by Ali, Tariq
The clique that ruled behind him and was conducting the war included five senior generals and a few civil servants, none of whom were distinguished for their competence. In his memoirs, General Gul Hassan, a senior officer at the time, recounts the chaos in GHQ during the war: dispatches full of lies, cover-ups designed to conceal military failures, the overextension of military units that left Dhaka vulnerable, and so on. Viewed coldly as a military operation, it was a disaster. General “Tiger” Niazi, commandant of East Pakistan, had boasted that he would crush the rebellion within weeks, but this braggadocio was to no avail. Gul Hassan could barely conceal his contempt for Niazi, who he felt was no more than “company commander material.” Hassan himself was not a great strategic thinker and came up with a madcap scheme to open a second front. This entailed a strategic thrust against India on its western frontiers. He argued that the best way to save East Pakistan now was via a full-scale war that would lead to a UN/U.S./China intervention to impose a global cease-fire. The risk here was that if, as was likely, this did not happen, then West Pakistan too might go up in smoke. His more friendly superiors patted him on the back for clever thinking but rejected the idea.* They were not totally stupid. The complete control of the state by the army now raised more fundamental questions.
The Pakistan army and civil bureaucracy have always enjoyed a relative autonomy from the landlords and businessmen of West Pakistan. But the converse does not hold. The latter were heavily dependent on the military-bureaucratic complex that dominated the state. This process had been accelerated by the mass upsurge of 1968–69. The oligarchy in the West became more and more acutely aware of its dependence on the continued strength of the military and civilian state machine. The army and its cohesion was thus needed as a political rallying point over and above its purely repressive functions. The Six Points of March 1971 had struck at the heart of oligarchic rule in the West. This explains the frenzied refusal to compromise with the Awami League, the ferocity of the action against the East, and the remarkable degree of unanimity in West Pakistani ruling circles in immediately supporting the coup of March 25. It also explains the fidelity of the United States and its British adjutants to the military regime, despite the fact that it had jeopardized “stability” in Bengal.
The United States did try to inflect the Pakistani dictatorship toward “moderation,” while shoring it up otherwise. Critical voices in Washington were annoyed by the threat posed to their global interests by the narrow national egoism of the Pakistan army. They were also nervous that the debacle in the East might destabilize the hitherto solid command structure of the Pakistani military.
Steeped in British conventions, the senior officers had hitherto always respected strict hierarchy of rank. Both Ayub and Yahya, when they assumed power in 1958 and 1969 respectively, were commander in chief of the army and formally acted in an ex officio capacity. A Middle Eastern– or Latin American–style putsch by radical younger generals or colonels would have represented a sharp rupture with this whole tradition. Such an eventuality was avoided in the nick of time after the crushing defeat of December 1971, when the domestic situation had already greatly deteriorated and the junior ranks were restive because of the ineptitude of the high command.
The war in Bangladesh had badly shaken the Pakistani economy, which had been depressed anyway since 1968. Foreign exchange had drastically dwindled, while prices and unemployment rose in tandem. Jute exports had naturally collapsed, precipitating steep falls on the Karachi stock exchange. This grave economic crisis was, of course, caused by the cost of the expeditionary force in Bengal. Press estimates calculated this at something like $2 million a day (the equivalent of $40 million today), a massive burden when added to West Pakistan’s chronic import deficit of $140 million dollars ($2.8 billion today) a month. The Islamabad regime was thus faced with a domestic squeeze it had not bargained for when it embarked on its genocidal operations in March. It unilaterally suspended payments on its foreign debts and needed further large infusions of U.S. aid to ward off total bankruptcy.
New dangers loomed on other fronts. It soon became clear to the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, that a protracted struggle in East Bengal could have critical repercussions inside India in West Bengal. The latter province had been in the throes of a profound social crisis for three years now. Peasant uprisings and generalized social unrest had made the border province a powder keg. The Indian ruling elite, although far stronger than its Pakistani counterpart, was well aware of this and nervous that the infection might spread. Many reading this account today will be surprised by the thought that anyone in power ever feared a “Red revolution,” but they did. The strength of the Communist Party (Marxist) and Maoist groups to its left worried successive Indian governments.
This was one of the main reasons that Mrs. Gandhi was quick in her demagogic response to the events in East Bengal. Every opposition party in India had been urging New Delhi to intervene more forcefully. However, Indira Gandhi’s policy was to prop up the Awami League, while repeatedly disarming guerrillas crossing the border and instituting strict political control over the so-called “training camps” set up on Indian soil. Although it enjoyed great military superiority, the Indian government was initially daunted by the prospect of an intervention in East Bengal. It would anger the United States and China and might plunge the whole region into a turmoil that New Delhi feared it might not be able to control. Indeed, even if the Awami League succeeded in establishing what Indira Gandhi referred to as a “secular and democratic state” in East Bengal, the weakness of the indigenous elite and the virtual absence of a developed state apparatus would have posed the question of some sort of a revolutionary solution with great rapidity.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE political force in West Bengal itself at that time (as today) was undoubtedly the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), with its tens of thousands of militants and millions of supporters. The centrist inclinations of this party were in full view even then as it formed a coalition state government in the province, though once governor’s rule was imposed and the center took charge, it allowed itself more revolutionary rhetoric. Its leaders stated that Indira Gandhi and Yahya Khan represented equally reactionary social and political forces, which was a bit unfair. They argued that just as East Bengal was specially exploited by West Pakistan, so “West Bengal was especially exploited by the Indian Centre.” The logical conclusion to this view was to develop a strategy for a United Socialist Bengal. But to think in such terms necessitated a break with the past, and this the CPI(M) could not do. Perhaps it was a utopian notion, and perhaps it was the strong utopian streak in me that led me later, and quite independently of the CPI(M), to raise the demand for a United Socialist Bengali Republic. I found myself being denounced as an “ultraleft adventurist,” a criticism that, on thinking back, possibly contained a germ of truth. At the time it seemed a reasonable enough response to military dictators, compromised politicians, and ignoble businessmen.
It was as an “ultraleft adventurer” that I arrived on a pitch-dark night in Calcutta in 1971, disguised as a Hindu trader. My aim was to meet up with a courier from the war zone and cross the border with him into East Pakistan and establish direct contact with the Bengali resistance. I had shaved off my mustache for the first and last time and barely recognized myself. I was traveling on a fake British passport that had once belonged to a man called Muttabir Thakur, a Bengali trader from Brick Lane in the East End of London. I had no idea who he was, but he had volunteered to surrender his passport to help the Bengali struggle. I was at that time still a Pakistani citizen and was aware that then, as now, a Pakistani passport did not facilitate a quick entry into most countries and especially not India.
For some unfathomable reason, Sophie, the French militant who had dyed my hair in Paris, had given it and my eyebrows a reddish tint so that when I looked in the mirror, I saw someone resembling a Hollywood serial killer. I was carrying a revolver gifted indirectly by the IRA for this journ
ey, which I had packed in my suitcase together with some ammunition.
At Bombay airport the immigration officer asked me a routine question: “What is your father’s name?” I had memorized Thakur’s address in Calcutta, but had stupidly not foreseen this question. I panicked, blurting out, “Mohammed.” The immigration officer was shocked, but before he could say anything, an elderly, ample-girthed Parsi lady queuing up behind me, evidently touched that a Hindu boy’s father had been named Mohammed, defused the situation by exclaiming, “How sweet!” Everyone smiled, my papers were stamped, and Customs did not bother to open my suitcase.
I had arrived determined to cross the border and establish contact with the guerrilla band of Abdul Matin and Tipu Biswas, who represented the most sympathetic, Guevarist wing of the Bengali left. One of their supporters had translated Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare into Bengali, and it was now being read by soldiers in the Mukti Bahini, the official liberation army, which included former Bengali soldiers and officers of the Pakistan army. Matin and Biswas’s irregulars were said to be operating in Pabna, in the heart of the province between the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers, as well as in the northeast of the province, in the region of Sylhet and Mymensingh. This last had been the epicenter of the great Tebhaga peasant uprising for rent reductions in 1945–47, the most militant social revolt of the rural poor in the subcontinent to that date. The tradition had certainly not disappeared. A courier from the Bengali maquis met me in Calcutta. He must have been only eighteen years old, but his composure and authority belied his youth. He impressed me greatly. He told me that the resistance was growing and maturing every day and had succeeded in paralyzing the port towns of Chittagong and Khulna, thus reducing interzonal trade to a trickle. “Soon we will take Santa Clara and then Havana,” he said with a smile, the closest he came to revealing his political identity. In those days, given the diversity of groups engaged in the resistance, it was better not to pry too deeply into political affiliations, especially if one was a Punjabi from West Pakistan.
His instructions were to take me across the border, from where others would be responsible for my transportation. He insisted that we could not travel with any weapons in case we were stopped and searched by the Indian border police. So, reluctantly, I left the revolver behind. As we moved in the direction of the border, we began to encounter roadblocks and signs of heavy Indian troop movements and tanks. The border was obviously being sealed off. We were warned by activists en route that border crossings were virtually impossible. There was no option but to abort the mission. The courier kept his cool. He left me at a safe location in Calcutta and returned. I never discovered his real name. Some years later a Bengali friend told me that he was dead.
Over breakfast one morning at the Great Eastern, a dilapidated but atmospheric relic of the raj in central Calcutta, I was chatting with friends when an English journalist, Peter Hazelhurst of the Times, walked over and stared at me. I looked up, gave no sign of recognition, and turned away. We all fell quiet and buried our faces in newsprint. Hazelhurst hovered around, then returned to our table. He said something to me but I ignored him. He now insisted that he had recognized my voice, congratulated me on the effectiveness otherwise of my disguise, and threatened to expose my presence unless I gave him an exclusive interview as to what I was doing there. I was trapped and agreed. Afterward he gave me twenty-four hours to get out and helped to throw pursuers off the scent by writing I was heavily bearded and heading for Delhi. In fact I went to the airport and hopped on the first flight to London. In the interview I had raised the desirability of a United Red Bengal, a beacon for the whole region, a spark that would set the prairie on fire. Words came easily in those days. Hazelhurst agreed that a Red Bengal would alarm Delhi even more than Islamabad and reported me accurately, a rare enough occurrence at the time. These stray reflections stirred a hornet’s nest. The Maoist groups, in particular, saw this as a “petty-bourgeois nationalist deviation.” The prospect of a united Bengal was viewed with equal alarm by Washington, which perceived it as a stepping-stone to the possible Vietnamization of South Asia. This became clear when, astonishingly but to my immense delight, the following editorial appeared in the New York Times:
Mr. Ali’s radical vision of chaos on the Indian subcontinent cannot be taken lightly....
A prolonged guerrilla conflict in East Pakistan would have profound repercussions in the neighboring violence-prone Indian state of West Bengal, already shaken by the influx of more than three million refugees from the Pakistani Army’s campaign of terror. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is under mounting pressure to intervene to try to check this threat to India’s own internal peace and integrity.
It is obviously in nobody’s interest to allow the Bengali “spark” to explode into a major international conflict, one which might speedily involve the major powers. Nor is it wise to permit the situation in East Pakistan to continue to fester, inviting the gradual political disintegration of the entire subcontinent.
To deprive Tariq Ali and his like of their “big opportunity” it is essential that Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan come to terms speedily with the more moderate Sheik Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League, which won an overwhelming popular mandate in last December’s national and state elections. Such an accommodation with East Pakistan’s elected representatives should be a pre-requisite for the resumption of U.S. aid, except for relief assistance, to Pakistan.*
But Yahya Khan was out of it by now. It was Mrs. Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, who would deprive us of our “big opportunity.” It had become obvious to New Delhi that the Pakistan army could not hold the province for long, and if the guerrilla war persisted, the Awami League leadership might be bypassed by more radical elements. Accordingly, on December 3, 1971, the Indian army crossed the East Bengal border, were greeted as liberators, were helped by the local population, and advanced toward the capital, Dhaka. Within a fortnight they had compelled “Tiger” Niazi to surrender himself and the rest of his command. Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force, and just under a third of its army. The rout was complete. Within weeks Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been released from a West Pakistani prison and flown to Dhaka via London. Washington, fearing chaos in his absence, had pressured Islamabad for his swift release. A defeated leadership had little choice but to oblige. East Bengal now became Bangladesh, a country of 70 million people. Within several weeks the Indian army had left, leaving the new state to construct its own apparatus.
The ferocious cyclone that had struck East Bengal in 1970, a year before the Pakistan army, had claimed two hundred thousand lives. Nature was kinder than the war. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman insisted that 3 million Bengalis had been killed in the war. The Pakistan army disputed these figures without supplying their own. A senior State Department mandarin, presumably relying on U.S. intelligence reports, wrote that “one million people were killed in Bengal between March and December [1971]. Some four million families—up to 20 million people—appear to have fled their homes, nearly half of them to refuge in India. Between one and two million houses were destroyed.”* These are shocking figures, dwarfing the massacres at the time of partition and even the appalling Bengal famine of 1943. General A. O. Mitha, with the help of the U.S. military, had created the Special Services Group (SSG) in the sixties. Its purpose was to carry out specialist missions behind enemy lines (India), and its commandos had been sent to East Pakistan long before March 1971. In his memoirs, Mitha describes being stationed in Calcutta as a young officer and witnessing the heartrending plight of the famine victims. The same general, this time part of the war machine, exonerated the military commanders and blamed the politicians for the bloodbath.
Back in Islamabad, General Hameed, the man responsible for the prosecution of the war and on behalf of the high command, addressed all the officers in GHQ to explain why they had surrendered and lost half the country. Thirty years later, Mitha, who had thought the meeting was a bad idea but had to attend, described the sce
ne when Hameed invited questions:
All hell broke loose. Majors, Lt. Colonels, Brigadiers screamed and shouted at him and called him and Yahya filthy names. The gist of what they shouted was that the reason for the defeat was that all senior officers were interested in was getting more and more plots and more and more land.... Hameed tried to calm them down but nobody would listen to him now, so he walked out.*
General Gul Hassan, who was at the same meeting, wrote in his memoirs, “One incessant demand I vaguely recall was that all officers’ messes should be declared dry.” He was convinced that a group of conspirators in the army were planning to use the SSG to either arrest or kill Bhutto when he returned to Islamabad from New York, where he had been addressing the United Nations Security Council. Gul Hassan noted:
I do not know what role was contemplated for the SSG in Rawalpindi, but I can state categorically that the one purpose it was not intended for was to furnish a guard of honour to Bhutto at the airport. Had this drama been staged, it would have smacked of a re-enactment of our military action in Dhaka. Whether the President [Yahya Khan] was a party to this design, I am in no position to say. General Mitha, with his potent credentials, was the obvious choice to set this plot in train. . . . The discipline of the Army was on the verge of snapping and the repugnant odour of anarchy was in the air. . . . The induction of a company of the SSG, by no stretch of imagination for a Samaritan role, was a move so reckless that, had it materialised, it could have dispatched the country into oblivion.†
In his memoirs, General Mitha denied the charge and accused Gul Hassan of pandering to Bhutto and “lying.” What none of them could deny was that their fun-loving president, General Yahya Khan, had presided over a monumental political and military disaster. Having successfully liquidated the old state, he was now asked to relinquish power. His reign had lasted less than three years. The debate as to the inevitability of this loss continues to this day within the military elite, and a hard-line view of the conflict insists that it was all an Indian plot and Pakistan will have its revenge in Kashmir provided it is permitted “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Action based on half-baked ideas of this variety might, on the contrary, lead to a repeat performance of 1971 and further dent, if not destroy, the state.
