. As the reception got underway in Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Presidential Palace, with notun gurer shondesh, a delicious Bengali sweet ordered from Calcutta, and other savouries like the traditional spicy singharas (samosas) with cups of the finest Darjeeling tea, Mrs Gandhi got busy setting the consultation process in motion, calling a meeting of her top level aids. Included among them were Ram Nath Kao, the Intelligence Chief; TN Kaul, Foreign Secretary: PN Haksar, Political Adviser; DP Dhar; and General Sam Maneckshaw, the Chief of Army Staff. The PM decided, standing on her feet, that if Mujibur Rahman raised the issue in his talks with her at Rashtrapati Bhavan, she would agree to withdraw the Indian troops by 31 March 1971. Never before or since has a decision of such crucial importance to India’s security been taken so swiftly as on this occasion.

At the summit meeting, Mujib did indeed raise with the PM-in line with the friendly intelligence input already communicated the issue of the withdrawal of Indian troops on 31 March 1972. At the end of the Indira Gandhi-Mujibur Rahman Summit in Delhi, a Joint Communique was issued in which India declared its decision that at the suggestion of Mujibur Rahman, New Delhi had agreed to withdraw its forces from Bangladesh on 31 March 1972, advancing the date from 30 June 1972. It showcased India’s commitment to an unreserved friendship with Bangladesh. Mujib exuded happiness at the outcome of his summit with Mrs Indira Gandhi. He was now in no doubt that the crucial British recognition of Bangladesh was only a matter of time. With India, the Soviet Union, and Britain recognising Bangladesh, Dhaka’s place under the sun was now guaranteed.

Mujib’s sense of courtesy did not fail him. He took an early opportunity after the Summit was over, as he came out of the conference room, to dash towards me and clasp my hands, thanking me for the “advance spadework” that I had done to nudge Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to agree on the issue of the withdrawal the Indian armed forces three months in advance from Bangladesh with such urgency.
Armed with this unprecedented diplomatic success in Delhi, Mujib arrived in Dhaka to a hero’s welcome. I had never before seen such a seething, vibrating mass of humanity, estimated to be a million people, celebrating their beloved Father of the Nation’s safe return home to chants of slogans like “Joy Bongo Bondhu”, “Joy Swadhinota Songram”, “Joy Indira Gandhi”, “Joy Swadhin Bangladesh”. The atmosphere was electrifying and the moment truly historic.
In its sheer magnitude of mass participation, Mujib’s return home to such tumultuous welcome was comparable to the return of Ayatullah Ruhullah Khomeini to Tehran at the height of the Islamic Revolution in Iran 1979. There was however one fundamental difference. Mujib had unfurled the ideology of a liberal and inclusive secular democracy, lending a unique characteristic to the Bangladesh movement almost in the mould of Kemal Ataturk’s secular revolution in Turkey replacing the dying Ottoman Empire. Mujib on his part had won the ideological argument against a repressive and obscurantist military dictatorship. Khomeini’s Shia Revolution on the other hand signalled the beginning of Islamic extremism and violence which became the source of so much instability and bloodshed in the world. Mujibur Rahman’s return home to a free, democratic, and secular Bangladesh was greeted with high hopes of the beginning of a new era of freedom and democracy in the developing world. Back to the VIP flight. After refuelling in Akrotiri, the RAF Base in Cyprus, as the Comet jet took off for Oman–for a second refuelling on its way to Delhi-I found Mujib in an exuberant mood. He stood up and began singing the well-known Bengali patriotic song written by India’s national poet Rabindra Nath Tagore, Aamaar Shonaar Bangla, Aami Tomaye Bhalobashi translated into English as: “Oh! My Golden Bengal, I Love You So Dearly”), and asked me to join him in the chorus. As he sang the song a second time-the first time was like a rehearsal, the second rendition was sung with much more verve and passion-I could catch a glimpse of his eyes moistening with emotion. Apart from what I knew of him as a man of great charm and warmth over the years, I was now left in no doubt after seeing tears in his eyes about his true inner self as an uncompromising patriot-a rare breed among politicians in these days.

As we sat down, he sprang a surprise on me. He whispered into my ears that the song Aamaar Shonaar Bangla, Aami Tomaye Bhalobashi should be adopted as the national anthem of Bangladesh. He asked my opinion on this idea. I told him that it was indeed a great idea and added that with Rabindra Nath Tagore, whose humanity knew no bounds, becoming the bridge of friendship between India and Bangladesh, what more would one need to cement that relationship forever? It had never happened before in history that the national anthems of two nations were written by one and the same person. It was also typical of Mujib’s emotional exuberance when he told me that although there would be no written record in history, he wanted me to know at the personal level that the decision to adopt the “Aamaar Shonaar Bangla, Aami Tomaye Bhalobashi” as the national anthem of Bangladesh was taken between two old friends, in his words “you and me”, on board a RAF flight from London to Dhaka. It was now my turn to be emotional.
Sentimentalism apart, I felt that Mujib was worried and didn’t want to leave matters to chance in his determination to achieve a certain objective as he played the national anthem diplomacy” on me. He wanted to inject a dose of adrenaline in me to motivate me more strongly to do the job assigned by him in his words the advance spadework”–preparing Mrs Indira Gandhi to agree to withdraw the Indian troops from Bangladesh by 31 March 1972. It was in the highest common interest of both India and Bangladesh and I was acutely aware of its importance. (I have covered the outcome in the earlier paragraphs.)
The brief that I was carrying with me from the PM was still incomplete in its accomplishment. It was a difficult mission, it needed delicate handling, and the time was short. The task involved was to impress upon Mujib, using all my powers of persuasion to make him agree, without being too persistent, to adopt a parliamentary system of government for the new nation on the model of the Indian experience. Mrs Gandhi might have thought that the parliamentary system had a better chance of forging a more sustained long-term friendly relationship between the two nations than the presidential system, which was apparently much too closely associated with military dictatorships in the subcontinent.
A discussion of this subject also chimed well with what I had in mind. Nobody knew more than me, because of my close association with him during the liberation struggle, what dedicated hard work Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury had put in for the cause of freedom and justice of the people in the land of his birth. He had no job or hardly any family income to fall ck upon yet I had seen him slogging on selflessly for freedom of the people of Bangladesh. He was born in District Mymensingh in undivided Bengal. His contribution was unique: putting the cause of Bangladesh into the consciousness of the international community, working through the corridors of the UN and other world organisations. I felt that his services should receive due recognition.

I used my own way to address the issue. First we talked about various systems of government that we knew of and, given the range of choices in a democracy, we asked ourselves what would be the most suitable system for developing countries, particularly for those making their debut uniquely in democratic governance. We talked of the presidential system of government. I argued that for a large mature democracy like the United States, the presidential system was perhaps the most suitable. In certain developing countries, where it existed, the presidential system seemed to have lost their way and their democratic credentials. Thus, for example, in a country like Pakistan the presidential system had become largely associated with military dictatorships. Then there was the parliamentary system of government. The oldest practitioner of this system known as the Westminster Model-was Britain. The parliamentary system of government which India had adopted in 1950 was originally based on the Westminster model of Britain, but as it has matured over the years Indians have begun believing that the system was very much their own, imported but bred and nurtured in India.

There were a million good reasons why the system suited India so much. Detach it from drawing inspiration from the Indian experience, if you like the Westminster Model would, in my view, suit the genius of Bangladesh most eminently. India had made a tryst with the parliamentary system and was comfortable with it. I thought that Bangladesh would be happy to embrace a vibrant and perhaps a noisy democracy much like India. We had the same blood running in our veins. Mujib had a good laugh when he heard this thesis of mine.
I suggested to Mujib that among the many reasons why the Westminster Model of parliamentary democracy would suit Bangladesh, most significant was the desirability of finding a niche for Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury-an internationally renowned jurist, an eminent educationist, and a statesman of a high order who had served the cause of the freedom of Bangladesh so selflessly and tirelessly and who was also known for his unbending loyalty to Mujib and his ideology of the liberation struggle. I engaged Mujib for as long as it was possible for me to hold his attention on this subject. I told him that it would also greatly add to the stature of Bangladesh in the international community in the early days of its independent existence if a man of Justice Choudhury’s intellectual calibre was appointed to the office of the ceremonial head of state as the President while Mujib himself, the Father of the Nation, would take his place as the executive head of government as the Prime Minister. The office of the Prime Minister would thus become the fulcrum of power of the nation.

Mujib was quick on the uptake to appreciate the nuances of the argument that I had advanced in favour of Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury. With a twinkle in his eye Mujib asked me if the idea of a parliamentary system of government for Bangladesh was that of Mrs Indira Gandhi. I could not help being amused at the childlike innocence of the man. Perhaps, I wondered, he wanted to be sure that I was not speaking out of turn. I nodded in confirmation of his supposition, adding that Mrs Indira Gandhi was perhaps the rarest among the world leaders whose good will for Bangladesh was so unique and so unparalleled.
I articulated my thoughts with these words: “Yes, Bongo Bondhu, I have been asked by my Prime Minister to submit this suggestion for your consideration. It is up to you to take the decision.”
After a pause and reflection, he accepted that under the present circumstances, the parliamentary system of government would be the most appropriate for the newly formed State of Bangladesh. He added that appointing Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury as President of Bangladesh was a sound idea and one which met with his approval. He also agreed to take over as the Prime Minister which would take effect only after he returned to Dhaka. This would ensure that Mujibur Rahman as the President of Bangladesh was received at the International Airport in Delhi as the Head of State and presented with a guard of honour by the combined defence forces of India.
Before I took the return flight to India on the waiting RAF comet jet, I had a farewell meeting with Mujib at his home. I was happy to learn from the horse’s mouth that his meeting with the Indian Prime Minister had worked out to his satisfaction and that he had obtained practically everything he had wanted from her, the most important one being the rescheduling of the date of withdrawal of the Indian armed forces from Bangladesh. He thanked me once again for the “advance spadework” I had put in with Mrs Indira Gandhi.
I thought the moment was appropriate and the opportunity ripe to ask if Mujib had spoken to Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, personally appraising him of the contents of his discussions with Mrs Indira Gandhi. He confessed that he had not done it as yet, although it was unlikely that Heath had not read the joint communiqué issued in Delhi. Promptly, in my presence, Mujib asked his secretary to call Edward Heath in London. As he spoke to the British PM he asked if he had seen the joint communiqué confirming India’s agreement to withdraw its troops from Bangladesh by 31 March 1972. In his own way, Mujib nudged Heath of their London agreement over British recognition of Bangladesh as a sovereign independent state in the backdrop of this agreement in place. When I saw a big laugh on his face, I knew that it was good news. With India, the Soviet Union, and Britain recognising Bangladesh, Dhaka’s rightful place under the sun was now guaranteed. Now that Dhaka had achieved diplomatic recognition from three major member nations of the UN, recognition from other nations was only a matter of time. Mujib’s fast-moving diplomacy in securing swift recognition of Bangladesh from Britain was astute and impressive.

What was really heart-warming was Mujib’s acknowledgement of India’s help in extending its hand of friendship in securing the independence of Bangladesh. He mentioned Mrs Indira Gandhi’s name time and again, giving an indication how much he admired her political sagacity and moral courage.
It was inconceivable, he went on to say, that India would go to war for the sake of another country’s liberation at a great risk to its own security, adding that Bangladesh would remain forever grateful to India for helping it secure its freedom.
For my part, I told him that had it not been for the courage of the people of Bangladesh and their determination to fight for their liberation under his leadership, precious little could have been achieved irrespective of India extending its hand of friendship. India’s support was for freedom and democracy, for secularism and Bengali nationalism.
Something not to be missed in this account of events was an in-flight message received by Mujib sent by Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the Chief Minister of West Bengal. On behalf of the people of his state, Ray requested Mujib to break journey in Calcutta on his way from Delhi to Dhaka, provided it was not too much of an inconvenience for him. I complied with Mujib’s request to draft a reply for him. He guided me in what was to be written.
The final version of the message was couched in the politest possible language conveying his inability to oblige him for the moment. He must proceed to Dhaka after Delhi and meet his people before visiting Calcutta. He promised to visit Calcutta at the earliest possible opportunity after Dhaka.
Mujib’s much awaited visit to Calcutta a few days later would turn out to be the cause of nearly as much jubilation and celebration as his return to Dhaka had been in the wake of his country’s liberation. Millions came out in the streets of Calcutta for a glimpse of Bongo Bondhu-the Friend of the People of Bangladesh a term of endearment that the people of the region had coined for Mujibur Rahman. Mujib’s powerful oratory at the public meeting in the Brigade Parade ground in Calcutta mesmerised the milling crowd who had turned up to see and hear him speak. The newspapers reported that for the estimated million people who were there in the Brigade Parade ground in Calcutta that day, it was an unforgettable experience. Mrs Indira Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister, had flown to Calcutta from Delhi and was on the podium when Mujibur Rahman addressed the mass rally. Mrs Gandhi also addressed the rally, thanking Mujib for visiting Calcutta so soon after his return home. The Bangladesh Government on 24 July 2011 posthumously conferred its highest state award Bangladesh Swadhinota Sonmanona on Mrs Indira Gandhi for her outstanding contribution to the country’s 1971 Liberation War. The award was received from Bangladesh President Zillur Rahman in Dhaka by Sonia Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law, the Chairperson of India’s ruling United Progressive Alliance and the President of the Indian National Congress. The grand ceremony was attended by Bangladesh Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina.
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15

The smell of gunpowder The Assassination of Mujibur Rahman, the Father of the Nation, in Dhaka, 15 August
1975. India’s 28th Independence Day,
It was Bangladesh’s extreme misfortune that its tryst with democracy was to last for just under four years. We may know it all too well yet it is worth a fresh recall and a round of reemphasising where it is needed most. It was on 16 December 1971 that Bangladesh had come into being as a secular liberal democracy at the end of a hard-fought struggle for liberation and a full-fledged India-Pakistan War defeating the mighty Pakistan Army. It was exactly three years and eight months later on 15 August 1975-India’s 28th independence day
–that Bangladesh’s Father of the Nation Shaikh Mujibur Rahman, regarded as an icon of democracy across the world and a world statesman, was assassinated with the rest of his family in a gruesome attack with machine guns and revolvers at his home in Dhaka in a bloody early morning military coup. Mujib’s ancestral home at 32 Dhanmondi Residential Area in Dhaka where he was living was laid siege by armoured personnel carriers and main battle tanks as an Armoured Corps officer Colonel Farook Rahman and an Infantry Officer Major Shariful Haq Dalim, both of Bangladesh Army, supported by a group of other military officers, mounted their ferocious attack. The Chief of Army Staff of Bangladesh Army, General Ziaur Rahman, fully robed in military uniform, was seated in the command centre at the time of the coup in the Dhaka Cantonment. General Ziaur Rahman quickly asserted his power and took over weeks later in November 1975 as the Military Dictator of Bangladesh.

Thus ended the short-lived Dhaka Spring, snuffed out at the barrel of a gun.
Within a few short weeks, in what looked like a meticulously preplanned assault, another tragedy struck Bangladesh. In one fell swoop the entire second-tier political leadership of The Awami League was gunned down. The methodology used by the assassins in killing the second-rung leadership of the Awami League being almost identical to the assassination of Mujibur Rahman, it was widely assumed and later confirmed that the political forces involved in the second wave of the crime were the same as the first one.

Military Dictatorship thus struck back in Bangladesh in a ferocious vendetta and an unforgiving revenge. To complete the picture, as the hold of the military consolidated, it steadily emerged that the ideological underpinning of the regime was the return of the familiar old Pakistani brand of religious fundamentalism overloaded with the deology of hate, extremism, and violence. Soon the provision enshrined in the 1973 Constitution of secularism defined as the ideal of inclusive social cohesion in governance was expunged and Bangladesh was declared an Islamic Republic. As was to be expected, Islamist organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, Ahl-e-Hadees, Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami, and so many others emerged out of the woodworks and began flourishing. What was more, a cluster of anti-India terrorist organisations running insurgencies in the north-eastern region of India found safe haven in Bangladesh, prominent among them being the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), the Naga rebels, the Bodo rebels, and others.
Given the date chosen for mounting the bloody military coup, namely the 28th Independence Day of India, targeting the secular democratic government led by Mujibur Rahman, seen in Islamabad as the one who was responsible for the fragmentation of Pakistan with the help of arch-enemy India, Rawalpindi’s behind-the-scene involvement using local proxies in the murders was too obvious to be ruled out. Harking back to Mrs Indira Gandhi’s fear of the assassin’s bullet stalking Mujibur Rahman, her last-minute decision to change his London-Delhi-Dhaka flight from Air India to the RAF VIP military jet was the evidence of this apprehension. The premonition materialised only when the bullets hit the target, three years and eight months later. It proved tragically so real. Not to be forgotten was Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury’s warning to Mrs Indira Gandhi that the “unfinished war” of 1971, leaving India’s western neighbour “intact and in one piece”, was a grave, strategic blunder which would leave both India and Bangladesh’s security dangerously exposed. He too was proved tragically so right.
There were rejoicings at the Inter-Services Intelligence headquarters in Rawalpindi on 15 August 1975, the day when Mujib was gunned down, for the vindication of the country’s national honour. Mujib was finally handed a punishment with death for causing harm to Pakistan while at the same time, the Army had safely and with honour secured the return of the 93.000 Pakistani POWs back home from India without having to give up its claims on Kashmir. India was also taught a suitable lesson for interfering in the internal affairs of Pakistan, while Bangladesh was reminded that it had not detached itself yet from the sphere of influence that Pakistan exercised over the erstwhile other half of the country. Bangladesh was now a thorn in the side of India.
16

General Ziaur Rahman Engaging General Ziaur Rahman in a War Game in 1973. in London-A Flashback. How the story of an opportunistic planning for a political murder comes out of a social chat in a restaurant in London, and how military dictatorship returns to Bangladesh that lasts a quarter of a century. It is not unusual for military, paramilitary and diplomatic establishments to engage in war games. They take the form of boardroom exercises based on hypothetical situations, creating competing models founded on perceived threat perceptions to vital political, defence, and economic interests of nations and evaluate the outcomes as alternative policy options. One such war game was played in the spring of 1973. The location was London. The key dramatis persona was none other than the Chief of Army Staff of Bangladesh Army (COAS) himself in person. Sticking my neck out and at a great risk to myself, I ventured to engage the COAS Bangladesh in a polite conversation, basing my discussions with him on certain intelligence information which I had with me.

But before unfolding this unusual story, I wish to strike a note of caution. The depth of national concern in the background of which the war game was played could be understood only if the events were placed and read in the context of the cold war raging between the United States and the Soviet Union in the sixties and the seventies of the last century, in which India was caught right in the middle. Not by choice or chance but by force of circumstances India, the largest democracy in the world, was placed on the other side of the fence leaning on the Soviet Union, a communist totalitarianism. The United States, the strongest democracy in the world, was neither an ally nor even a friend of India. The relationship was in fact adversarial. The most trusted alliance partner of the United States in South Asia was Pakistan, a military dictatorship. The Bangladesh liberation leadership by dint of its association with India and the Soviet Union was not a friend of the United States either. The United States was in fact furious at both the Indian and the Bangladesh leadership in 1971 for having sought the help of Moscow and dismembered Pakistan, a member of SEATO and CENTO, the West’s most treasured components of the collective security alliance.

The post-cold war scenario is quite different, though. Both the United States and India have declared their intention to develop a multi-layered strategic partnership. The acrimony of the past seems to have been buried and the atmosphere is positive despite many odds. This has the potential of benefiting both the nations in the emerging “new world order”. The United States now also regards Bangladesh as a friend in South Asia.
In 1973 the situation was charged with high emotion. Pakistan had lost a war, defeated by its arch-enemy India. Half of its territory had gone out of its control. East Pakistan had declared its independence and was now Bangladesh. Mujibur Rahman, the independence leader of Bangladesh, was the most hated figure in Pakistan. He was equally an adversary in the eyes of the United States under President Richard Nixon.
The generals of the Pakistan Army had expected that Mujib, with no experience of administration, would not be able to run a complex entity like Bangladesh and hoped that he would run back to Pakistan with an SOS to save it from disaster. Bhutto’s offer in 1972 of a Pakistan-Bangladesh confederation was still on the table. What infuriated the generals was that Mujib was in fact settling down and consolidating his hold on his “fiefdom” a word coined in Rawalpindi. They feared that East Pakistan was now politically lost forever. Discreet intelligence inputs were pouring in with the information that the generals at the General Head Quarters in Rawalpindi, in a fit of frustration and rage, had held discussions with the Intelligence Chief about the prospect of eliminating Mujibur Rahman. A military takeover by a friendly general in the midst of chaos of the assassination, should it happen at all, was also reportedly discussed. The military men also felt the need to conduct a secret vilification campaign against the Bangladesh leader in order to destroy his credibility in preparation for the special operation. Meanwhile the internal political situation had also worsened in Bangladesh. It was hot air blowing all over. Were these reports to be believed? Normally few would. But Pakistan is such an extraordinary country that anything was possible. What was however lacking was cast-iron corroboration of these wild reports. Nor was there actionable intelligence; only anecdotal evidence of the going on in Rawalpindi. But the reports of a possible assassination bid were taken very seriously in New Delhi.
In a related incident, several years later in March 2011, I met in a party in London a sophisticated middle-aged Bangladeshi lady who claimed herself to be an heiress to one of leading trading houses in her country. She was very much a garrulous political person who had happy memories of the days when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan. She told me with much gusto that when Mujib was shot dead by Colonel Farook Rahman and Major Shariful Haq Dalim in 1975, he was so unpopular, branded as a corrupt politician, that “nobody shed even a drop of tear for Mujib.” I was shocked at what she said witnessing first-hand what enduring impact vile Pakistani propaganda against Mujib had created in the minds of certain sections of the Bangladeshis. All the lifelong sacrifices that Mujib had made, all the affection he had for the people and all the love that the people of Bangladesh had showered upon him, were forgotten at the altar of hostile propaganda.

Apart from Pakistan’s simmering anger, how was superpower United States looking at the developing situation in South Asia? While the United States had demonstrated its unhappiness with New Delhi for engaging alliance partner Pakistan in a war that led to its disintegration, Washington was livid with arch-rival Soviet Union for its involvement in the successfully concluded separatist movement. It was like rubbing salt into the wound. The depth of frustration in Washington was manifest in the US decision to move the entire nuclear-armed 7th Fleet of the US Navy into the Bay of Bengal but most importantly it didn’t fire a single shot in anger. The perception in New Delhi was that if the United States did not go into an offensive mode, it was primarily because of the respect it had for democratic India. However, not to be ignored was the security umbrella provided by the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation of 1971. It stood as a guarantor of India’s territorial integrity.

The US President Richard Nixon was certainly angry when Mrs Indira Gandhi ignored the presence of the USS Enterprise in the Bay of Bengal and ordered the Indian Army to force Pakistan Army to lay down arms and surrender in Dhaka.
At the street level, the 7th Fleet became a joke in India. The popular perception was that it came, it saw, it waited, and went back without firing a shot. What was more, for the United States it was an enormous loss of face before Communist China, with whom Pakistan’s Military Dictator, General Yahya Khan had just at that time helped open for the United States a door for dialogue and interaction, which were to prove so valuable to Washington in its diplomatic balancing act against the Soviet Union. The developments began looking sinister when rumours were heard circulating particularly among the chattering classes and the left liberals that the CIA could undertake an
assassination bid on Mujib after the fashion of Salvador Allende of Chile. These rumours created paranoia in India.
General Ziaur Rahman was the Chief of Army Staff of the newly constituted Bangladesh Army. It was a political appointment made personally by Mujibur Rahman in recognition of Zia’s enthusiasm and his perceived loyalty to the cause of liberating Bangladesh. In an interesting incident, as the story goes, a certain “Major Zia” had caught hold of a microphone in a supposedly clandestine Radio Station in Chittagong in East Pakistan on 27 March 1971, and made a declaration that Bangladesh was now a free and an independent nation. Factually that claim was incorrect. Also according to reliable sources there was only one clandestine radio station voicing the cause of Bangladesh and it was operating from Mujibnagar, the headquarters of the Government of Bangladesh in exile in India.
Ziaur Rahman held the rank of a Major when he met Mujib and successfully persuaded him that the famous “Major Zia” was none other than himself. According to him, he had put his personal safety on the line when there was no certainty that Bangladesh would ever see the light of day. Mujib was suitably impressed and rewarded Ziaur Rahman by appointing him in the rank of a Colonel and as the first Chief of Army Staff of Bangladesh Army after independence.
Shaikh Mujib got quite early into the business of developing a nonaligned foreign policy for Bangladesh. That Bangladesh owed its independence to India going to war with Pakistan at a great sacrifice to its own security interests was well acknowledged. The backing the Soviet Union provided was no less appreciated. Mujib was now seized with the idea that developing a diplomatic relationship with the United States must form part of Dhaka’s evolving policy of nonalignment. Keeping this in mind, he sent Colonel Ziaur Rahman, the Chief of Army Staff, as his personal envoy to Washington in early 1973. Ziaur Rahman spent one and a half months in the US capital establishing close personal contacts with the top echelons in the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, and so on.
At the end of his US tour of duty, he stopped for a few days in London on his way back to Dhaka. It was during this stopover in London that Ziaur Rahman wanted to see me. I was then posted as an Attaché in the High Commission of India in London. His message to me was routed through the Bangladesh High Commissioner in London Syed Abdus Sultan. I met Ziaur Rahman at the High Commissioner’s Office in Notting Hill Gate, London ending up with a private lunch paid for by me. I had a second meeting with him the next day, this time he hosted the lunch. The purpose of seeking a meeting with me was to retrieve a suitcase and the Colonel’s baton belonging to Farook Rahman, which were lying with me at my home. Farook Rahman was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Armoured Corps of Pakistan Army, posted in Saudi Arabia as a training officer on secondment to the Saudi Army. He was on a visit to London when the military crackdown in Dhaka University was ordered by General Tikka Khan, the Military Governor of East Pakistan, on 25 March 1971.

A very emotional man, Lt. Colonel Farook Rahman defected, protesting against the massacre by the Pakistan Army, and switched his allegiance to the cause of the liberation of Bangladesh. After he met me, I directed him to see Justice Abu Sayeed Choudhury, who was leading the Liberation Struggle from London. He however remained in touch with me lasting up to the outbreak of the India-Pakistan War on 3 December 1971.

Farook Rahman paid me a visit at my home in London late in the night on 3 December 1971, the day when the war broke out, asking me to arrange his passage to the war front. He wanted to fight alongside the Indian Army, joining in its thrust towards Dhaka. I promptly contacted the authorities of the Indian Army through my channels and got their approval for Lt. Colonel Farook Rahman to proceed to the battlefront. As he left for the war front on the India-East Pakistan border, he left his suitcase and his regimental baton with me for safekeeping, saying that if he survived the war he would reclaim his possessions at some future date.
The suitcase triggered a serious discussion between me and Colonel Ziaur Rahman on the question of the personal safety and security of Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman. This was in the backdrop of the wild rumours doing the rounds in India that there was a possibility of Mujib being targeted in an assassination bid. In the midst of a lot of political discussions, 1 sought Colonel Zia’s permission if I could be direct with him and ask one or two uncomfortable questions related to my apprehensions. I told him that my concerns about Mujib’s life were personal as we shared a longstanding friendship. He told me that the High Commissioner had briefed him on that subject.
Discreetly I asked him a pointed question, reminding him that he didn’t have to say anything if he was not comfortable in answering it, as to who did he meet in his six weeks stay in Washington. He told me that he had met a number of senior officials in the US Government starting from the Defence Secretary downwards. I also asked him that since he started his career in the Pakistan Army he should have felt like, for old time’s sake, getting in touch with the Pakistani Military Attache” in the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. With some initial hesitation he replied in the affirmative.
With much nervousness I came to the point straightaway. I asked the Colonel that sending the Chief of Army Staff out of the country for six whole weeks when the political atmosphere in the sub-continent was filled with dark rumours about a possible assassination bid on Mujib was not like inviting trouble needlessly. I had of course reminded him in the beginning that I was only discussing a hypothetical situation, not individuals. When I found that he was not upset, I went on to suggest that if a man like him was the operational head of an intelligence agency of an adversarial power, would he not have explored the possibility, given that there was a potential candidate at hand, of bumping off such a “troublesome character like Mujib, the cause of so much aggravation to both Washington and Islamabad? The assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile was a case in point. Meeting the Pakistani Military Attache’ in Washington was another. He responded to these provocations like a mature diplomat. He had a good laugh at my hypothetical questions and commented that I had a truly fertile mind even to think on those lines. He could have called off the meeting but to my surprise he didn’t.
I queried him as to why as the Army Chief was he taking so much trouble in doing a minion’s job of collecting the suitcase of a subordinate officer like Farook Rahman. I thought to myself, there was reason to suspect that Ziaur Rahman was creating an obligation and perhaps also thinking of making use of Farook Rahman as a pawn in a big bang operation in good time? Was there a broader plan? As one who was trained in Pakistan Army’s training institutions, traditionally a breeding ground of Military Dictators, it would not be far-fetched to visualise that he could perhaps nurture suppressed ambitions to grab power in a military coup. Killing the democratically elected leader would come naturally to such a man.
I was curious to know what did he talk to the Pakistani Military Attache’? But when I found him getting too nervous to talk on that subject any more, I left him at that. After I had delivered my set piece, I was nervous to the point of falling unconscious. I was speaking to a nation’s Army Chief, a VIP. I was several steps junior to him in the hierarchy and I represented a foreign government. I knew it was a private meeting, but I was unable to forgive myself for what I had done. What I said was provocative enough for someone so senior a military officer to shoot me down.

But to my utter amazement, Ziaur Rahman maintained his composure throughout the face to face talk. What was most significant was that he did not cancel his second appointment when he was to collect Farook Rahman’s suitcase. He kept his lunch appointment, collected Farook’s suitcase, and carried it personally on foot from the restaurant to the High Commission building almost next door. To me this one incident was pregnant with a deep meaning,
He had maintained a stoic silence in the face of my hectoring. The only thing he repeated twice perhaps nervously was “You have a God-gifted capacity for fertile imagination.” His final comment on this subject was “It was a juicy war game you played on me over a suitcase, was it not?” I agreed with him. I profusely apologised for my indulgences. We parted with cold smiles on our faces.
The point to note was that Colonel Ziaur Rahman never for once even made any attempt to repudiate my not-so-subtle questioning on hypothetical apprehensions, although they were made in couched and contrived language. I expected a senior military officer to be upright and convivial but my impression about Ziaur Rahman after my two meetings with him was that he was shifty eyed and conniving which to my mind were matters of great concern in the context Mujib’s safety and security. Quickly I drafted a report of my discussions with the Bangladesh COAS Colonel Ziaur Rahman in London and what conclusions I had drawn about him and sent it to Delhi. I did not mince my words about my apprehensions. It was forwarded to Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman for his eyes only” perusal. Mujib’s reply was: “Boys like Ziaur Rahman and Farook Rahman were like my children and children don’t kill their parents.” There were several other intelligence inputs coming from different sources on the subject of threats to Mujib’s life and his reply was no different. He was not prepared to accept enhanced security cover for himself and his family. In 1973 Mujib called general elections and was elected by a thumping majority. But very soon afterwards, Bangladesh lapsed into a deep crisis. Two successive massive killer floods were followed by a famine that left more than a lakh (one hundred thousand) dead. Law and order collapsed as a result of the combination of natural disasters. Five thousand political murders were recorded between 1972 and 1974. The Government was fast losing control and Mujib felt that it was not possible to quickly restore order in a democratic setup. In a kneejerk reaction, Mujib announced the formation of what was known as the Bangladesh Krishak Shramik Awami League or BAKSHAL, the purpose of which was to effectively introduce a one-party system with local committees placed in charge of districts that were to be run by governors. This was Mujib’s biggest political blunder, which looked almost similar to Mrs Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the State of Emergency in India. It didn’t go down well with either the Army or the opposition parties. Thus began clandestine conspiracies in the Army’s chain of command plotting Mujib’s assassination. It was to be followed by a military coup.
On 15 August 1975, Colonel Farook Rahman, accompanied by Major Shariful Haq Dalim, Risaldar Maslehuddin who was the first to pull the trigger, and a few other officers of Bangladesh Army in an early morning bloody military coup, shot and killed Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman at his home in Dhaka. His whole family was slaughtered along with him.
His two daughters Shaikh Hasina and her younger sister Shaikh Rehana survived because they were travelling abroad at the time. It did not take long for Colonel Ziaur Rahman, who promptly promoted himself to the rank of a General, to take over in November 1975 as the Military Dictator of Bangladesh. Thirty-five years after the assassination of Mujibur Rahman on 15 August 1975, five exArmy officers, after a prolonged trial and verdict of capital punishment, were hanged on 28 January 2010.. Four among the famous five were Colonel Farook Rahman, Colonel Muhiuddin Ahmed, Major Bazlul Huda, Colonel Mahluddin, and Colonel Sultan Shahriar Rashid Khan. The fifth convict was Abdul Aziz Pasha. He had died in exile in Kenya.

Six of the remaining convicts were fugitives living abroad. Most important among them was Major Shariful Haq Dalim, said to be hiding in Canada. The others were Noor Choudhury, Khandakar Abdur Rashid, MA Rashid Choudhury, Mosleuddin, and Abdul Majed. It is important to remember that Colonel Farook Rahman was the subject matter of my discussions with Colonel Ziaur Rahman in London in 1973. I don’t know why I had in my heart a nasty feeling that Colonel Ziaur Rahman could use Colonel Farook Rahman in a big bang operation in order to kill Mujib and how my deep-seated fear turned out to be so real. My life’s one great regret will remain with me till I die that in spite of my early warning, Mujib did not take my advice seriously and consequently I could not save Mujib’s precious life. He left his people when the nation needed him the most and on his part he was ready to give his best for the people against all odds. I cried when the sad news broke that Bongo Bondhu was dead, murdered by Farook Rahman and Shariful Dalim.I wondered to what extent man can be so cruel and merciless.

As Military Dictator of Bangladesh, General Ziaur Rahman’s regime lasted six years. He too was assassinated on 30 May 1981 by one of his Army colleagues, some say by none other than his own successor. He was succeeded by General Hossain Ershad, who after a short while was also overthrown in a messy military putsch. Ershad was succeeded by Begum Khaleda Zia, widow of General Ziaur Rahman. The Party Headquarters of the Bangladesh National Party founded by General Ziau Rahman was located inside Dhaka Cantonment and even after Zia’s assassination, his widow did not shift the BNP’s office out of the military garrison. It was obvious that she enjoyed the backing of the Army top brass. After much political pressure was brought to bear on Khaleda Zia by the Shaikh Hasina administration, BNP’s office was shifted o 2010.

Begum Khaleda Zia’s claim to fame was her effort to eradicate the memory of Mujibur Rahman as the Father of the Nation from the collective consciousness of the people of Bangladesh. She firmly believed that her late husband, who was supposedly the first to announce the independence of Bangladesh over the clandestine Bangladesh Radio in Chittagong on 27 March 1971, deserved the honour of being known as Nation. It is now known that “Major Zia”, who had supposedly made the declaration of independence on 27 March 1971, was an assumed name, a nom de plume, and that there was no such clandestine radio station in Chittagong. Under Khaleda Zia’s orders issued as the Prime Minister, Mujib’s portraits captioned “Father of the Nation” were removed from government offices all across the country. In mid 2007, Khaleda Zia landed in jail, later released, on corruption charges levelled against her by the caretaker government of Fakhruddin Ahmed. And on 30 October 2007 she was ousted from her position as the President of Bangladesh National Party, which was her family business.
Khaleda Zia’s iconoclastic frenzy against Mujibur Rahman lasted till the end of 2008 when, in a free and fair election conducted by the caretaker government headed by Fakhruddin Ali, she lost her hold on power and Shaikh Hasina, the eldest daughter of Mujibur Rahman, elected with a massive majority, became the Prime Minister. This marked the return of democracy and secularism to Bangladesh after a gap of thirty-three years. Shaikh Hasina’s mandate created a revolution of rising expectations among the people. Needless to reiterate, she will have to work hard to fulfil those expectations.
17

Begum Khaleda Zia It is incredible how memories of the savage genocide and the atrocities of mass rape of Bengali women are allowed to fade under Khaleda Zia’s charge. Efforts at reconciliation with Pakistan begins in right earnest.
An idea had gained ground across the Islamic World towards the end of the year 2001, the year of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States followed by the declaration of war on terror by US President George W Bush, that Islam was in ferment and there was the need for unity among the member nations of the Organisation of Islamic Countries. The time was therefore ripe for Bangladesh as a fellow Muslim country to forget and forgive the genocide of 1971 and settle for a reconciliation with Pakistan. What helped matters was that the right-wing Bangladesh National Party-led government of Khaleda Zia just at that point of time was relying on the Jamaat-e-Islami, a pro-Pakistani Islamic fundamentalist political party, for its survival in power. Other politico-religious outfits like Ahal-e-Hadees and Harkat ul Jihad-e-Islami also exercised influence on Khaleda Zia, thanks to the good offices of Jamaat-e-Islami. It also coincided with a phase in Bangladesh politics that began winning votes in the country by simply encouraging hostility towards India. Khaleda Zia’s rise to power was the outcome of this political trend.
The bilateral situation being congenial and the international atmosphere propitious for Pakistan to move towards a reconciliation with its erstwhile eastern wing, Islamabad took a decision to step into the adventure. A considerable amount of strategic thought had gone into the timing of General Pervez Musharraf’s visit to Bangladesh. The three-day visit in July 2002, the first ever by a Pakistani Military Dictator, thirty-one years after the war of liberation in 1971 and only months after al Qaeda’s 9/11 of 2001 attacks, was timed to coincide with the heavy allied bombardment of the Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. Taliban’s stranglehold over Afghanistan was nearing its end. In the wake of such developments, Pakistan was seriously concerned that its ongoing infiltration of militants and cross-border terrorism into India could come under American scrutiny. Washington decided to tick off its alliance partner by telling Pakistan that its cross-border activities against India had to end.

A visit by the Pakistan President was therefore urgently overdue. It was time that infiltration routes for the militants to cross over into India were shifted and relocated into a safer place. What could be a better location for creating a militant safe haven than Pakistan’s old colony Bangladesh, at a time when the reins of power in Dhaka were in the hands of a friendly coalition government, whose key partner was Jamaat-e-Islami. A warm welcome thus awaited Musharraf when he landed in Dhaka. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia ensured that Musharraf was given a rousing reception. The General acknowledged that he shared the grief of Bangladesh’s citizens for the military excesses that they had to endure in 1971. While Khaleda Zia claimed that this expression of sympathy and regret was a positive gesture on Musharraf’s part, Abdus Samad Azad, Foreign Minister in the earlier Mujibur Rahman administration and the lone survivor of the assassinations of second-tier Awami League leaders, was of the opinion that a mere admission of regret hardly compensated for Pakistan Army’s slaughter of 1.5 million innocent men, women, and children. It was quite apparent that Musharraf was being let off lightly for the sake of political expediency.
A new bond of friendship between Pakistan and Bangladesh, in other words, the development of a Pakistan-Bangladesh nexus on the common platform of their shared antagonism towards India, had taken shape. It consolidated the position of Jamaat-e-Islami as never before, ensuring the spread of religious intolerance and the death of secularism in the country. Bangladesh now seemed ready to accommodate Pakistan’s need for accessing its borders for the purpose of operating infiltration routes for Islamic militants.
There was concern in the intelligence community in India as to why New Delhi chose to remain an onlooker, taking no visible steps to safeguard its security interests, leaving the nation’s eastern flank exposed. The government of India took no notice of their warnings. Perhaps India relied on the persuasive nature of geographical realities, hoping that the dynamics of trade and cultural links were strong enough to discourage Khaleda Zia from wandering into this misadventure. But India’s hopes were dashed. Prodded by the Bangladesh Army, Begum Zia fell into Musharraf’s trap quite easily. From Dhaka, the General decided to extend his visit and proceed on an onward journey to Beijing. The unscheduled China visit from Dhaka was laden with symbolism and was expected to generate its own momentum and build political pressure on PM Khaleda Zia from two fronts, namely Islamabad and Beijing. Combined with the domestic compulsions of the ruling party’s coalition with the Islamic fundamentalist parties, the pressure proved too formidable to shrug off. India’s decision to remain noncommittal facilitated the situation both for Pakistan and Bangladesh as they set about promoting and consolidating their triangular relationship with China. It was now patently clear that, driven by adversarial sentiments, Khaleda Zia’s government was moving Bangladesh into the Chinese orbit.
The declassified Bangladesh Papers released in July 2005 by the US State Department revealed that at the US-UK Summit held in Bermuda on 20 and 21 December 1971, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the British Foreign Secretary, had said while offering his assessment to US President Richard Nixon of the new forces at work in the subcontinent following the war, that India would continue with its policy of nonalignment, refusing to allow the Soviets to pick up the tab”. New Delhi was obviously worried about the possible influence of China on Bangladesh. Mrs Gandhi had gambled on Chinese influence not getting out of hand in Bangladesh. Sir Alec’s conclusion was that it will be in the Western interests that the new Bangladesh should be basically India-oriented rather than China-oriented.
Meanwhile references to the atrocities committed by Pakistan in 1971 including genocide and the mass rape of women became taboo in public debate.
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Conclaves of Islamist Organisations in Bangladesh Their hostile resolutions with copies endorsed to General Pervez Musharraf, were aimed at destabilising the north-eastern region of India, To make General Musharraf’s visit to Dhaka a worthwhile and welcoming event, a conclave of nine Islamist outfits attended by about seventy delegates was held in the Chittagong Hill Tracts District of Bangladesh in May 2002, just two months before the arrival in Dhaka of Pakistan’s Military Dictator. On the lines of the United Jihad Council in Pakistan, the conclave set up the Bangladesh Islamic Mancha (BIM), translated into English as “Bangladesh Islamic Council”, with Shaukat Usmani as the President and Ghulam Quddus as the Secretary General. Both were suspected to have links with the Taliban. The leading constituents of the BIM as reported in the Dhaka print media were the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Muslim Liberation Front of Assam, Harkat ul Jihad-e-Islami, Ahal-e-Hadees, Islamic Shashon Tontro, and others. Bangladesh’s Chief of Military Intelligence was said to have attended the conclave. A resolution adopted by the conclave was handed over to General Musharraf during his Dhaka visit. The resolution contained a declaration that the nine Islamist outfits participating in the conclave were ready to launch an armed struggle against India, demanding the self-determination of “nine Muslim majority districts in Assam” and “eight Muslim majority districts in West Bengal” and their inclusion in a Greater Islamic Republic of Bangladesh. They also demanded the withdrawal of Indian troops from these areas.
The BIM’s sources of information reporting on the changing demographics in the northeastern region of India ranged from India’s census reports, research work by Indian scholars on demographics like Religious Demography of India published by the Centre for Policy Studies in Chennai compiled in 2002, media reports, and so on, to their own local sources of information and channels of communication. Their claims of dramatic religious demographic change thus bore elements of some authenticity despite repudiation by government sources in India.
Following the 2002 conclave in Chittagong Hill Tracts, a second three-day conclave was held from 15 to 18 December in 2004 in Mohammadpur, a suburb in Dhaka, convened by an organisation called “Jamiat ul Madrassa” and attended, according to media reports, by one hundred fifty delegates. Among those who reportedly attended were Brigadier Abdul Jabbar and DK Bakshi, both said to represent the ISI, Pakistan’s Intelligence Services; Matiur Rahman Nizami and Ghulam Azam, representing the Jamaat-e-Islami; Mohammad Nazrul Islam of the Islamic Chatro Shibir; Azizul Huq of Harkat ul Jihad-e-Islami; Fazlur Rahman of Jihad Movement; Nurul Islam of Rohinga Solidarity Organisation; Deepak Barua of United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) a separatist outfit of India, and others. Four Muslim leaders from Calcutta also attended whose names were not revealed. Salauddin Qader Choudhury, a senior bureaucrat in Bangladesh Government also attended. The delegates pledged to launch a separatist movement in India, headquartered in Bangladesh, demanding the inclusion of parts of India’s north-eastern region including Assam and West Bengal to form a Greater Islamic Republic of Bangladesh.
In a statement made in Dhaka, Syed Ashraful Islam, Local Government Minister of Bangladesh, in the wake of Prime Minister Hasina Shaikh’s visit to India on 10 January 2010, revealed that President General Pervez Musharraf during his 2002 Dhaka visit had met Anup Chetia and Arobindo Rajkhawa, both senior leaders of the insurgent outfit ULFA fighting the Indian state, and discussed strategies and handed them secret funds for anti-Indian activities.
According to the lists compiled by the first and the second conclaves, the eight Muslim majority districts of West Bengal as of 2002 and 2004 were: Murshidabad, Malda, Nadia, North 24 Parghanas, South 24 Parghanas, North Dinajpur, South Dinajpur, and Cooch Behar; and the nine Muslim majority districts of Assam were listed as: Goalpara, Dhubri, Barpeta, Kokrajhar, Darrang, Kamrup, Nagaon, Bongaigaon, and Cachar.
The objective of raising the issue of self-determination of the alleged Muslim majority districts in West Bengal and Assam was apparently to draw a parallel with the demand for self-determination of the Muslim majority State of Jammu and Kashmir. Like Srinagar Valley, where India is fighting a separatist Muslim insurgency whose aim is not only to annexe the State into Pakistan but also to destabilise the entire western sector of India, the strategic aim of inciting a separatist Muslim insurgency in the north-eastern region would be to create a joint platform with the potential to expand the arc of destabilisation into the whole of India.
The 2004 conclave declared that setting up a clandestine radio station was being considered to raise awareness among the Muslim people in the entire north-eastem region with a view to preparing them for an armed struggle.
There were several other conclaves held in addition to the two reported above that issued hot anti-Indian resolutions, but their blueprints of action had so far failed to materialise. Pakistan’s determination to seek a Bangladesh-revenge against India was still alive and kicking but the responses were too slow to be of much consequence
There were two reasons for this frustration. Firstly, the majority of the Muslim populations in West Bengal and Assam or for that matter in Bihar, Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland showed little interest in breaking away from India in the name of selfdetermination. The freedoms enjoyed in secular democratic India combined with its recent spectacular economic growth, rising standards of living, and enhanced international stature have made India a much more desirable place to live than the unknown entity called Greater Islamic Republic of Bangladesh. Call it by any name; it cannot be a better place than India in terms of safety, security and stability, equality of opportunity, scope for higher education, and higher levels of prosperity for the children and grandchildren of the future.
In the backdrop of this phenomenon, it must be a warning to well-meaning but misdirected Indian politicians seeking “peace at any cost” with Pakistan on Kashmir, to avoid the temptation of conceding anything out of turn. Decision-making in respect of its sensitive Strategic relationship with its western neighbour at this critical stage of India’s growth would prove highly costly to India’s higher national interests if it was not informed by extraordinary care and deep calculation.
The second reason why the promotion of separatism and instability in the north-eastern region of India by the Pakistan-sponsored elements had to stop in its tracks was the retum of secular democracy in Bangladesh. By the end of the year 2008, Shaikh Hasina Wajed took over the reins of power after winning the stakes in a free and fair election in Bangladesh supervised by the caretaker government of Fakhruddin Ali, a bureaucrat.
After assuming office following the 2008 elections, Shaikh Hasina took stern action against the extremist elements including Jamaat-e-Islami, Harkatul Jihad-e-Islami, Ahal-eHadees, and others who were not only fomenting trouble for her administration but were also involved in fifth column activities, causing serious hurdles in the successful outcome of the liberation struggle in 1971.
A matter of great security concern to India was the increasing use that Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence Directorate was making of the Indo-Bangladesh borders for purposes of infiltration of Pakistani terror operatives into India. There were three main reasons why this traffic had increased: Firstly, India was stuck with certain provisions contained in the border agreements with Bangladesh Government which prevented New Delhi from completing the unfinished “security fencing” of the Indo-Bangladesh borders. The borders, particularly along Tripura, Assam, Mizoram, and Meghalaya, had remained unfenced in long stretches. That apart, some river systems like the Bramhaputra, the Padma, and the Meghna, are so wide in places- 10 miles in some bends that they are like open unchecked borders, and steamers or fishing boats crossing the waters at night are the vehicles most used for transporting illegal traffic, including armed terror gangs. The second reason was that Dhaka had now a government in place which was seen as friendly towards India and therefore it was perhaps safe for the illegal immigrants to assume that the border security checks would be more relaxed than was the case when Khaleda Zia was the Prime Minister. Thirdly, due to the heavy deployment of Indian Security forces including the Army, the Border Security Force, and other paramilitary personnel along the western border with Pakistan, in addition to more effective border fencing and manning of the border outposts, the ISI had found India’s eastern borders with Bangladesh as “safe corridors” for purposes of infiltration into India. The Indo-Bangladesh borders, particularly in the eastern sector in Agartala, Assam, Meghalaya, and Mizoram, had become “safe passage for the ISI.

These developments came to light quite recently following a string of arrests made by Agartala security forces of Pakistani terror leaders, particularly along on the BangladeshAgartala borders. Their confessions produced a treasure-trove of intelligence information Their names are all in the public domain. To name some of them: Mohammad Abdul Rahman of al Qaeda, Daud Merchant, and Mamun Mia and Sangram Ali were all of Harkat-ul-Jihade-Islami: Momin Khan was an ISI operative. In June 2010, Mamun Mia, a HUJI operative and an undercover arms dealer, was sentenced to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment by the High Court of Agartala.
The Indian security forces are reported to have heightened their vigil along the IndoBangladesh borders following these exposures.
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19

India pays a high price in blood and tears for supporting the Liberation
Struggle of Bangladesh 1962-1971 and its ideals of Freedom & Democracy. Forty years down the line in 2011, Pakistan’s military continues its unrelenting hostility towards India. As the bloody proxy war continues to rage across the Line of Control on Pakistan’s eastern borders, the Al-Pak contlict across the Durand Line on frontiers gets menacingly linked to the India-Pakistan conflict over India’s support in 1971 to Bangladesh Liberation, In the backdrop of the nonviolent freedom movement led by Mohandas K Gandhi which was an important factor that won India its independence, New Delhi has been traditionally very conservative to the point of being overcautious about extending support to post-World War II anticolonial national liberation struggles. India has hardly ever provided any material support to the armed struggles for freedom. However, known for its pacifist tendencies, India has offered moral support and succour to the struggles for freedom of the oppressed peoples of the third world extending for example medical assistance to the liberation struggle of the Front for the National Liberation of Algeria (FNLA) led by Ben Bella in Algeria, although it was not exactly a nonviolent struggle. Another example was that New Delhi provided medical assistance to the African National Congress in its struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. India’s trademark was that it was always very sensitive to the glare of publicity in these matters.

It had never happened before and it was the first time that India had ever agreed to support a freedom movement like the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle in the manner it did. When Shaikh Mujibur Rahman made his first approach on Christmas Day 25 December 1962 seeking India’s help, New Delhi was hesitant in coming forward wholeheartedly. There were compelling reasons for such hesitation and to convince him of India’s good intentions, Mujibur Rahman was given a full explanation for it. I have covered this part of the story in an earlier chapter. However when the rules of engagement and the matters of principle were settled, written in stone, it was only then that New Delhi agreed to step forward and extend support to the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle.
The no-holds-barred support came only when East Pakistan, the seventy-five million people of the province almost to the last man, revolted in 1971 against the brutal repression unleashed by the Pakistan Army. Islamabad had no one to blame except itself. Pakistan’s moral compass and its claim to be a civilised nation had lost its meaning and validity. When India stepped forward to rescue the people of Bangladesh in their hour of utmost misfortune and unparalleled crisis, Pakistan chose what was the only thing known to them namely to blame India holding it responsible for everything including its very own terrible and unforgivable misdeeds.

India could never have succeeded in securing freedom for the people of East Pakistan had it not been for Pakistan having burnt its bridges, leaving no viable alternative way forward except for the people of Bangladesh breaking away and taking their own cherished route to freedom and democracy.
With the creation of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state, began a new phase of India-Pakistan relationship. In the words of K Subramanyam, India’s strategic guru, in this phase of its history Pakistan became a difficult, troubled, and irrational state. He added that for them (meaning the generals), hatred of India had become overpowering.
Pakistan’s India policy was now fired by a determination to take revenge against India for the loss of East Pakistan and sought every possible opportunity or avenue to destroy the very fabric of India’s nationhood. This led to the birth of a Pakistani version of proxy war. It was laid down as a doctrine of war, custom-made for its eastern frontier across the LOC in Kashmir and beyond. General Aslam Baig, formerly Pakistan Army’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS), had described the doctrine to mean “carrying war deep into enemy territory”. It meant carrying Pakistan’s proxy war into Indian territory. Javed Jabbar, formerly a Minister in the Federal Cabinet of Pakistan, had told K Subramanyam, and I quote: “There will be no peace in South Asia till India breaks up into constituents.”
The nuclear umbrella created with the help of China provided a minimum deterrence and prevented the running battles of the proxy war from crossing the threshold or stepping into a nuclear exchange. The daily diet of murder and mayhem in the Srinagar Valley were examples of this proxy war. The attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi on 13 December 2001 and the Mumbai terror attack of 26/11 of 2008 orchestrated by the ISI and carried out by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (these facts are well documented) were the prime examples.
Links between India’s support of Bangladesh Liberation Struggle and the Pakistandriven Af-Pak conflict.
Not to be forgotten is the other security doctrine of Pakistan Army specially made for use beyond the Durand Line across its western borders. It is the doctrine of “strategic depth in Afghanistan”. It is intrinsically linked to what the generals of Pakistan Army believe that a war with India at some future date is inevitable.
The strategic depth will be required to serve the purpose of securing an extensive and deep-penetration military playing field—a warehouse for storing military hardware – in the backyard of Pakistan, enabling it to spread out the fighter and bomber jets and parts of the arsenal of war out of the reach of the Indian Air Force’s hypothetical offensive bombing runs in the event a war. Once absorbed into Pakistan at some future date this is only a dream at this juncture – the integration of the contagious territories of Afghanistan will make Pakistan look that much bigger, compensated for the loss of East Pakistan. Such a line of strategic thinking, however weird that it may look, links the Af-Pak conflict with the historical phenomenon of the loss of East Pakistan, following the liberation of Bangladesh supported by Pakistan’s eternal enemy India, Pakistan’s strategic alliances with the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, and the Organisation of Islamic Countries are all driven by that one undeclared secret mission, which is to fragment and disintegrate India. The one aim the generals are fixated upon, above everything else, is that they want India to hand over the territories of Jan under its administration to Pakistan as an atonement for the sin of breaking up Pakistan and creating Bangladesh. This is the coded message that comes out of General Pervez Musharraf ‘s colourful statement: The LOC is the problem; it cannot be the solution.

India has been warning Washington over and over again that the billions of American taxpayer dollars that have been pumped into Pakistan in the decade since 2001, adding up to the figure of $20 billion according to one estimate, have only gone to fortify the determination of the generals to intensifying their proxy wars against India and Afghanistan,
Pakistan’s very own War on Two Fronts run concurrently. With the events of 9/11 the US became the high profile victim of that conflict and in the decade since 2001 America in its war on terror has suffered heavy damages in both men and material.
Pakistan seems to have perfected the art of not loving America and prospering with US dollars with no questions asked, not even where Osama bin Laden, when he was alive, Ayman al Zawahiri, or Mullah Mohammad Omar were or are hiding. Since the Bangladesh War of 1971, the Pakistanis have looked upon their relationship with the US as purely mercenary in nature interested only in its dollars. On the other hand, as long as this free flow of US dollars to Pakistan Army continues, the full potential of a US-India strategic partnership arguably will never be achieved.
Make no mistake, Pakistan’s unending belligerence against India lies at the heart of the Af-Pak conflict in Central Asia. There are two elements involved in this phenomenon. On the one hand is the ideological conflict between freedom and democracy of which India is the chief exponent among the emerging powers and on the other is the religious bigotry and militarism of Pakistan which keeps the military rulers of Pakistan firmly in the seat of power. Secondly for no fault of its own, thanks to its sub-conventional military conflict of revenge against India, Pakistan has dragged Afghanistan into this dirty war.
Pakistan’s thirst for India’s blood is not quenched yet for another reason.
For its part the coming into being of Bangladesh which is essentially a component of the wider ethnic conflict raging within Pakistan, seems to have opened a Pandora’s Box for the Islamic nation. It has triggered a rising tide of ethno-nationalism in the minority provinces that is threatening to reshape the future destiny of Pakistan. I have discussed this problem in some detail in another chapter. In the face of this existential threat, Pakistan Army has formulated its own survival doctrine determinedly using the tool of a wholesale Islamisation of its people. The big challenge is how to keep the country United against ethnic and historical forces that are constantly pushing for disintegration. The military rulers believe that rampant Islamisation has the potential of providing the religious glue that will keep ethnically divided Pakistan together.
It has also a wider security implication for New Delhi. It has the potential to polarise
lim opinion in India which facilitates the ISI to merrily setting up a proliferation of sleeper terror cells in the chosen pockets of Muslim dominated regions of India. The ISI has used this opening to great effect.
The terror attack on the US of 9/11 of 2001 dragged the US into this unsavoury bloody conflict in Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Now that the US is involved in this conflict, it must recognise that the solution of the Af-Pak conflict lies not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. Only the US can find a solution. There are no soft options.
Specific case studies of Pakistan’s angry response to India’s involvement in Bangladesh Liberation Struggle. The story of Islamabad’s sub-conventional warfare in South Asia.
The Mizo Insurgency 1963-1985. As early as 1963, Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) got an uncorroborated intelligence input through its sources within the Awami League in East Pakistan that its leader Shaikh Mujibur Rahman might be secretly seeking some sort of financial assistance for his party from India, given that there was a reported depletion of party funding. Exercising abundant precaution, the IB had put in place 24-hour surveillance operations on him-static both at his
home and office and also mobile, chasing and checking his every movement.
The IB’s suspicions were strengthened after Mujib had paid a secret visit to the State of Tripura in India and was returning from its capital Agartala when he was arrested by the East Pakistan police. The IB couldn’t secure law-court-sustainable evidence of Mujib’s visit to Agartala although the Agency was pretty much certain that he had visited Agartala and his visit was neither related to any business deals nor was it a family visit across the borders.
The police started criminal proceedings against him, charging him with sedition, giving it the name “Agartala Conspiracy Case”. The media in East Pakistan had gone absolutely overthe-top in playing up the story. The Investigating Officer from the Police Station who had arrested him at the India-East Pakistan border check-post had a flair for a colonial kind of English prose, wrote a hilarious conclusion on the case: “Final report true, no clue”, after which the case was closed. The trial lasted five years, at the end of which Mujib was released on 22 April 1969 without pronouncing any punishment.
Six months later on 21 October 1969, Mujib left for London. He stayed with Minhajuddin Ahmad, a restaurant owner hailing from Sylhet with an Irish wife. Minhajuddin was an ardent Awami League worker in London and a fundraiser for the Party back home. He was an unflinching supporter for the liberation of Bangladesh. Another confidant of Mujib in London was Tasadduq Ahmed, also a Sylheti restaurant owner and a fundraiser for the AL. Mujib had discussed with Minhajuddin Ahmed, Tasadduq Ahmad—both are dead and also others about the need to start a liberation movement and sought their help in fundraising for the purchase of arms needed for the launch of the armed struggle.
Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau was not happy with the outcome of the trial and the slipshod manner in which the conclusion was drawn by the police.
But the IB’s anger was not limited to Mujib alone. The Intelligence Agency was very upset with Indian intelligence playing a cat and mouse game with Pakistan, keeping Mujib as the centrepiece of its operations.
As luck would have it for the IB of Pakistan, an interesting incident came to light. It occurred just about the time when the Agartala Conspiracy case against Mujib was in full play in the courts and the media in Dhaka.
Two individuals named Lal Denga and Lal Juliana, in the middle of a winter night of 1963, appeared before a Police Station in Chittagong Hill Tracts District in East Pakistan.
Lal Denga and Lal Juliana were two of the senior most leaders of Mizo National Front in India a separatist outfit. They had launched an armed struggle with the aim of breaking away from India and establishing a sovereign independent State of Mizoram. The purpose of their crossover into East Pakistan was scouting for funding, training, arms supplies, and logistic support from Pakistan, including cross-border safe haven for Mizo fighters.
On arrival they asked the Officer in Charge (OC) of the Police Station for political asylum. Not knowing what to do with the duo, the OC did the thing that he knew best. He locked them up in police custody. Wireless messages were sent out and replies were received Soon the Intelligence Bureau in Islamabad got involved and none other than AB Awan, the Director of IB himself, arrived in Dhaka and escorted them to Islamabad for debriefing. It was followed by an interactive session with AB Awan conducting an interrogation of the two Mizo leaders, trying to figure out what they really wanted from Pakistan. In response to their pleadings for help, Islamabad provided “no-holds-barred” material assistance and support to the Mizo National Front in its armed struggle against India. The insurgency lasted for nearly twenty years. Thousands were butchered. It was only in 1985, when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India, that a Peace Accord was negotiated and signed between India and the Mizo leaders Lal Denga and Lal Juliana in a public ceremony where they surrendered their arms. Peace returned to the State of Mizoram in India. Lal Denga was appointed the Chief Minister and Lal Juliana the Deputy Chief Minister. This ended the insurgency The Khalistani Terror Campaign 1971-1991 While Bangladesh Liberation Struggle was gathering momentum in 1971, Islamabad had become increasingly convinced that the movement had gained India’s sympathy and that the Awami League had managed to recruit New Delhi to its cause. In the general atmosphere of insecurity that prevailed, Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau had prepared a plan and presented it to General Yahya Khan for his approval. It involved a campaign to destabilise the State of Punjab in India, projecting it as Pakistan’s fitting response to the neighbour’s involvement in Bangladesh. The plan was to mobilise the Sikh community’s unemployed youth and the disaffected and criminal elements within India for terrorist activities on the one hand; and on the other, to target some of the affluent Sikh expatriates living abroad in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and entice them with the promise of an independent State of Khalistan that Pakistan would help create.

The strategy was uncannily reminiscent of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s divisive religionbased partition plan of British India in 1947 wherein the last Viceroy of India had offered to create a homeland exclusively for the Sikhs if they so desired. The Sikh leaders, led by Master Tara Singh, Sardar Baldev Singh, and others, chose to remain within India and rejected the plan.
The call for the creation of a sovereign State of Khalistan thus assumed the form of a revivalist plan directed by a neighbouring country’s intelligence agency. It manifested itself into a savage terror campaign against the Indian state.
The power of money, a critical component of the plan, was used to recruit participants by involving them in a hugely lucrative drug trade that would generate enough profits to meet a major portion of the campaign’s funding requirements. Bank robberies and extortion rackets constituted the other sources of funding.
The operational plan involved recruitment of young terror operatives who were trained in sub-conventional urban warfare at secret training camps located mostly across the border within military cantonments of the Pakistan Army. They were taught how to make explosive devices and were provided with arms supplies and communication gadgetry. They were clandestinely escorted out of India for training and subsequently infiltrated back into the country for terrorist action. The objective was murder, mayhem, and chaos on a large scale, rendering the State of Punjab virtually ungovernable.
General Yahya Khan readily granted his approval of the plan. The terror campaign was launched with immediate effect. Jagjit Singh Chauhan, a frequent visitor to the Pakistan High Commission in London, who had lost a hand in an accident, was chosen in 1971 to serve as one of Khalistan’s earliest spokesmen.
Soon a large number of disaffected Sikhs enrolled themselves in the terror campaign. There was a lot of money flowing. In order to keep the leading activists engaged, many of them aspiring to independent leadership roles in the campaign, the masterminds created
f outfits to satisfy everybody in the fray. The proliferation of so many terror cells with records of brutality created panic among the members of India’s security community. As
the terror campaign assumed daring proportions, the Pakistani intelligence community realised its potential to inflict maximum damage on India. As General Zia ul Huq took over as the military dictator, the responsibility of running the Khalistan Operations was shifted from civilian control of the IB to the military control of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (IST). From then on under the command of the ISI, the intensified Khalistan terror campaign marked the formal introduction of a non-Islamic component in the use of terror as an instrument of Pakistan’s state policy.
The names of some of the leading Khalistani terrorists who were known to have led spectacular terror strikes in Punjab and elsewhere in India in a sustained run of terror strikes for a period of two decades, killing large numbers of people, were: Wadhwa Singh Babbar, Chief of Babbar Khalsa International; Lakhbir Singh Rode, Chief of the International Sikh Youth Federation; Paramjit Singh Panjwar, Chief of the Khalsa Commando Force; Gajinder Singh, the hijacker of the Indian Airlines plane to Lahore in 1981 who surrendered to Pakistan Police; and Ranjit Singh Neeta, head of the Khalistan Zindabad Force, classified as a terrorist organisation in 2005 by the European Union. There were others like Wasan Singh Zafarwal, Sukhwinder Singh Sukhi, and Daya Singh Lahoria; they were dreaded small bands of killers known for their prolific capacity to commit murder. Most of these terror leaders have grown old and are living in Pakistan; others have moved to EU countries, Canada or the United States and are living in exile as political refugees.
The march of events littered with mounting instances of mass massacres forced the Government of India into launching in 1984 the infamous Operation Blue Star, a counteroffensive military action on the Golden Temple Complex, the Sikh religion’s holiest shrine in Amritsar, that would lead to many casualties. Prominent among those killed was the top Sikh terror leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was holed up in the Holy Akal Taqt, a grand annexe within the Golden Temple complex.
Within the next few months after the military assault on the Golden Temple there was bad news in store for India. The assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi in her official residence by her Sikh Bodyguards was an earth shaking event that devastated the nation. India lost its greatest Prime Minister since independence. The creator of Bangladesh was dead.
For the ISI, this was its finest hour. The tragic developments in India marked the resounding success of the ISI’s Khalistan Operations. The disappointment over the ISI’S failure to achieve statehood for Khalistan was more than compensated for by the killing of Indira Gandhi, who had for years been regarded with much hatred as one who had planned and implemented the disintegration of Pakistan. Her assassination was celebrated with some exuberance at the ISI Directorate in Rawalpindi as a fitting revenge for the loss of East Pakistan.
20
Democracy Returns to Bangladesh

31 December 2008 Shaikh Hasina, daughter of Mujibur Rahman, takes over as Prime Minister. Keeping in step with changing times, she shifts policy focus from politics to national security and the development agenda. Her declared aim is to transform Bangladesh into a small scale Singapore After an interregnum of over thirty-five years of murderous military coups-short and inconsequential civilian interludes apart and the near collapse of the economy pushing the people into an abyss of poverty and the nation into a pariah status, Shaikh Hasina, daughter of the Father of the Nation Shaikh Mujibur Rahman and leader of the Awami League, returned to power on the back of a landslide majority in what was unprecedented in the nation’s history since independence-a free and fair election-held on 31 December 2008. In the Bangladesh National Parliament, Awami League won 230 seats on its own while the Party’s coalition partners scored another 32, making it a total of 262 in the 300-member House. It heralded the return of a stable, secular inclusive democracy to Bangladesh. The breath of fresh air lit the lamp of hope for prosperity and modernity.
In the backdrop of the rising expectations of the people for greater security and safety of life and property and the economic betterment of the people, Shaikh Hasina, showing a measure of political maturity, charted the priorities of her administration’s “next steps action plan” with much care and thought. She took a considered decision to shift the focus of the debate from political agitation to the more serious issues of national security and the development agenda.
Her first priority was the restoration of the high principles of state policy as were adopted by the Constitution of Bangladesh promulgated on 16 December 1972 but dropped in 1988 by General HM Ershad, the Military Dictator who had usurped power after the assassination of General Ziaur Rahman.
The 1972 Constitution drafted under the guidance of Prime Minister Mujibur Rahman had enshrined the “principles of state policy” of Democracy, Secularism, Bengali Nationalism, and Socialism in the preamble. Article 12 of the Constitution stated that the ideal of secularism would be realised through the elimination of 1. communalism in all forms, 2. state support granting political identity to any religion, 3. abuse of religion for political purposes, and 4. discrimination against or persecution of persons practising any particular religion. Article 38 laid down that no person shall have the right to form or be a member or otherwise take part in the activities of any communal organisation pursuing a political purpose.
Overriding the founding principle of state policy, General HM Ershad had introduced Islam as the State Religion of Bangladesh through the Constitution (Fifth Amendment) Act on 7 June 1988 and gave free rein to extremist Islamic forces like the Pakistan-sponsored paramilitary force called the “Razakars” who had collaborated with the marauding Pakistan Army in the military crackdown in 1971 liberation struggle, the Jamaat-e-Islami, Harkatul Jihad e Islam, Ahal-e-Hadees, and others. In this phase of its history, Bangladesh became the breeding ground of violent Islamist terrorism. According to a report in at least one major news magazine of the United States, Bangladesh had become the safe haven of the Taliban and one of the franchised elements of al Qaeda; the target of both these outfits was of course none other than India. Ershad’s contrived lurch pushing Bangladesh into religious fundamentalism, and Khaleda Zia administration’s agreeing to provide safe havens to a variety of terrorist outfits on its soil, did irreparable damage to national security and the developmental aspirations of the people.
Shaikh Hasina was elected Prime Minister for the first time in 1996 and was in office till 2001, but because of Awami League’s thin majority in Parliament she could not put an end to nor even stall the spiralling momentum of terrorist activity on the soil of Bangladesh. But 2008 was different. With her massive majority in Parliament she had the will, the capacity, and the resolve to curb entrenched fanaticism of the Islamists and take her country forward to the modernist path her father had laid down for the nation.
The second item on Shaikh Hasina’s next steps action plan was to bring the assassins of Shaikh Mujib to justice. She could get the criminal cases through the highest court in the land of five under-trials, foremost among them being Colonel Farook Rahman, who had fired the first shot that killed Shaikh Mujib in the military coup of 15 August 1975. They were sentenced to death and subsequently hanged in a Dhaka jail.
Shaikh Hasina had also initiated the trial of the War Criminals of the Genocide, Mass Rape, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. As of 2011 when I was still writing this book, the trials were under way in the Courts of Justice.
The Prime Minister’s third item on the actions agenda” was to flush the terrorists involved in the anti-India insurgencies in the northeastern region of India-namely, the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). Arabindo Rajkhowa and Anup Chetia, two of the highest-ranking leaders of the ULFA-responsible for killing thousands of innocent people in India were arrested and handed over to India under a bilateral extradition treaty, a gesture of great significance to New Delhi. Needless to say that India was enormously grateful to Bangladesh for this help in its fight against anti-India insurgencies in Assam and other parts of the northeastern region of India. In what shape and form India reciprocates this goodwill gesture of Bangladesh will be watched by the well-wishers of Indo-Bangladesh cooperation.
Another gesture of goodwill towards India was the Prime Minister’s decision to enact what came to be known as the Vested Property Return (Amendment) Act 2009, enabling the return of Hindu properties confiscated during the India-Pakistan War of 1965. The Hindus who were forced out of East Pakistan into India in 1965 as refugees in a state of destitution would be the beneficiaries of this new law.
In an astute move on the economic front, Shaikh Hasina initiated a nondiscriminatory process of opening the doors for foreign direct investments, Bangladesh was already a rapidly expanding market economy, growing at the rate six to to seven percent per annum in recent years. Its per capita income in 2010 was estimated to be $1700, adjusted to purchasing power parity. Its exports in 2009 registered $25 billion while the imports were valued at $24 billion, indicating a healthy balance of payments position. The country’s foreign exchange reserves had increased from $3.74 billion in 2007 to over $10 billion in 2009.
In the wake of the Bangladesh Prime Minister’s visit to India in January 2010, Anisul Huq, the President of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said in an interview with The Times of India datelined New Delhi 11 January 2011, “The opportunities for Indian investors in Bangladesh were growing everyday as the Government of Bangladesh was committed to providing a safe and an attractive platform for foreign investors. Indian and Bangladesh businessmen could work closer together in gas exploration,
gas development, power generation, coal mining and other mining exploration activities.”
Anisul Huq expressed the hope that “Bangladesh could act as a bridge between the emerging markets of South Asia and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries and had the potential to be an entry port to the region, a potential small-scale Singapore for the region, covering Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the seven north-eastern states of India and the resource-rich northern Mayanmar, a land locked region.” He pointed out, “The Federation of Bangladesh Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) could closely work with Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCT) and other trade bodies in India for promoting trade and investment between the two nations. The FBCCI could exchange trade and investment delegations, arrange participation of companies in trade exhibitions and fairs in India and arrange “Bangladesh single country fairs in different regions of India. Huq also invited Indian investments in infrastructure, close Bangladesh tieups with Indian textile industries, investments in the energy sector, mobile telephony under “Digital Bangladesh” scheme, partnership with Indian TV Channels, and so on.
The invitation extended to India for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) was quite welcoming. The economic situation as its existed in 2011 was promising too. It was to be hoped that Indian industry would respond positively. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had predicted that Bangladesh GDP growth over the next five years would be about 6.5 per cent, which is healthy but admittedly well short of the 9 to 10 per cent needed to lift Bangladesh to “mid-income nation level. Foreign investors were frustrated with Bangladesh’s politics of confrontation, culture of corruption, slow process of reform, and sluggish privatisation and deregulation of the public sector. Lack of basic infrastructure like first-class road connectivity, efficient railway system, ports, airports, power generation and distribution, internet and mobile telephone connectivity, and so on have hampered growth. In an age where the free flow of cross-border international trade has become imperative for growth, expansion of road connectivity cannot remain limited to domestic needs only but ideally should be linked internationally. The Grand Asian Highway under construction, connecting Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to New Delhi in India and passing through Dhaka, would be a great leap forward for Bangladesh aspiring to be a bridge between ASEAN and India. These sectors are hungry for massive investments. Investments in core sectors like exploration of coal, gas, oil, river water management, and generation of hydroelectricity are other areas waiting to be explored.
The possibilities seem to be immense. Attaining the level of a mini-Singapore status is not beyond one’s dream. What is needed is a thoughtful, non-discriminatory, nonconfrontational road map for fast track growth, free from corruption and informed by sound financial planning.
I have a suggestion for Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina. She may like to consider appointing a high-powered Advisory Council of no more than six members comprising 1. an economist specialising in market economics, who should have the additional responsibility of curbing all forms of corruption; 2. a banker specialising and experienced in mobilisation of clean finance; 3. a civil engineer who has expertise in road planning and construction, bridge building, and water management; 4. an IT expert who will take care of mobile telephony and internet; 5. a medical entrepreneur with knowledge and experience in investment in the health care system; and finally 6. an electrical engineer with knowledge and experience of power generation. Bangladesh under Shaikh Hasina’s democratic dispensation has a wealth of goodwill around the world and getting world experts in their areas of specialisation to come and serve in the Advisory Council should not be much of a problem. The advisers should not
be part of the bureaucracy. Their only function will be to conceptualise and implement fasttrack economic development of the country. The Advisory Council would be non-political and function directly under the supervision of the Prime Minister.
Bangladesh is changing and it is also time for India to change, not forgetting the essential ingredient required to keep in step with its eastern neighbour’s security and developmental needs but only on terms of sovereign equality.
It is taken as read that India had helped Bangladesh to win its freedom from political repression and economic exploitation of a savage military dictatorship, but this fact of history should not be allowed to play any part in sustaining the old sentimentality in its future relationship with its easter neighbour. Times have changed. This is the twenty-first century. Bangladesh would not like the tag of a “special relationship” with India. In today’s world it would be unbecoming on the part of India not to exercise utmost maturity and caution against the use of references to the expression “special relationship with Bangladesh. Special relationships by definition are essentially unequal partnerships. It is a relationship between a senior partner and a junior partner. A relationship, to be healthy, must be based on the principles of sovereign equality.
The perfect example of a special relationship is the one between the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In spite of so many commonalties between the two nations like a common language, a common culture, a common religion, and so on, the fact remains that the United States is the senior partner and the United Kingdom the junior partner. In other words, it is an unequal partnership. As it happens, the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has increasingly lost its relevance today. Even differences of opinion are allowed to prevail between the alliance partners and there are no hard feelings.
It is therefore appropriate that India in its bilateral relationship with Bangladesh, as indeed with all other member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), should use the expression “sovereign equality” in defining relationships with its smaller neighbours. It should be a hard-nosed business-like relationship based on national interest and mutual benefit where sentimentality has no place.
I have mentioned in an earlier chapter that at the end of the India-Pakistan War of 1971 which led to the creation of a sovereign independent Bangladesh, India’s Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi had issued instructions to all the relevant Ministries of the Government of India and all the Indian Embassies around the world not to claim that Bangladesh got its independence because of India.
According to her, it was the people of Bangladesh who had struggled hard and secured their freedom. This forward thinking on the part of Mrs Gandhi had set the framework of the bilateral India-Bangladesh relationship for the future. It is a well-defined guideline that India has no reason to deviate from.
If specific gestures of goodwill have assumed importance in the context of IndoBangladesh relations, it is imperative that New Delhi opens its market a lot more generously in a move to liberalise access for goods from Bangladesh more than the present customs rules allow. India needs to focus on such hot issues as elimination of relevant non-tariff barriers, reduction of the negative list for zero duty imports, and modernisation of trade facilitation on the India-Bangladesh borders.
In the early eighties Bangladesh had played a lead role in promoting the South Asian
Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). There are indications once again that Dhaka may be interested to have a strong Indian endorsement of its aspirations to lead the process of promoting regional and subregional cooperation in the subcontinent. India’s support would generate enormous good-will in Dhaka.
A key area where India can play a vital role is in helping the development of Bangladesh leveraging its geopolitical location as the Eastern Hub of South Asia. The hub would include Bangladesh, the north-eastern region of India, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal. Linking these countries and regions into an integrated transport network of efficient highway and waterway systems; extending them into the landmass of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam; and creating networked air and sea connectivity with Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore could be given high priority for promoting a strategy for sustainable growth in the entire extended region. When such major cross-border multinational economic initiatives are put in place, there should follow important borderland industrial projects. Development of industrial corridors along the highways would have the potential of creating massive employment opportunities and prosperity in the entire region. Given inspiring leadership and the gift of foresight of a man like Lee Kuan Yeu, the mentor of Singapore, the materialisation of such a dream into a reality is possible. It could transform the region.
The coming to power of Shaikh Hasina in 2008 opened the doors for India, after a gap of over three decades, for a breakthrough in Indo-Bangladesh bilateral cooperation. India could not miss this golden opportunity. It had no alternative but to respond positively and seize the moment.