India: A History. Revised and Updated (102 page)

The results confirmed both the appeal of his broad-based campaign and his stature as the election’s outstanding personality. The PPP won 81 of the 138 seats in the western provinces. It was a victory, albeit a sub-national one, scarcely exceeded by Mrs Gandhi’s triumph a few weeks later. Bhutto had repeatedly claimed to be the voice of the people; now he began to believe it. They became ‘my people’ and he their saviour. ‘I was born to make a nation … to bring emancipation to the people … [to] reverse the march toward self-annihilation …’ he would write.
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The democrat was turning into a demagogue if not a demi-god.

However remarkable Bhutto’s electoral triumph in the West, it was, though, as nothing compared to that of the Awami League in the East. There Mujib-ur-Rahman’s party pulled off one of the most unexpected and comprehensive triumphs ever recorded in a genuinely free multi-party election. The situation had been hard to read. After monsoon floods had led to the vote being postponed till December, the worst cyclone of the century had hit the coastal regions in November. The devastation, carried inland on a tidal bore, left millions homeless and may have killed as many people as Partition and the Indo-Pak wars of 1947-8 and 1965 combined. With the disruption still chronic, the poll had to wait till January in some constituencies. But mostly it went ahead as planned – though not regardless.

For to Mujib and his party the cyclone had been the last straw. As a metaphor for East Pakistan’s devastating submergence beneath the Panjab-dominated West it had some rhetorical value, but it was the relief effort, or rather the lack of it, that played a major part in the vote. Not only was central government aid woefully inadequate, but, according to Awami League propaganda, it was wilfully so. The military had supplied just one helicopter, India’s offers of help had been rebuffed and only international pressure had got the junta to acknowledge the seriousness of the crisis. A more timely illustration of West Pakistan’s callous indifference to the East could hardly have been contrived. Outraged, Maulana Bhashani, the leader of an ultra-leftist party which might have tested the Awami League’s popularity, boycotted the poll. The turnout was nevertheless large and gave Mujib’s Awami League 160 of the province’s 162 national seats plus a like majority in the provincial assembly. He thus had twice as many national assemblymen as Bhutto’s PPP, indeed a comfortable majority over all Pakistan’s other parties combined. Yahya himself now acknowledged Mujib as the next prime minister and conceded that the new assembly should convene in Dhaka.

Yet just as the PPP had won not a single seat in the East, so the Awami League had won not a single seat in the West. The flaw in the nation’s structure, imperfectly obscured by constitutional wallpapering and exacerbated by the military’s clumsy experiments, now gaped wide open. Pakistanis had finally got to choose a government of their liking and it was totally unworkable. Bengali supremacy was no more acceptable to Panjabis than Panjabi supremacy had been to Bengalis. Compromising on Mujib’s six points would trigger a revolution in the East; denying Bhutto a share of power would trigger a backlash in the West. Either way, the integrity of the nation was in the utmost peril. And since Bhutto’s only chance of office lay in having the rules of the game changed, the junta too was increasingly drawn into the fray as a player rather than a referee.

Three-way negotiations between Yahya, Mujib and Bhutto got nowhere. By delaying the inauguration of the new assembly, they merely heightened Bengali suspicions of the junta’s good faith and of Bhutto’s behind-the-scenes manoeuvring. An indefinite postponement of the assembly on 1 March 1971 brought a total strike throughout the East. Students and others clashed with troops, mutinous sentiments were rife among locally recruited units of the Pakistan army, and the Awami League began issuing quasi-governmental directives. It did so in the name of’Bangladesh’ (‘Bengal-land’) instead of ‘East Pakistan’; a new flag was being flown and a new anthem sung.

Yahya seemed to backtrack by announcing that the assembly would in fact assemble in three weeks’ time. Mujib demanded that the troops first return to barracks, that their indiscriminate shooting of civilian protesters be investigated and that power be immediately transferred to the Awami League. Ostensibly to defuse the crisis, Yahya flew to Dhaka; Bhutto followed, covertly to stoke it. But these last-minute exchanges had almost certainly been ‘programmed to fail’.
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A decision in favour of the armed suppression of what the military planners were now calling a ‘rebellion’ had already been taken. The axe would fall; it was just a matter of timing.

On 23 March, the anniversary of the 1940 Lahore Resolution when Pakistan celebrated its Independence Day, Dhaka rallied for ‘Resistance Day’. The new ensign with its golden Bangladesh outlined against a blood-red disk on a lush green background was everywhere. It even fluttered on the vehicles that bore the Awami League leaders to their last meeting with Yahya and Bhutto. Hours later Yahya flew home, then Bhutto. By the time Bhutto reached Karachi on the 26th, he felt confident enough to announce that ‘by the grace of God Pakistan has at last been saved’. He was referring to Operation Searchlight, the army’s genocidal repression of Bengali dissent which had indeed begun. And he was wrong of course.

Pakistan as it had existed since 1947 would not be saved. Rather were thousands, perhaps millions, of disaffected Bengali Pakistanis massacred and several million driven into exile by the state that claimed them. Then, eight months later, the fabric of Pakistan itself was sundered by India’s military intervention on behalf of these exiles and their self-proclaimed Bangladesh. There were thus two conflicts, the first an attritional civil war in which Pakistani forces secured control of the province’s urban centres, the second a brief Indo-Pak war involving hostilities elsewhere but fought mainly in East Bengal where the Indian army, assisted by Bangladeshi forces, secured a Pakistani surrender.

In Islamabad the Awami League’s defiance had come to be seen as treasonable and Mujib’s announcement of independence, issued on 26 March
and broadcast soon after, as secession. Besides begging the question of whether, in a democratic context, a majority can secede from a minority (arguably it need only repudiate it), Islamabad’s reading had ignored Mujib’s overwhelming mandate for provincial autonomy. For, if accepted, it would have meant a similar autonomy for the provinces in the West, leading to a diminution of that strong central authority – military, bureaucratic and economic – on which the coherence of Jinnah’s nation depended just as much as religion. Operation Searchlight was indeed, then, all about ‘saving Pakistan’. Yet, by frustrating Mujib’s mandate, Yahya and Bhutto precipitated the catastrophic reaction that led to half of Pakistan being ‘lost’. To Mujib and those who now called themselves Bangladeshis, mere autonomy had ceased to be an option. ‘The struggle now is the struggle for our independence,’ he had told a mass rally on 7 March.’… Turn every house into a fort. Fight with whatever you have.’ The enemy was portrayed as a colonial-style oppressor and the war as a second phase of the liberationist struggle first waged against the British.

Like earlier freedom fighters, Mujib himself had quickly been arrested and consigned to a Panjabi prison cell. Other Awami League leaders had made good their escape to India and there formed a government-in-exile in April 1971. It set up home among mango trees at the renamed Mujibnagar, a border township north of Calcutta which, as part of the Meherpur district of Rajshahi, was technically in Bangladesh. India afforded some protection, although New Delhi’s attitude to developments in East Bengal initially displayed ambivalence. Condoning acts of secession could backfire, especially in a region where Delhi too faced secessionist demands from the disaffected Naga and Mizo peoples plus a strong political challenge from the ultra-leftist CPM.

On the other hand, Indira Gandhi’s handsomely mandated government could not but relish the discomfiture of the Pakistani regime and certainly did nothing to ease it. Rather conveniently, even suspiciously so, in February 1971 the hijacking by Kashmiri militants of a small Indian Airlines plane had provided India with the perfect excuse for a retaliatory suspension of all Pakistani overflights. Thus throughout the crisis, and for some years after, East Bengal was not 1500 kilometres from Karachi but 5000. Military supplies could reach the East’s port of Chittagong only by the sea route round India. Additional troops had either to accompany them or, like the shuttling Yayha and the rendited Mujib, to be flown circuitously via Colombo.

Indian caution gave way to active engagement only when the consequences of Operation Searchlight became apparent. The mass exodus -2 million according to Karachi, 8 million according to Delhi – of East Bengali refugees to the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura posed a major
humanitarian problem. It also reopened the wounds of Partition and presented India with an interesting opportunity. Of the refugees, many were either Awami League supporters or Bengalis who had defected from the Pakistani army, both groups being intent on continuing the war from Indian territory. As guerrilla fighters, they organised themselves into what became known as the Mukti Bahini (‘Liberation Force’) and, after being trained and armed by Indian regulars, mounted cross-border raids against the Pakistani army and its collaborators. Most of these fighters were Muslims, though by no means all; for it soon became apparent that the bulk of the refugees were in fact members of East Bengal’s substantial Hindu minority. Long regarded with suspicion by Karachi, these stay-put survivors of the 1947 Partition were seen by the Pakistani troops as Indian fifth-columnists and were obliged to flee for their lives. But once in refugee camps along the border, Delhi made little effort to resettle them elsewhere in India. Despite being Hindus, their plight and their rightful hopes of return represented too tempting a political asset. In a familiar twist to the Partition saga, the dispossessed were to be used for political advantage.

It would be much the same with those ex-Indian Muslims, mostly Biharis, who having left India for Muslim East Bengal in 1947 supplied Operation Searchlight with collaborators and who would therefore be exposed to horrific retribution when the Pakistani army surrendered. Themselves confined to refugee camps in the new Bangladesh (partly for their own safety), several hundred thousand of these Biharis would still be there at the turn of the century, awaiting an uncertain ‘repatriation’ to an alien and unenthusiastic (West) Pakistan.

The refugee crisis also served to internationalise the struggle. While Yahya and Bhutto blamed India for inflaming the situation and infringing Pakistan’s sovereignty by supporting the insurgents, Mrs Gandhi harped on the plight of the refugees and the impossibility of India hosting them indefinitely. Each side hastened to present its case to other world leaders and each quietly lobbied for the resources, military as well as financial, supposed necessary for a resolution. Despite Yahya and Bhutto having just facilitated US national security advisor Henry Kissinger’s ground-breaking visit to Beijing, US arms sales were still embargoed; but, thanks to Bhutto’s foreign overtures, Pakistan could count on munitions and diplomatic support from China, plus some more sophisticated weaponry from the Soviet Union. This latter source of supply troubled Mrs Gandhi. To cut it off, to trigger Indian trade and arms purchases from the Soviet bloc and to ensure Soviet support in the event of Indian action in East Bengal, in August 1971 Mrs Gandhi signed an Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship
and Co-operation. Non-alignment had temporarily been ditched; sixteen years after accompanying her father to Bandung, Mrs Gandhi had cast India’s lot in with one of the despised superpower blocs.

As the 1971 monsoon ended, the struggle in East Bengal escalated. The Mukti Bahini intensified its operations and by November the Indian army was actively involved in cross-border shelling and forays into East Bengal in its support. By way of diversion, Islamabad responded on 3 December with a bombing raid on Indian installations in the Panjab. Citing this as an unprovoked act of aggresssion, India retaliated with overwhelming force. Air strikes into West Pakistan supported a naval advance on Karachi, a tank incursion in the Panjab and the inevitable exchanges along the Kashmir Ceasefire Line. But these were all by way of a smokescreen for the massive, well-planned and quickly executed advance on Dhaka. Outgunned, heavily outnumbered and hopelessly isolated, the Pakistani forces in East Bengal crumbled. Barely two weeks sufficed for Dhaka to fall and Pakistan’s General Niazi to accept an offer of unconditional surrender. His 90,000 troops laid down their arms and were ignominiously interned. In an eloquent display of the realities of the conflict, the actual surrender was taken in Dhaka by India’s top brass with a single Bangladeshi representative in doubtful attendance.

Unlike previous Indo-Pak wars, this one had been decisive. In the cricket parlance favoured by both sides, after a couple of drawn matches Pakistan had been ‘thrashed’. The series belonged to India. Even in Kashmir a modest advance had been made from the old Ceasefire Line to a new ‘Line of Control’. Moscow had stood firm in its support of India; Beijing had not intervened on behalf of its Pakistani ally; and though part of the US Seventh Fleet had made an unwelcome appearance in the Bay of Bengal, Washington could not be accused of having cheated the victor of victory. To historically minded Hindus it was as if all those countless incursions by Muslim foes from the north-west – from Mahmud of Ghazni to Babur the Mughal – had been avenged. The nation glowed in triumph, Mrs Gandhi bestrode the subcontinent, even her opponents smothered her in garlands.

Pakistan, on the other hand, had been humiliated. Islam had been embarrassed and Jinnah’s two-nation theory discredited. Yahya resigned immediately, leaving Bhutto to ‘pick up the pieces, the very little pieces’ (his own words) as the only civilian ever to have been a chief martial law administrator. By now as experienced in damage limitation as in evading responsibility, Bhutto still had his electoral majority in what remained of Pakistan and would use it to reinvent the nation in his own flawed self-image. Amid all the handwringing in Islamabad and the tub-thumping in
Delhi it was easy to forget that in Dhaka, from the wreckage of Bengal’s impoverished heartland, a new nation had been born and a new government, nine months in exile among the mango trees of Mujibnagar, was about to take power.