Tag: East Pakistan

Why the Narrative on Manekshaw – India’s Uncrowned CDS – Is Captivating Military Veterans Now

The Chief of Army Staff General Sam Manekshaw had achieved what no other military in the world could, including the US with all its wizardry had not earlier accomplished: the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh.

Chandigarh: Veteran and serving Indian military officers never tire of repeating the narrative in which the Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) General S.H.F.J. Manekshaw – later Field Marshal – had resisted pressure from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to launch immediate military operations against East Pakistan in early 1971 to stem the flow of millions of Bengali refugees into India.

In March 1971, predominantly Bengali East Pakistan had revolted against the dominance of its Punjabi and Pathani western section, resulting in a brutal crackdown by the army with a similar ethnic mix which, in turn, had triggered the refugee exodus into India. Alongside, the Pakistan Army had also affected a pogrom of intellectuals and Bengali leaders, brutally killing over 50,000 of them in mass executions and shootings, further roiling the devastated region.

This refugee influx had imposed a crippling financial burden on India, in addition to straining the social and political fabric of its eastern states, the lingering consequences of which still endure, in one form or another. However, after touring the teeming refugee camps, Indira Gandhi asked Manekshaw what the Indian Army could do to control the situation.

“Nothing,” quipped Manekshaw – or so goes the account that bears retelling for its nerve and objective boldness, albeit much to the horror of Gandhi and her entourage of senior civil servants and ministers, as no one had ever dared to respond so brusquely and abruptly to the domineering leader, used to unquestioning assent. Backed by her eager-to-please cabinet, Gandhi wanted Manekshaw to swiftly conduct a surgical strike on East Pakistan, followed by the installation of a government led by Mujibur Rahman, the popular Bengali leader, and the subsequent return of refugees.

Manekshaw is believed to have listened patiently to the prime minister but retorted that while the army could be battle-ready three months later in June, indisputable military logic, India’s extant operational capability and logistical realities directed that November 1971 would tactically be the opportune moment to attack East Pakistan, primarily for two reasons.

The first was the fierce monsoon that renders the entire region a virtual lake, severely restricting vehicular and armed personnel movement, argued Manekshaw. The second, equally credible rationale for postponing operations, was the possible northern threat from China with whom India had fought a debilitating border war just nine years earlier, and come off worse.

India, he maintained in his vaunted briefing to Gandhi and her senior cabinet members and advisors, needed to guard against the prospect of fighting a two-front war, analogous to the precarious situation that presently looms along India’s disputed borders with collusive allies China and Pakistan. Such an outcome, the CoAS had declared, would present him with problems far more complex than what had been the tactical bane of the German general staff for more than 50 years across two World Wars.

It would also be unwise to rely on diplomatic assurances from China that it would not react in support of Pakistan, he stated and recommended waiting till snow blocked possible Chinese movement across the northern Himalayas. Such a move, he added, would also enable troop withdrawals from the Chinese front for deployment to East Pakistan as well as the West Pakistan front which too needed additional bolstering.

A poster depicting atrocities committed by the Pakistan army during the 1971 Bangladesh war, in the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka. Photo: Adam Jones/CC BY-SA 2.0

A compliant Gandhi reluctantly agreed, but in the interregnum, a whispering campaign was mounted by senior officials and politicians against Manekshaw, accusing him of vacillation and shoddy ‘general-ship’. Fully aware of the calumny unleashed against him, Manekshaw remained unruffled as he calmly set about preparing for combat. This hiatus, meanwhile, enabled Gandhi to secure the Friendship and Co-operation Treaty with the Soviet Union, thereby neutralising the possibility of any interference from either an antagonistic US or a belligerent China.

It also enabled the establishment of a formal Bangladesh government in exile in India and the arming and training of Mukti Bahini guerrilla fighters, jointly by the Research and Analysis Wing and the army’s Special Forces. Over the next few months, till war erupted, these militias successfully harassed and engaged the Pakistani Army, confining it to garrison towns far from the capital, Dacca (now Dhaka), rendering Manekshaw’s eventual task easier when war ultimately ensued.

And, when the Pakistani Air Force conducted a pre-emptive strike on Indian airfields in December 1971 from West Pakistan, Manekshaw unleashed his campaign. A firm believer in the chain of command, he delegated the battle planning and execution to his field commanders, using his clout with the political establishment in New Delhi to fulfil their financial and hardware requirements.

In reality, this overarching role rendered Manekshaw India’s first uncrowned Chief of Defence Staff, an appointment Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been unable to confirm nine months after General Bipin Rawat’s demise in December 2021.

Also read: The Longer the Modi Govt Delays Appointing a CDS, the More ‘Expendable’ the Post Becomes

Thereafter, a fortnight later, on December 16, 1971, the irreverently outspoken, jocular and fiercely moustachioed Parsi army chief, who was born and grew up in Amritsar, achieved what no other military in the world, including the US with all its wizardry had not earlier accomplished: the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh. India also captured 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war.

Almost 51 years, or two generations and a half later, this narrative continues to captivate veteran and serving officers in all three services in varying measures, epitomising for them the apogee of the military successfully asserting their status with the country’s formidable political and bureaucratic establishments.

But a cross-section of these officers, along with defence and security analysts, rue the reality that in the intervening period, the military hierarchy’s propensity to fearlessly express such operational objectivity had steadily degenerated, to the point of vanishing, replaced regrettably, by a services-politician nexus guaranteeing reciprocal benefit.

However, several of these officers, though in agreement with the latter sentiment, were unwilling to be quoted by name in expressing their varying degrees of disappointment with the dissipated moral courage amongst active servicemen in standing their corner on numerous service and operational issues, like the recent Agnipath/Agniveer scheme.

Police personnel try to snatch a burning effigy from a protester during a protest against the Agnipath scheme, in Kolkata, June 18, 2022. Photo: PTI

Also read: The Agnipath Scheme May Be Designed to Ring the Death Knell of Indian Democracy

“It’s fantastic to even think that what Manekshaw did over half a century ago in standing up to Mrs Gandhi is even remotely possible today,” said a grizzled three-star army officer. It simply isn’t.

However, former Indian Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Arun Prakash is one of the rare few to publicly concede the inability of the military’s higher ranks to convey the ‘unvarnished truth and unpleasant news’ to their superiors. Writing in the Indian Institute of Defence Studies Journal in 2013, he observed that ‘in (the respective) service headquarters, the (situational) comprehension levels were lower, and tolerance for bad news even less at the political and bureaucratic levels. Hence, it often required all of one’s resources of moral courage to place (service) matters in the correct perspective, he declared.

In his lengthy essay titled ‘Roots of moral decline in the armed forces’, Admiral Prakash said that due to the tangible erosion of values and frequent displays of venality, the armed forces were ‘rapidly slipping’ in their country’s estimation and for them to blame this decay on society and polity was ‘not acceptable’. It was also apparent, he added, that neither the defence ministry nor any other civilian authority either cared about the moral health of the military, or could do anything about it.

Hence, the onus for stemming the rot and attempting to reclaim the izzat (honour) of the armed forces lay squarely on the prevailing military leadership – in Delhi and in the respective command headquarters, with basic military training institutions becoming the foci of attention.

Unfortunately, few heeded Admiral Prakash’s forewarnings and admonitions, and little or nothing had altered since his frank assessments nearly a decade ago.

Instead, the Faustian bargain between soldiers and politicians had intensified in recent years. It is no secret in security and media circles that many senior service personnel were increasingly identifying themselves with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led administration, that in turn unashamedly sought to exploit military achievements for political gain.

A host of senior-serving and retired military officers privately acknowledged that since 2014, ‘political expediency’ had been factored into several of their tactical operational plans and wider strategic decisions. This symbiotic relationship has suited both parties, as ruling party politicians had successfully exploited what passed for tactical military gains to take on the election campaign trail, to project the BJPs robust handling of national security issues.

This is best illustrated by the army’s September 2016 ‘surgical strikes’ against militant launch pads across the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the Indian Air Force’s reported bombing of an Islamic terrorist training centre at Balakot in Pakistan’s northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in February 2019.

Also read: The Surgical Strikes Videos Are Proof That Politics Is Fully in Command

Skillfully portraying both these ‘virile’ responses against a lesser enemy ensured the BJP a massive victory in the Uttar Pradesh state elections in early 2016, weeks after Prime Minister Modi’s ruinous demonetisation initiative. The latter airstrike proved even more electorally fortuitous: the BJP returned to power after the April 2019 general elections in even greater numbers than previously.

For the services, these events also proved fortuitous for the self-centred and pecuniary-minded soldiery which, in several instances, was rewarded either with promotions in service, or lucrative sinecures after retirement, or in some cases even both. “Military officers now continually have an eye to the main chance, pushing the government for employment after retirement, unlike previously when they superannuated gracefully, confident of their status in society,” said a one-star retired army officer.

Earlier, reminisced another former two-star army officer, some degree of dissidence was not discouraged within the respective services and promotions, the bane of all military men presently, were largely merit-based and shorn of ‘outside’-read political influences. Undeserving, or passed-over candidates rarely ever crossed their limits of incompetence and quietly faded away, rarely ever resorting to litigation to secure higher ranks.

But all that had changed.

Currently, civil courts and military tribunals – another avenue of employment for senior officers – were overloaded with promotion-related cases. This, in turn, was precipitated by relentless pressure on advancement up the greasy pyramid-like services edifice – determined in recent decades on decimal point weightages by computers – only prompting further pitiless and unseemly competition.

Admiral Prakash in his essay recommended a ‘major thrust to revive a sense of honour and pride in the profession of arms, by introducing self-monitoring and self-regulatory systems within the Services’. This endeavour, he suggested can only be initiated by the top military leadership to focus on the moral health of the Services, to create formal codes of conduct and above all, to set personal examples of a spartan, upright and soldierly way of life.

Perhaps, then, and only then, can we aim and hope for a redux of Field Marshal Manekshaw’s upright candour.

Book Review: Failing to Internalise Why India Fought the 1971 War

In ‘December in Dacca’, K.S. Nair argues that the jubilation about 1971 should have been for ending a monstrous humanitarian crisis in East Pakistan, rather than just defeating Pakistan.

December in Dacca: The Indian Armed Forces and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is not a comprehensive history of the 1971 war but it provides a fascinating insight into a conflict that irrevocably changed geography – and, more importantly, explains what went wrong for India (and Bangladesh) subsequently. In other words, author K.S. Nair’s complaint is that India never incorporated into national memory its own humanitarian and ethical justifications for waging this war. This, he laments, is a monumental tragedy.

This is why Indians are at risk of celebrating the victory, which led to East Pakistan becoming an independent Bangladesh, for having comprehensively thrashed an old enemy. Instead, the jubilation should have been for a much more important cause: for ending a monstrous humanitarian crisis in East Pakistan, committed by a heartless Pakistani military.

“We are at risk of celebrating the victory without internalizing what our adversaries did wrong, without holding them to account for their wrongs, without holding ourselves to the higher standards we upheld then, and without reaffirming India’s values and strengths,” Nair writes.

Just to understand the scale of atrocities (notwithstanding Islamabad’s staid denials), look at the statistics. The Pakistani military murdered a million people in a span of nine months and forced another 10 million to flee and take shelter in India. In comparison, six million Jews were killed in the Nazi holocaust over a period of at least six years. Thus, the Pakistani murder rate exceeds that of the Nazis by at least 33%. (And to fast forward to now, look at the number of Ukrainians killed by Russia and see the Western reaction.)

Also read: Book Review: A Disturbing Account of the 1970 East Pakistan Storm and Its Political Fallout

K.S. Nair
December in Dacca: The Indian Armed Forces and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War
HarperCollins India, 2022

“Yet, there was no outraged protest from the world when India sent back to Pakistan tens of thousands of Pakistani POWs, without holding the few hundred of them who had been identified as war criminals to account for their genocide.”

Nair concedes there may have been reasons for this. The Indian government was perhaps happy with the military victory and did not wish to take on the legal, administrative and public communication pressures that would have accompanied trials of Pakistani military prisoners on charges of crimes against humanity. India was not the global player it is now, and the economy did not count for much then.

And why fault only the government of the day? Despite the Pakistani military’s deliberate targeting of Hindus, even India’s most outspokenly Hindu political groups did not seem interested in redressing the crimes. The Left too did not seem inclined to pursue and punish the murderers of innocent Bengali peasants.

Indeed, as Nair argues, an open airing of the crimes of the Pakistani military might have strengthened the cautions against brute majoritarianism in our own country. No wonder, the defeat did not any way chasten or enlighten the Pakistani military. Within 15 years of perpetrating horrific violence on its own people, Pakistan was assiduously recasting itself as the champion of self-determination for Kashmiris.

The Bangladesh Liberation War should be better remembered – and in some ways differently remembered, the way the Second World War is. Nair underlines that it was one of the last of the “just wars” of the 20th century. India went to war for a national and institutional commitment to values of freedom, democracy, pluralism and justice. India, he feels, did not sufficiently disseminate its narrative to the rest of the world. Pakistan was not held accountable for the terrible crimes it committed on its own people – Hindus and Muslims, as well as innocent men, women and children.

Is this why bigotry and misogyny still remain alive today in this part of the world? Nair admits that in India itself, far too many groups have carried out occasional pogroms against minorities or domestic enemies of the day. In the process, India has slipped from the moral high ground it so overwhelmingly owned in 1971. Indeed, India today must be prepared to look within itself as well, shedding unquestioned deference to the majority and criminalisation of dissent. These diseases, Nair says, have now infected Indian society. “These are all signs that India has forgotten the lessons of 1971.”

Also read: A Diplomatic Narrative of the 1971 War

K.S. Nair. Photo: HarperCollins website

The author takes you through war dates, virtually transporting you to the battlefields – on the ground, in the sea and in the air – as India took on Pakistan in December 1971. He debunks some of the much bandied conspiracy theories in the process and details, like a good scholar, some of the memorable although bloody India-Pakistani encounters.

The diplomatic squabbles in the United Nations were far more deadly, as far as India was concerned. The Soviet Union remained a loyal friend in the UN. But towards the fag end of the war, it began to run out of patience. Just before December 16, Poland introduced a resolution – undoubtedly with Moscow’s nod – which would have forced India – had it passed in the Security Council – to halt its military blitzkrieg just when it was within handshaking distance of a clear victory.

The one man who saved India was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who, realising the imminent end for the Pakistani military in the eastern wing, created tantrums in the UN and tore up the Polish resolution. Just as the Indian diplomats heaved a huge sigh of relief (there would be no voting now), the Indian military forced a surrender from tens of thousands of demoralised Pakistani soldiers and collaborators in newly liberated Bangladesh.

To say this is a great book will be an understatement.

M.R. Narayan Swamy is a veteran journalist.

A Diplomatic Narrative of the 1971 War

How two dimensions of India’s diplomacy in the framework of the 1971 India-Pakistan war helped in removing the consideration of the ‘situation in the India/Pakistan subcontinent’ from the UNSC’s agenda till today.

This article is based on retired diplomat Asoke Mukerji’s public lecture ‘India and the UN 1971’. You can watch it here.

The narrative of India’s diplomacy in the framework of the 1971 India-Pakistan war involved two dimensions. At the bilateral level, India engaged primarily with the four great powers (France, the UK, USSR, and US), as part of the larger international community, to prevail on Pakistan to reach a “political settlement” in East Pakistan and mitigate the burden of 10 million refugees in India pushed out by Pakistan’s genocidal crackdown (Operation Searchlight) from March 25, 1971.

At the multilateral level, India coordinated with three of the great powers (France, the UK and the USSR) from December 4, 1971 onwards to prevail on the UN Security Council (UNSC) to prioritise such a political settlement as part of any decision calling for a ceasefire to India’s military campaign launched in response to Pakistan’s declaration of war on India.

These two dimensions converged with the UNSC resolution 307 on December 21, 1971, removing the consideration of the “situation in the India/Pakistan subcontinent” from the UNSC’s agenda till today.

 Diplomacy before outbreak of war

The outcome of December 1970 parliamentary elections in Pakistan, which had resulted in the victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League party in the legislature of united Pakistan, with 167 of the 313 seats, was rejected by Pakistan’s military ruler General Yahya Khan. Instead, with the launch of ‘Operation Searchlight’ on March 25, 1971, Pakistan unleashed a reign of terror and genocide that continued until the beginning of the conflict in December 1971. This substantially revised India’s original objective of upholding democracy in Pakistan with a proactive diplomatic and military campaign for an independent Bangladesh.

In 1971, the USSR was facing two major international challenges. It was embroiled in an ideological dispute with communist China, aggravated by the bloody border clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops in March 1969 along the Ussuri river. With the US, it was building on attempts to normalise relations by preparing to host the first visit by a US President to Moscow since the end of the Second World War.

Also read: Behind the Scenes of India’s Response to the East Pakistan Crisis of 1971

India’s diplomatic outreach registered a positive outcome with the USSR, when Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny wrote to President Yahya Khan on April 2, 1971 denouncing ‘Operation Searchlight’ and calling for a “peaceful settlement” in East Pakistan. This demand was deflected by Yahya Khan, and enabled India’s Foreign Minister Sardar Swaran Singh during his visit to Moscow in June 1971 to discuss and negotiate the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. The Treaty was signed on August 9, 1971 during Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s visit to New Delhi.

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s personal leadership of India’s diplomacy in 1971 was evidenced by her outreach to all four major powers. She visited Moscow at the end of September 1971 to coordinate views on how to implement the Treaty with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, resulting in the visit of two high-level delegations from the USSR to India from October 22, 1971 led by Deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Firyubin and Chief of the Soviet Air Force Marshal Pavel Koutakov. These visits opened the door for mutual coordination and support on the battlefield and in the UNSC, where the diplomatic endgame of the war would play out in December 1971.

PM Indira Gandhi followed up her visit to Moscow by undertaking a high-profile visit to the major Western capitals between October 25 and November 12 in 1971. Her first stop was London, which had been since 1947 a major strategic supporter of Pakistan. However, in late 1971, the UK’s primary diplomatic objective was to become part of the European Economic Community (EEC). French President Charles de Gaulle had twice (in 1961 and 1969) vetoed the UK’s attempts to enter the European integration process. Following de Gaulle’s resignation in mid-1969, the UK saw an opportunity to garner French support for its entry into the EEC (which it succeeded in doing in 1973).

In Asia, the UK had steadily downsized its strategic footprint following the Suez Crisis in 1956. In 1971, the UK was preoccupied with ensuring control of its huge oil and financial stakes in the Gulf, while granting independence to Gulf states. Bahrain and Qatar became UN members in September, Oman in October, and the United Arab Emirates in December 1971.

Yahya Khan with American President Richard Nixon. Credit: By Oliver F. Atkins, Public Domain

Following his meeting on October 31 with PM Indira Gandhi, British PM Edward Heath wrote to President Yahya Khan on November 9 suggesting a negotiated settlement in East Pakistan with the Awami League. This was rejected by Pakistan and played a part in the UK’s reticence during the UNSC debate on the war in December 1971.

PM Indira Gandhi’s next stop was Washington DC. The world was at the time unaware of the US’s secret outreach to communist China in 1971, and the surreptitious visit between 9-11 July 1971 by Dr Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser of President Richard Nixon, to Beijing while he was supposed to be in Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan’s role in the rapprochement between the US and communist China played a significant part in the policy of the US to appease its military regime, despite evidence of the genocide from the ground contained in the report from the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood (known as ‘The Blood Telegram’).

In her two meetings with President Richard Nixon on 4 and 5 November 1971, PM Indira Gandhi (and her American hosts) were clear that India and the US would be on opposing sides in attempts to reach a political settlement in East Pakistan.

The humanitarian crisis in East Pakistan had aroused the voice of prominent French intellectuals led by Andre Malraux. Public opinion forced the French government to impose sanctions on Pakistan in July 1971. During PM Indira Gandhi’s visit to Paris, the convergence of priorities for a political settlement in East Pakistan, including the release of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from custody, was apparent.

Following his meeting with PM Indira Gandhi, French President Georges Pompidou wrote a letter on November 18, 1971 to President Yahya Khan asking him to release Sheikh Mujib as part of a political settlement in East Pakistan. This was flatly rejected by President Yahya Khan. France tacitly supported India’s position on the urgency of a political settlement when the UNSC began its debate on December 4, 1971.

In the May Day celebration in Beijing in 1970, Mao Zedong, the leader of China’s Communist Party, had given a public signal to India’s charge d’affaires Brajesh Mishra on China’s interest in improving relations with India. In July 1971, PM Indira Gandhi wrote to Chinese PM Chou En-lai explaining India’s concerns on the situation in East Pakistan. On October 25, 1971, two thirds of the member-states of the UN General Assembly, including India, voted to replace the Republic of China with communist China in the UN, including the UNSC. This brought communist China into the UN and UNSC debates on East Pakistan, on the side of Pakistan.

In its diplomatic outreach to the wider international community, India sent delegations to 70 countries, of which 13 were at ministerial level. However, the main hurdle faced by India in galvanising the support of nonaligned and developing country member-states of the UN was to overcome their concern on the impact of any political settlement in East Pakistan on the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty, upheld by the UN Charter.

Diplomacy in the UN 

Former Secretary-General of the United Nations U. Thant.

Under Article 99 of the UN Charter, the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) has the mandate to alert the UNSC on any issue which could threaten international peace and security. Although he had provided the UNSC with detailed reports regarding the humanitarian crisis in East Pakistan, UNSG U. Thant did not play a proactive role in advising the UNSC to resolve the crisis. His second five-year term was to end in December 1971; the military regime in Burma did not support him; and he was hospitalised with ulcers as the crisis came to a head, appearing in the UN after the outbreak of the India-Pakistan war in December 1971.

On December 3, Thant proposed to the UN Security Council, based on the UN Secretariat reports, that the UN should position observers in India and Pakistan and called for the withdrawal of Indian troops from the border with East Pakistan. The US supported this proposal, which was included in the first draft resolution tabled by Ambassador George H.W. Bush, the envoy of the US to the UN (who would become the 41st President of the US in 1989), on December 4, 1971 in the UNSC.

The resolution called for a ceasefire, withdrawal of the armed forces of India and Pakistan from each other’s territories, and the deployment of UN observers. While the US, China (represented by Huang Hua, the former interpreter of Mao Zedong) and 9 elected members of the UNSC supported the resolution, France and the UK abstained. Soviet envoy Yakov Malik vetoed the US’s draft resolution on the ground that it did not address the need for a political settlement in East Pakistan. Poland voted against the resolution.

On December 5, the Soviet Union proposed a draft resolution which called for a political settlement in East Pakistan as a pre-requisite for the cessation of hostilities. 12 Council members abstained on this proposal, and China opposed it on the grounds that this was an internal matter of Pakistan. The Soviet proposal was not adopted.  A second draft resolution moved by the US, along with Argentina, Belgium, Burundi, Italy, Japan, Nicaragua, and Somalia on December 5 was vetoed by the USSR, its second veto on successive days of the war, again on the ground that the proposal would not lead to a political settlement in East Pakistan.

Somalia’s envoy Abdulrahim Abby Farah, supported by Argentina, Burundi, Nicaragua, Japan, Belgium, Italy, and the US proposed on December 6, UNSC Resolution 303 referring the matter to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) under the “Uniting for Peace” resolution of 1950. This resolution was adopted with 11 members including the US and China in favour, and four abstentions (the USSR, France, UK, and Poland).

Thereafter, on December 7, the UNGA presided by Foreign Minister Adam Malik of Indonesia conducted an extensive debate. Most speakers focused on whether the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty, including addressing internal matters of member-states, could be violated by armed action by another member-state. The humanitarian dimension, including the genocide and the denial of democratic rights in East Pakistan, were stressed by countries critical of Pakistan. Fifty out of the 131 member-states in the UNGA spoke, and 104 voted in favour of Argentinian resolution 2793 calling for ceasefire and withdrawal of armed forces to their respective territories, return of refugees, a role of the UN, calling on the UNSC to act. These 104 countries included the US, China, and Pakistan. Eleven countries opposed the resolution, including India, USSR, Bhutan, and members of the Warsaw Pact, while 10 countries including France, UK, Afghanistan, Nepal, Oman, and Singapore abstained.

Pakistan informed the UNSC President on December 9 of its readiness to comply with the UNGA resolution. India informed the UNSC President on December 12 of its inability to comply with the UNGA resolution as it omitted any political settlement in East Pakistan, which India had recognised on December 6 as the independent state of Bangladesh.

Also read: With the Creation of Bangladesh, a Longstanding Dream of the RSS Was Achieved

On December 8, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev wrote to President Nixon proposing a “simultaneous” ceasefire and a political settlement in East Pakistan. On December 9, President Nixon proposed to Soviet Charge d’affaires Yuli Vorontsov, accompanying the visiting Soviet Agriculture Minister to the White House, that in exchange for progress in US-USSR relations on strategic arms limitation talks, the status of Berlin, a framework for cooperation and security in Europe and improved trade, the USSR should agree to work with the US on a ceasefire, and talks “within a Pakistan framework” on East Pakistan, so that “the United States and the Soviet Union will be as close together as we were during the great war”. The USSR did not respond to this gambit immediately.

On December 12, the US asked for a meeting of the UNSC to propose another resolution after receiving the responses of Pakistan and India to the UNGA resolution. The resolution moved by the US on December 13, which mirrored the UNGA resolution, was again vetoed by the USSR, and abstained on by France and the UK, as it did not address the political settlement in East Pakistan.

Alexie Kosygin, Leonid Brezhnev, Indira Gandhi, Swaran Singh and T.N. Kaul.

Foreign Minister Sardar Swaran Singh and Pakistan Deputy Prime Minister/Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto attended the UNSC meetings from December 12. At noon on December 15, when the Council reconvened for its meeting to consider a draft resolution moved by Poland, Pakistan Foreign Minister Bhutto walked out of the meeting, accusing the Council for the “legalisation of aggression” and procrastinating “for Dacca to fall”. The Polish resolution was opposed by China. The Soviet Union tabled another resolution and sought an adjournment till December 16, for delegations to examine the draft, which was agreed to.

When the Council reconvened on December 16, Indian Foreign Minister Swaran Singh informed the Council that the fighting in Bangladesh had come to a halt with the surrender of the Pakistani army in Dhaka. India had announced it would ceasefire in the western sector on December 17. On December 21, the UNSC adopted Somalia-tabled Resolution 307 (on which the USSR and Poland abstained) to close its consideration of the 1971 India-Pakistan war. It called for a durable ceasefire, withdrawal of forces, upholding of Geneva Conventions of 1949 on PoWs, and repatriation of refugees.

Outcomes

Four outcomes flow from this diplomatic narrative of the 1971 India-Pakistan war. First, it provided the basis for India and Pakistan to negotiate and agree between January-July 1971 on a legal treaty (the Simla Agreement of July 2, 1972) that committed both countries to resolve issues, including the Kashmir issue, bilaterally. As a treaty registered under Article 102 of the UN Charter, this overtook previous UN decisions on India-Pakistan issues.

Second, it presaged the entry of an independent Bangladesh into the UN (after overcoming communist China’s first veto on August 25, 1972 against Bangladesh’s membership), providing an international framework for the new country’s orientation and aspirations.

Third, the diplomatic responses to the war demonstrated the hollowness of the UN in acting to uphold the legal obligations of the 1948 Convention on Genocide adopted to prevent mass atrocity crimes after the Second World War. The UN has failed to halt such crimes subsequently, as in Cambodia (1975-1979), Srebrenica (1992), Rwanda (1994), and the Yazidi genocide in Iraq (2014). Fourth, it effectively overturned the UK’s “two-nation theory” of 1947, which was applied to divide and partition British India, with the emergence of Bangladesh showing that religion could not be the sole factor behind nationhood in South Asia.

Asoke Mukerji is a retired diplomat, who was India’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013-2015. This article is based on his public lecture ‘India and the UN 1971’. You can watch it here.

Dr B.C. Roy and the First Decade of the Indian Federation

While briefly recapitulating some highlights of Bengal’s first chief minister’s 14-year rule, we may observe the fluidity and unique problems faced by states in those early years.

Dr B.C. Roy, who led West Bengal as chief minister between 1948 and 1962, died on this first day of July, 59 years ago. He was known for his exactitude and his scientific temper, but to take leave of the world on the same date on which he came into it and that too, as soon as he had reached a perfect 80, is more than just unusual.

Indians still view the early, long-serving chief ministers like Govind Ballabh Pant, K. Kamaraj or Bidhan Chandra Roy with a certain amount of awe, for they are the ones who defined the rules of the game. While briefly recapitulating some highlights in B.C. Roy’s 14-years’ rule, we may observe the fluidity and unique problems faced by states in those early years. They came in all sizes and shapes and the Union was quite top-down by design. It was, nevertheless, a federal arrangement – largely because India was too diverse and ungovernably large to function as a unitary country. Both the Union and its constituents needed, therefore, to establish codes and protocols over areas and issues that could never be covered by typed-out Acts and Rules. Jawaharlal Nehru surely started as the ‘first among equals’, which fitted in quite well with his liberal-democrat image, yet his strong ideas and long stewardship ensured that he towered too tall over all others. We need also to understand that even in the ‘golden era’, the Centre presided over states quite decisively.

Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy is viewed as quite ‘autonomous’ and he surely belonged to that small handful that never appeared to be overwhelmed by Nehru. His reputation is of one who ‘checked and balanced’ the prime minister, which he did at times, but we may also appreciate the extent to which this was true or, at all, possible. When we are alarmed at the prime minister’s relentless subordination of all chief ministers, whether they belong to his party or not, we may not beguile ourselves into believing that his predecessors were completely different. But when Roy addressed the formidable prime minister of India by his first name, not as Pandit-ji, people were more than taken aback, even then, and we may not witness such informality ever again.

Bidhan Roy’s strength lay primarily in his professional competence – not as a politician – but as a physician. He could, therefore, walk into Nehru’s inner chambers for he often treated him as his patient, and he had been his father’s doctor and for Gandhi’s as well. He was also seven years senior to Nehru, in age, and he had also been educated in England, and coincidentally, both returned to India in 1911-12. The fact that he completed two prized medical degrees, MRCP and FRCS, simultaneously in a record period of only two years and three months, was not only very rare but earned him the regard of the medical community, in England and well as in India. Barrister Jawaharlal was more than impressed, but Roy moved on with his medical practice and teaching. He excelled in it and India decided to honour him in perpetuity by declaring that this date to be observed as National Doctors’ Day.

Roy did not join politics until 1925, and in that year, he defeated ‘the grand old man of Bengal’, the redoubtable ‘Surrender-Not’ S.N. Banerjea, in a straight fight from Barrackpore. He first leaned towards the Swaraj party, led by Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das and Vithalbhai Patel, that had broken off from Gandhi’s Congress, but as soon as differences were reconciled, he joined the mainstream of the Congress. As Subhas was in and out of jail, B.C. Roy organised the Civil Disobedience Movement in Bengal in 1930 and so thorough and effective was he that Motilal had him promoted as a member of the prestigious Congress Working Committee. Roy kept his practice alive and took care to cultivate the image of the legendary doctor who added value to the Congress movement. He was chosen by the ‘high command’ to serve as mayor of Calcutta Corporation, and he proved his dexterity in handling the faction-ridden Bengal Provincial Congress — where Subhas Chandra Bose was, incidentally, an active participant. Roy was full 15 years senior to Bose, which mattered in a traditional gerontocratic society, and he was a skilled dribbler in politics as well.

Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru and others proceeding to the AICC meeting from 1, Woodburn Park on October 1937. Photo: Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

B.C. Roy maintained a neutral stance in the ‘Gandhi versus the Bengal Congress’ ideological debate and even thereafter. His proximity to the Nehru family and Gandhi’s politics earned him brownie points that would serve him well in future, especially as the bulk of the Congress party in Bengal was perceived to be more favourable to a defiant Subhas Chandra. We must remember that Bengal was a Muslim-majority province but its economic and social domination had traditionally been in the hands of the English-educated, upper-caste Hindus. These bhadraloks lorded it over the vast majority, consisting largely of Muslims and ‘depressed castes’. This elite constituted just 6.4% of the population but it monopolised education and employment in both the government and private sectors.

From the second decade of the 20th century, however, Muslims and, thereafter, the ‘depressed castes’ embarked on their political empowerment campaigns and the tussle began. As soon as relatively large-scale voting (far short of universal adult franchise) began from 1937, Muslims led government-formation in Bengal, first under Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Praja Party and then under the Muslim League. Thus, when Subhas became the president of the Indian National Congress in 1938, and again in 1939, the party was already on the decline in the politics of the ‘undivided province. But even two months before Independence and Partition, no one really knew for sure whether Bengal would be split or remain united, as the demand to partition it on communal lines was ultimately rammed through by the Muslim League, there was a strong lobby to keep it as separate, united Hindu-Muslim nation. The Congress officially opposed the creation of Pakistan and was, frankly, quite confused in Bengal.

The purpose of stating these facts is to appreciate that while compromise was absolutely unthinkable in Punjab, all options were open in Bengal. Hindu-Muslim animosities were neither so bitter and nor communalism so deep in Bengal. Passion for the common language and the syncretic heritage were quite strong, even in the worst of times — as the 2021 election results have recently reconfirmed. The traditionally powerful (Hindu) leadership of the Provincial Congress had an impressive base in East Bengal. Its leaders became quite rootless after Partition, because like many in Bengal, Congress leaders were not prepared for it. Roy’s predecessor, the first chief minister, was from the ‘far East’ had to go as he had angered the dominant ‘Hughli faction’ of the West Bengal Congress. As a pravasi Bengali, born and bred largely in Bihar, Roy was seen as being above this parochial conflict. Nehru surely played a role and Roy had often no option but to acquiesce to Delhi’s decisions. He had to fall in line with Nehru’s plans even when they adversely affected the state.

The first issue on which federal relations had to be settled related to the distribution of income tax collected by the Union but meant partly to be granted to states. Under the existing British formula, the Niemeyer Award, Bengal and Bombay provinces were entitled to 20% of the total tax collection — since they were instrumental in garnering its lion’s share. When Nehru’s government reduced West Bengal’s share to just 12%, Roy led the hue and cry against it, on the ground that the hiving off of the eastern bulk did not really matter as almost all the income tax was always collected in Kolkata.

The Central government had not constituted the Finance Commission that the constitution had prescribed, and Nehru assuaged Roy by setting up a Committee under C.D. Deshmukh — which increased Bengal’s share to 13.5%. The point is that this head-on conflict marked the beginning of the great federal debate that continues till today. The Southern states of India are up against the present Union government’s plan to reward the North Indian states for not being able to check their population.

Similarly, while the setting up of the Durgapur Steel Plant did give a fillip to his narrative that the Asansol-Durgapur-Ranigunj belt was, indeed, the Ruhr of India, and did wonders to his image, the ‘Freight Equalisation’ policy that he had to gulp down ensured that the locational advantage of eastern India was taken away quite decisively. In any case, the new Licensing Policy of the Nehru era meant that, ultimately, the Centre finally decided which industry should be set up where, and even during Roy’s tenure, West Bengal started losing out quite rapidly to States like Maharashtra. The State’s essential raw materials like cotton or petroleum arrived with heavy and uneconomic transport costs attached. But, we remember B.C. Roy for his indomitable spirit to state his contrary views (quite unthinkable nowadays) and in securing the best bargain possible from Nehru’s government. Thus, other than Durgapur, he could also set up two new modern townships at Kalyani and Bidhannagar (Kolkata’s Salt Lake town), and create a large urban settlement to accommodate refugees, called Ashokenagar-Habra.

Refugees were, indeed, the most difficult of his challenges — more so as Nehru and Patel were totally overtaken by the 73 lakh Hindus and Sikhs who had crossed over from Pakistani Punjab in just four years following Independence. They had little time for the problem of much smaller numbers of Hindus of East Pakistan, who were entering an already densely occupied West Bengal in regular instalments. But the number was not too small either, and reports reveal that some 25 lakhs had crossed over to West Bengal between 1947 and 1950. By the time Roy died in 1962, the total number of refugees from East Pakistan had gone up to 42.6 lakh, which was certainly a large number in the population of 3.5 crores then. Besides, this official figure is quite an understatement as numerous immigrants, especially the bhadraloks, simply moved in with their extended families and kin in West Bengal. Travelling to and fro and cross-settlements were traditionally much more fluid between the east and west in Bengal

The 1951 Census noted that 25 lakhs had already moved over from the east and settled in and around Kolkata even before the Partition. But Nehru was banking too much on Bengal’s more tolerant ethos and wanted a harassed Bidhan Roy to agree. On April 1, 1948, he told Bengal that “it is dangerous to encourage this exodus as this may lead to disastrous consequences.” A fortnight later, he was more explicit that “Hindus should not leave East Bengal. If they do so in very large numbers, they will suffer greatly and we might be wholly unable to make any arrangement.” Though this was clearly discriminatory, since his government was showering its resources to take care of refugees who had fled West Pakistan, Roy had to stomach it, with just some protest.

The ‘secular ethos’ of Bengal held true to some extent, and in the entire quarter-century of East Pakistan’s existence, not more than 15 lakh Bengali Muslims crossed over to it. This is only a small fraction of the number that deserted Punjab and Uttar Pradesh for West Pakistan. Many Muslims, in fact, returned to West Bengal. Thus, while the Central government could requisition some 4.5 million acres of property abandoned by Muslims who had fled to West Pakistan, to accommodate Hindus and Sikhs, there was hardly a tenth of such resources left behind by Muslims in West Bengal.

But Nehru was also being rather impractical, as ethos or no ethos, communal and anti-social elements in both communities invariably created deliberate mayhem and riots, to loot and seize ‘enemy property’. The situation in Bengal was becoming quite explosive, with the government largely ignoring the refugee problem, but Nehru insisted that B.C. Roy should not be an alarmist. In 1949, the Congress lost a critical by-election in South Kolkata, which sent shock waves. More disturbing were the forceful occupation of vacant lands, both government and private, by impatient refugees in the heart of Kolkata. Communists had jumped in and were busy organising them and when Nehru visited Calcutta in July 1949, angry refugees hurled stones and shoes at his car. A bomb exploded at a public meeting that he addressed. Violence was in the air but Delhi was fixated on the problem in its own backyard.

A bust of B.C. Roy. Photo: Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0

It was then that B.C. Roy embarked on his policy ‘to spread out the refugees’ from the camps, parks and pavements of Kolkata, to the western districts of Bengal. But the east Bengalis found them inadequately green and much too dry and rough. Roy’s plans to transport and transplant them in large numbers in Dandakaranya in the heart of India and in the Andaman Islands were only partially successful and caused considerable misery. But Bidhan’s ‘Jawahar’ looked the other way and Centre-state relations were under strain even then, however ‘democratic’ be the tensions. The positive spinoff of the communist leadership of the refugee movement was, however, that the natural tendency to communalise the issue was checked quite effectively, unlike in western and northern India. We need to take a fair appraisal and admit that Bengal had issues with the Union government not just when the Left or the Trinamool came to power, but right from the beginning. It will also explain why there is historical angst about Nehru, Gandhi and Patel in the state.

Food was a perennial problem in the over-populated state, more so after it was cut off from the bountiful east. In August 1959, the Communist-led ‘Food Movement’ was a turning point in the state’s history. Jyoti Basu claimed that 80 of his supporters were killed and the state assembly exploded in anger. Roy handled the crisis with aplomb, as he had become used to the high drama and violence that Communists displayed in their agitations. His very imperial Kolkata Police, which insisted on communicating only in English, and its British-trained mounted police were quite forbidding and their reprisals terribly deadly — that protestors learnt to their dismay. The ‘One Paisa Tram Fare’ agitation of 1953 and the ‘Teachers’ Movement’ of 1954 are considered legendary in Communist lore, but Roy’s stern handling is also remembered. The CPI, however, proved to be a worthy foe and Roy was all admiration for Jyoti Basu. No wonder that, while the Congress has completely forgotten B.C. Roy and the party itself is in the ICU in Bengal, the communists are the ones who still hold him in high respect, as the true builder of modern Bengal.

Jawhar Sircar is a former culture secretary, Government of India. He tweets at @jawharsircar.

Witnessing the Bangladesh War of 1971 Through Raghu Rai’s Camera

Remarkably, while it was one of the most richly documented popular struggles of modern times, very few compilations exist which provide an overview of the epic struggle.

The year 1971 was marked with several ‘big victories’ – in politics, cricket and in war – all of which had long term implications for India. The national mood was buoyant, even if the country continued to struggle with endemic problems.

Fifty years later, we look back at those times and evoke some of that mood. In a series of articles, leading writers recall and analyse key events and processes that left their mark on a young, struggling but hopeful nation.

“Kill three million of them,” said President Yahya Khan at the February conference (of the generals), “and the rest will eat out of our hands.”

The executioners stood on the pier, shooting down at the compact bunches of prisoners wading in the water. There were screams in the hot night air, and then silence.

∼ From Massacre by Robert Payne, 1973

There were to be no witnesses to the massacre. The foreign journalists had all been sent back. The media had been taken over. Those of us in East Pakistan – Bengalis, Paharis, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists – were all labeled kafirs. The genocide was to be presented as a holy war. They expected no resistance to ‘Operation Searchlight’ They couldn’t have been more wrong. The brutality was unparalleled, but so was the resistance.

Due to the Pakistani Army’s brutality, the revolt was unanimous, but they did have some paid informers called the razakars who were helping the retreating Pakistani Army to locate the movement of Indian troops near Jessore. Photo: Raghu Rai

A photo of the refugees. Credit: Raghu Rai

The national elections of 1970 had been the beginning of the army’s rude awakening. As is often the case with autocrats, the general had misgauged the popularity of the Awami League and had not foreseen either the people’s resolve, or their ability to fight back.

Also read: From Karachi To Bay of Bengal, How the Indian Navy Played a Stellar Role in the 1971 War

The clock started on March 25, 1971. It was within the space of a month that the entire opposition was to be decimated. The opposition newspapers, the para-militia and the university bore the brunt of the first assault. Death squads ruled the cities.

The exodus of ten million people is difficult to ignore. Despite the media blockade, word got out. Then came the second surprise. Resistance grew.

I was in the Khulna sector of Bangladesh with the advancing Indian artillery heading the attack. Indian soldiers were wounded by air bursts and shelling by the Pakistani Army and were brought in for medical help. Photo: Raghu Rai

Their actions became more desperate. The razakars (local collaborators of the Pakistani Army) consisting of the Al Badr and Al Shams, ran amok. Rapes and killings intensified. Entire villages were burnt. The random killings were augmented with targeted assassinations aimed at instilling fear and establishing authority. Here too, they miscalculated. Rather than ‘eating out of their hands’, the Mukti Bahini (freedom fighters), many of them supported, trained and armed by the Indian Army, slowly gelled into a more cohesive fighting force. It was a people’s war and ordinary women and men performed extraordinary acts of heroism. Mujibur Rahman had called for ‘every home becoming a fortress’. The fear was now in the oppressors’ eyes.

‘Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom’ by Raghu Rai.

Raghu Rai.

Also read: Risky Journeys to East Pakistan to Film the Mukti Bahini Fighting the Pakistani Army in 1971

In a last act of desperation, Pakistan preemptively attacked Indian airbases on December 3, 1971. This opened the floodgates. With India declaring war, the Mukti Bahini now had the open support of the Indian military. The nine-month guerilla war transformed into an all-out attack to vanquish the oppressor. The Pakistani Army surrendered with 93,000 soldiers. While the 13-day war is considered one of the shortest in history, it took a huge toll on Bangladesh. In their dying throes, the Pakistani Army and their collaborators began a selective campaign to kill the intelligentsia of Bangladesh, aiming to destroy the ability of the – now inevitable – new nation to recover.

Much like the rest of the world, Indira Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister at the time, did not believe that 10 million refugees had been displaced until she personally visited the camps. It was not just food they needed, the monsoon had brought in cholera and other diseases. Photo: Raghu Rai

To survive the wrath of the rains, many families took shelter in hume pipes. Photo: Raghu Rai

Much of this was discovered afterwards, when the mass graves were found. It is impossible to know how many such graves there were. New ones have been found even 28 years after the war. During these long nine months, the world wept for Bangladesh. While it is true that the US government sent the 7th Fleet to the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan and Henry Kissinger sent a message to General Yahya Khan, thanking him for his “delicacy and tact”, Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka had also dispatched his famous Blood Telegrams, accurately articulating the horrors that were being perpetrated. Joan Baez, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Billy Preston, Leon Russel, Ravi Shankar, Ringo Starr and many others had gathered at Madison Square Garden in New York, to an audience of over 40,000, to voice their protest and express their solidarity to the Bangladeshi cause. George Harrison’s song ‘Bangladesh’ and Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘September on Jessore Road’ galvanised world opinion and became the rallying cry for resistance.

Also read: The Pakistan Army’s Operations in East Pakistan Were Brutal and Ruthless

Some of the finest photojournalists of the world also came. Remarkably, while it was one of the most richly documented popular struggles of modern times, very few compilations exist which provide an overview of the epic struggle. Bangladeshi photographers were too vulnerable to make their work public. Some gave away undeveloped films to foreign journalists in the hope that they might make a difference. None of those films ever made it back to them. The books and films that were produced for Vietnam were never replicated for Bangladesh. The foreign publications where images were used were not available for the Bangladeshi public to see. US filmmaker Lear Levin followed a cultural group which sang songs for the Muktis during the war. The raw footage remained in his archives for many years until filmmaker couple Tareque and Catherine Masud created a compelling story Muktir Gaan (The Song of Freedom), combining fresh imagery with the archived footage.

With the help of the Indian Army, exiled Bangladeshi Army officers started recruiting and training members of the Mukti Bahini. Photo: Raghu Rai

The history of the war has been contested, with different individuals and parties trying to make political capital out of the sacrifices of millions. Photographic archives are slowly emerging, some by Bangladeshi professionals and amateurs who took enormous risks to preserve moments in history. The recently found work from the archives of the legendary Indian photographer Raghu Rai is undoubtedly one of the most significant of these.

As we began compiling the work of 1971, I had written, “They had risked all to hold on to this moment in history. The scarred negatives, hidden from the military, wrapped in old cloth, buried underground, also bore the wounds of war. These photographers were the only soldiers who preserved tangible memories of our war of liberation. A contested memory that politicians fight over, in their battle for supremacy. These faded images, war weary, bloodied in battle, provide the only record of what was witnessed. Nearly four decades later, they speak.”

Few speak more poignantly than the negatives of Raghu Rai.

Shahidul Alam is a Bangladeshi photojournalist, teacher and social activist. 

All the photos have been taken from Raghu Rai’s book Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom.

Risky Journeys to East Pakistan to Film the Mukti Bahini Fighting the Pakistani Army in 1971

Civilians bore the brunt of the Army’s brutality and refugees came into India in the thousands.

The year 1971 was marked with several ‘big victories’ – in politics, cricket and in war – all of which had long term implications for India. The national mood was buoyant, even if the country continued to struggle with endemic problems.

Fifty years later, we look back at those times and evoke some of that mood. In a series of articles, leading writers recall and analyse key events and processes that left their mark on a young, struggling but hopeful nation. 

On April 4, 1971, I was pointing my camera at the East Pakistan border from Agartala. My companion was recordist S.D. Patil. Our two-men sight and sound unit was on the job.

Rows of refugees, a trail of young and old terror-stricken people were pouring into India with horror tales from the other side of the border! The most distressing sight was of the suffering women and infants. All around pathetic cries and the beating of chests were heard. In fact, they were being chased out by the West Pakistani firing squads.

We could hear the sound of guns booming and bullets crackling from the distance, and right in front of us, a run for their lives for hundreds of helpless people. I was running my camera to record history’s large scale forcible eviction of the people from their own homeland by brutish armed forces.

At the Indian check-post, the border police did not allow us to cross. We somehow managed to push inside East Pakistan on April 5, from a different route.

We reached Qusba railway station. The signal cabin was destroyed by blasting. The station platform was guarded by local civilian volunteers. Here we encountered guerrillas of ‘Mukti Bahini’ (Freedom Army). Some of them were Bengali soldiers, deserted from Pakistan armed forces and had joined the civilian forces to fight against the West Pakistani soldiers. In Qusba, Mukti Bahini had taken command of the entire town. Here we saw many destroyed houses and walls with bullet marks. The moment the local crowd saw us with a camera and a recorder, they started shouting in chorus:

“Bangladesh swadhin karo,
Yahyar mukhe juta maro,
Cantonment dakhil karo,
Bangladesh swadhin karo.”

[Translation: Make Bangladesh independent, kick Yahya (Khan) with a shoe, occupy the Cantonment, make Bangladesh independent.]

Also read: The Pakistan Army’s Operations in East Pakistan Were Brutal and Ruthless

With the help of few volunteers, we went to Comilla town. Here again, we saw a long row of refugees migrating towards the Indian border. In the interiors, some of them were seen running away from the firing range. It was a horrible sight. At one place Patil and I had to run away when we heard the sound of bullets cracking from a close distance. By evening we returned to the camp with 1,000 feet of exposed film coverage.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, founding leader of Bangladesh with Lt Gen Aurora. Photo: Prem Vaidya

On April 6, with little boldness, we marched deeper towards Sylhet district. Here the refugees were going towards the state of Meghalaya in India. Along with local Bengali refugees, we saw four Pathans, whom we interviewed regarding their escape to India. “It’s hell out there, Allah will never forgive them,” they said.

Still, we moved deeper inside and met a commander of Mukti Bahini, Major Khalid Musharaf. He had deserted the Pakistan Army and was now training Bengali civilians to fight back. Here we could see civil war in full action. Major Musharaf narrated recent events in this area in front of our camera:

“We were all in a joyful mood a few months back when election results were declared and the Awami League of Sheikh Mujib swept the polls. At least, we expected a democratic government as you have in India. But what did we get?  The brutal assault on our people and they ordered us to shoot our own people! It was most unbearable. I left the army and joined Mukti Bahini. Now at least, I can save my people and train them to fight back if attacked.”

As reported in newspapers, the rebels rising and training a guerrilla force were now estimated to be close to 100,000 men. Major Musharaf warned us not to go further. “We expect some attack,” he said.

We heeded his advice.

Right in Agartala, in our camp, we were informed on April 6, that 16 West Pakistani soldiers had surrendered to the Indian Border Security Force. We rushed to cover it and found three officers:  Lt. Col. Khizar Hayad Khan, Major Sadeq Nawaz, Lt. Amjad Sayeed and thirteen soldiers. In an interview, Lt. Col. Khan admitted to surrendering to the Indian Security Forces, for their own safety from Mukti Bahini freedom-fighters.

 

Also read: For Indian Diplomats in Pakistan, the Run up To the 1971 War Was a Very Tense Time

Now in some of the border villages and towns, we could see flags of Bangladesh fluttering over housetops and on government buildings. It was a sure indication of safety for our work and safe return.

On April 7, we made a second attempt to go to Comilla. By now, the migrating population was increasing and behind them, we could see Pakistan atrocities in the form of black smoke belching at a distance from burnt villages. By now, I had consumed all my film stock on ‘Bangladesh in Turmoil’.

We returned to Bombay on April 10, 1971.

§

On August 14, the Pakistani army raided an Indian border village under the Sidhai Police Station of Tripura and killed 11 people and injured several others.

For me, there was now a long gap of five months since I had last visited the country. At the end of August 1971, I was asked to go to eastern India to get ‘action coverage’ for a special newsreel in both 16 mm and 35 mm! This time, my companion was recordist, Ramakant Chendwankar. Upon reaching Calcutta, we coordinated our coverage with my colleague H.S. Advani, Calcutta based Newsreel Cameraman. He was very helpful.

We were to meet A. Latif, Public Relations Officer (PRO) inside Bangladesh for coverage on the activities of Mukti Bahini. We were warned, the help will be given at our own risk! Hereafter, we were operating on a razor’s edge.

On September 12, in Tripura state, while covering incoming refugees from East Pakistan, we pushed ourselves inside the border. We could go about as long as we could see flags of Bangladesh fluttering around. We encountered two Mukti Bahini freedom fighters who took us to Chandkala town. Here we were surrounded by volunteers of Mujib Battery. We were given full freedom to film all their activities. Camping in the jungle, camp cooking, guerrilla training with looted arms, etc. Some were constantly tuning their transistors to the BBC and All India Radio (AIR) and in turn, cconveying the latest news to their fellowmen.

Also read: With the Creation of Bangladesh, a Longstanding Dream of the RSS Was Achieved

We filmed the entire sequence and interviewed Capt. Pasha. The area we were filming, was under the control of Capt. Gaffar and Capt. Pasha. They took us to the Salda-Nadi sub-sector in Shyampur which was under the control of the Mukti Bahini. We had a night halt at their camp.

Early next morning, we got up under a faint, sweet and soothing Ravindra Sangeet song emanating some distance away from a transistor. Someone had probably tuned into AIR Calcutta station. Coming out of the camp for fresh air, we found Mukti Bahini fighters digging long trenches and singing Gurudev Tagore’s famous song ‘Ekla Chalo Re‘. Some were cleaning their weapons and some were on the move for their assigned task.

The above extract is from Prem Vaidya’s Memorable Assignments on Moving Images published by the National Film Archive of India. It has been lightly edited for style.

Prem Vaidya worked as a cameraman, director and producer at the Films Division of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, from 1954 to 1984. An award-winning documentary producer, Vaidya covered the events inside East Pakistan in 1971. His footage was shown in cinemas around the world and he made Birth of a Nation: Bangladesh.

The Pakistan Army’s Operations in East Pakistan Were Brutal and Ruthless

A reporter’s eyewitness account of what he saw in 1971 in and around Dhaka.

The year 1971 was marked with several ‘big victories’ – in politics, cricket and in war – all of which had long term implications for India. The national mood was buoyant, even if the country continued to struggle with endemic problems.

Fifty years later, we look back at those times and evoke some of that mood. In a series of articles, leading writers recall and analyse key events and processes that left their mark on a young, struggling but hopeful nation.

On March 24, 1971  negotiations on a new  constitution for Pakistan collapsed. The negotiators were the President, General Yahya Khan, trying to hold the two wings of Pakistan together, the leader of the eastern wing Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, demanding autonomy little short of independence, and the leader of the western wing, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, insisting vehemently on a  centrist constitution.  

Tajuddin Ahmed, the secretary of Mujib’s party, the Awami League, announced that his party had submitted its final proposals and had nothing to add or negotiate. Bhutto’s  advisers and aides started leaving Dhaka and the same evening Yahya Khan left secretly for Islamabad.

During the ten days Yahya Khan had been in Dhaka security in the city had deteriorated so far that the city was effectively in the hands of Mujib’s Awami League and the army was confined to the cantonment.  

The day after he left, Yahya broadcast to the nation. Ignoring the conciliatory speech which had been drafted for him by Major General Rao Farman Ali who was advisor to the Governor of East Pakistan, Yahya declared war on Mujib, claiming that he had committed treason by running  a parallel government, and promising he would not go unpunished.  By the time he broadcast the punishment had already started. 

Also read: 1971: The Year India Felt Good About Itself

Around midnight army units had moved out of the cantonment and in brutal assaults captured key points in  the city. Sheikh Mujib had been arrested. After the crack-down Bhutto was escorted to the airport where, before boarding the plane, in a typically bombastic statement that was to prove so wrong he said, “Thank God Pakistan has been saved.” 

At that time I was in London writing commentaries for  the Eastern Service of the BBC World Service. They were broadcast  in Hindu, Urdu,  Bengali, Tamil and English. 

Although the Bangladeshi media was blacked-out and foreign correspondents had been rounded up and flown out of Dhaka, we were kept informed by our two stringers, the Bengali freelance journalists Ataus Samad and Nizamuddin. But their movements were limited by curfews and they had to be circumspect. Sadly Nizamuddin was eventually killed by Razakars when they discovered he was providing information for the BBC. Razakars were pro-Pakistan volunteers, almost entirely non-Bengalis, raised by the army to augment their strength. 

It wasn’t until five days after the crack-down that we got a more detailed account of its severity from  a report in the London Daily Telegraph by its correspondent  Simon Dring. When foreign correspondents were rounded up, he had hidden in Dhaka’s Intercontinental Hotel with the help of its  Bengali staff. He later managed to get to  the University, the old city and the police barracks and document the massacres that had taken place there. He counted thirty bodies in the University.

Dring’s report was invaluable but we were still not able to give our listeners much information about what had happened and was happening in other cities and towns of Bangladesh, and in the countryside too.

Then a bombshell hit the Pakistan army’s public relations effort, a bombshell the army never recovered from. It was an extensive eyewitness expose of the brutality of the Pakistan army’s crackdown. The report was written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Karachi journalist. The Pakistan government had taken a party of West Pakistani journalists, including Mascarenhas, to the eastern wing. 

Also read: Modi in Bangladesh: PM Talks of Fight Against Terror, His Own Participation in Liberation Protests

Their reports were subject to strict censorship and so gave the impression that the brutality of the army crackdown had been grossly exaggerated and normalcy had been restored throughout the province. Mascarenhas was so shocked by what he saw and heard that he felt it was his duty to reveal the truth about the situation. He went to London to meet Harold Evans, the  renowned editor of the Sunday Times, who agreed to publish his report once he had managed to get his family out of Pakistan. This Mascarenhas did with some difficulty, his report appearing in the Sunday Times on June 13, 1971. 

The report described seeing the army ‘“hunting” for Hindus. In the night Mascarenhas had heard screaming coming from the Circuit House in Comilla where men were being bludgeoned to death. He found the riverside port of Chandpur almost totally deserted. In army messes, officers boasted to him of the number of Bengalis they had personally shot and the number of houses they had burnt. They spoke of “kill and burn missions” conducted under cover of darkness and of “the final solution” to the problem of Bengal. A Divisional Commander, Major General Shaukat Raza told Mascarenhas, ”We are going to complete the job. We are not going to hand it over half-finished to politicians so that they can mess it up again.”  

As well as reporting the brutality of the Pakistan army, Mascarenhas also reported the massacre of non-Bengalis by Bengali soldiers and policemen who had mutinied. He wrote of their “atrocious savagery”.

Mascarenhas’ revelations had a huge international impact. We earned the wrath of the government of Pakistan by broadcasting news of the report extensively, so we were surprised when we were invited to send a reporter to join a party of the first foreign journalists to be allowed to visit East Pakistan, travel freely in the Province, and report without any censorship. The BBC put my name forward.

Mark Tully in what was then East Pakistan. Photo: Author provided.

It’s fifty years now since I landed in Dhaka for my first visit to East Pakistan. I deeply regret that throughout my BBC career I didn’t keep a diary, nor did I keep my notes or copies of my despatches, so I have to depend on my memory, which is inevitably not entirely fresh, to recall that visit.   

I can’t remember the exact date of our visit but it was not long after the Pakistani army secured the last two towns, Cox’s Bazar on April 28 and Maulvi Hatia on May 11. We were allowed a limited time to be in the province, I think about two weeks. 

We worked individually but sometimes met in the evenings to share notes. Major General Rao Farman Ali, advisor to the formidable governor of East Pakistan Lt General Tikka Khan briefed us and answered our questions patiently and politely. After the departure of the scholarly Martial Law Administrator, Lt General Sahabzada Yakub Khan, Rao Farman Ali became the brains of the high command in Dhaka. He was called on to draw up the first  part of the plan for Operation Searchlight, the code name for the crackdown. 

During his briefings, Rao Farman Ali attempted to convince us that life was returning to normal in Pakistan and that miscreants trained in India were responsible for what trouble there was. He arranged for us to meet jawans and officers in the field. All of them were extremely hostile to India. One jawan actually said to me, “We will show them that one Muslim is equal to ten Hindus.”  

 The change in media policy which led to our visit was the brainchild of a remarkable Public Relations Officer Major Siddiq Salik. He was in the army’s  headquarters in Dhaka throughout 1971 and was taken prisoner of war after the army surrendered. In 1977  Salik published a book called Witness to Surrender, a highly critical account of the army’s role in the last days of East Pakistan.  Nevertheless he went on to be promoted and become General Ziaul Haq’s public relations officer when he seized power. Saliq died when a case of mangoes exploded in the aeroplane he and General Zia were travelling in. 

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with then President of Pakistan, General Zia-Ul-Haq on December 17, 1985. Photo: KKK/December, 1985, M32RG/A63(9)

Salik realised the importance of BBC broadcasts and although I was never officially followed while in Dhaka, he somehow managed to turn up almost everywhere I went. There developed between us one of those strange relationships which do sometimes develop between journalists and PR officials, a sort of love-hate relationship. Salik signed my copy of his book “To Mark, my dear!” signifying, I think, our peculiar relationship.   

One place in Dhaka, Salik didn’t show up at was the deserted Hindu area, Shakhara Bazaar. I was preoccupied, taking photos of burnt or boarded up shops when my arm was grabbed by a six-foot plus burly Punjabi policeman, one of the 5,000 West Pakistani policemen sent to the eastern wing because the Bengali force was no longer trustworthy. The Punjabi marched me to a police station and, speaking in Hindustani, ordered the  SHO to arrest me. When the SHO realised I was a journalist with official permission to do my job, he rounded on the Punjabi saying, “You people come here. You don’t even know our language, and you start giving us orders. Get out.”

Over the inevitable cup of tea that followed the Punjabi officer’s departure, I asked the SHO  about the crackdown. He replied, “You can see with your eyes what has happened.” 

I did see evidence of the random firing that had taken place in the old city, I saw the burnt out dormitories of Rajabargh Police Lines, and the damage caused by mortars fired at Iqbal and Jaganath Halls in the University. All the Hindu areas I visited were  deserted and there was evidence of random firing. 

I contacted our two stringers on the phone but we didn’t meet because that would have endangered them. They informed me that the army was creating terror searching for rebels or insurgents as they called the Mukti Bahini. Young men were being taken off the streets to be interrogated in  what was being called “the torture chamber” situated in  the Second Capital. Many middle class citizens had left to stay with upcountry relatives or crossed the border into India. The Punjabi policemen on the streets were a constant reminder that Dhaka was an occupied city. 

Also read: For Indian Diplomats in Pakistan, the Run up To the 1971 War Was a Very Tense Time

It was arranged for me to meet the sector commander of the Mukti Bahini, Nasiruddin Yusuf Bachchi. He claimed that his “boys” were even active in the capital and told me that they had recently blown up an electricity transformer and a bridge. I remember being able to confirm the damage of the bridge and reporting it. Not surprisingly, the sector commander denied getting any help from India. 

I also met leaders of the Bihari community, non-Bengalis who had come to East Pakistan from Bihar and other parts of India at partition. Because of the atrocities inflicted on their community by Bengalis they welcomed the army presence and were hostile to me because they regarded BBC as anti-Pakistani. 

When I travelled outside Dhaka I got an impression of the extent of the army’s crackdown. For mile after mile, I passed deserted villages with huts burnt to cinders. Small towns were  deserted too. On the ferry crossing the mighty Padma river, I heard two army officers making disparaging remarks in Urdu about the manifest poverty of many of the passengers. On the other side of the river there was no sign of life. The army hadn’t even bothered to establish check posts, presumably because there was virtually no traffic to check. I wasn’t able to drive as far as I planned because the condition of the road was deplorable – evidence of the government’s neglect of the eastern wing of the country.  

Also read: Revisiting the Battle of Garibpur, a Precursor to the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War

In his book, Siddiq Salik described witnessing one of the “clearing missions” which wrought the devastation I saw outside Dhaka.   Searching for Mukti Bahini, the column he travelled with was even accompanied by field artillery which fired at suitable intervals in what Salik called “the general direction of the move”. The infantry travelled in trucks with machine guns mounted on them and “opened up on the slightest pretext or suspicion. A stir in a branch of trees or a little rustle…was enough to evoke a burst of automatic fire or at least a rifle shot.”  

Salik saw the soldiers setting thatched huts on fire. In the deserted small town of Karatea they burnt down the bazar and some kerosene drums.  

In  one  village an argument broke out between soldiers and an old Bengali, so poor he was only clad in a dirty loincloth. Salik found him sitting under a banana tree and asked him what had happened. He replied, “I am a poor fellow. I don’t know what to do. A little earlier they (the Mukti Bahini) were here. They threatened to put me to death if I told anyone about them. Now you confront me with an equally dreadful end if I don’t tell you about them.”

For Salik, “That summed up the dilemma of the common Bengali.” For me, Salik’s summary is  an admission by a Pakistani officer that the army declared war on the civilian population. That was the impression I left East Pakistan with. 

I spent the rest of that year back in London writing commentaries for the BBC Eastern Service on all the developments in East Pakistan. I returned after the war between Pakistan and India, to be among the first foreign journalists to interview Sheikh Mujib after he came back from imprisonment in Pakistan.  

A Sataygrah and Asatyagraha: Narendra Modi and the Liberation of Bangladesh

The August 1971 protest launched by the Jan Sangh in Delhi, when Modi courted arrest, was to protest the India-USSR Treaty of Friendship – a treaty which gave India the diplomatic cover needed to wage war against Pakistan later that year.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a statement on March 26 – at the 50th National Day Celebration of Bangladesh, where he was an invited guest – asserting that he had been jailed in 1971 for his participation in a ‘satyagraha’ with friends in support of the independence of Bangladesh.

While this assertion was greeted with both derision as well as admiration, depending on how one retrospectively views the political capacities of the 21-year-old Narendra Modi, it may be worthwhile to look at the events of 1971 more closely, to scrutinise Modi’s attempts to insert himself into the history of struggle for Bangladesh.

The ‘Independence of Bangladesh’ had been announced on ‘Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra / Radio Centre’ from Kalurghat Radio Station in Chittagong by then Major Zia ur Rahman on March 27, 1971.

This followed the declaration of martial law in East Pakistan in the wake of widespread disaffection arising from the annulment of the results of Pakistan’s 1970 general election, which saw the mainly East Pakistan-based Awami League win a majority.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had already been arrested in Dhaka on the midnight between March 24 and March 25, 1971 and flown to prison in Rawalpindi, West Pakistan on April .

Operation Searchlight, the Pakistan Army’s mass killings to ‘clean up’ East Pakistan of opposition began on March 25.

The Pakistan army’s premeditated attack on unarmed civilians in Dhaka on March 25 spared no one. Photo: Daily Star

The killings on that day included the massacre of a very large number of East Bengali intellectuals and academics, including those of Dhaka University.

Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister at the time, moved a resolution in parliament drafted by her principal secretary, P.N. Haksar. The resolution said that the Indian parliament expressed ‘whole hearted sympathy and support for the people of East Bengal’. Sensitive to the flux of international realpolitik, the resolution stopped short of endorsing the ‘declaration of independence of Bangladesh’ that had been made in the radio announcement by Zia Ur Rahman just four days before.

Mrs. Gandhi had already had a meeting with the principal opposition leaders on March 26, 1971 where she had discussed the limited options available to the Indian government. She told the opposition leaders that whatever steps may be contemplated by the Indian government in response to the escalating situation in East Pakistan should not be a matter of public debate – as that would ‘defeat the purpose of giving such comfort as we can to democratic forces in Pakistan as a whole’. She pointed out that Pakistan was a sovereign member of the United Nations, and that the taking of immediate and precipitate steps by India would be unlikely to find favour, or support, internationally.

The Indian government’s authorised ‘Official History of the 1971 War’ has many details of the turbulence in the Indian political and government scene with regard to the question of conferring immediate recognition to the ‘independence of Bangladesh’.

Events moved quickly after the last week of March, 1971.

Tajuddin Ahmed, the senior East Bengali opposition leader who would go on to be the acting head of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on April 3, 1971. He was promised all help. The ground work for this meeting had been done by among others, Ashok Mitra, (then economic adviser to the Prime Minister, later CPI(M) minister in West Bengal), Amartya Sen (then Professor at Delhi School of Economics), P.N.  Haksar (principal secretary to the prime minister) and two East Bengali economists, Anisur Rehman and Rahman Sobhan, both personally knowns to Mitra and Sen, who had somehow managed to escape to Delhi from Dhaka.

Indira Gandhi and P.N. Haksar. Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Library

Indira Gandhi and P.N. Haksar. Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Library

Also, in April 1971, General, later Field Marshall ‘Sam’ Maneckshaw, then Indian Army chief, bluntly told Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that the Indian army was not prepared to enter a war immediately and that he needed a few months’ time. Mrs. Gandhi, who was of a similar view herself, took his advice and played for time.

Meanwhile, the ‘Provisional Government of Bangladesh’ was declared in the town of Baidynathtola (renamed Mujibnagar) in East Pakistan on April 10, 1971.

The names of the members of the ‘cabinet’ of this provisional government were declared on April 17. They relocated shortly after to Calcutta, in India, where they operated from a building on 8, Theatre Road (now Shakespeare Sarani).

The Indian Government delayed conferring ‘formal recognition’ to the Provisional Government of Bangladesh as that would be considered an ‘act of war’ by Pakistan. At that time, in the event of war being declared, Pakistan had the promise of support of the United States and China.

To sum up, the Government of India did not confer formal recognition to the Provisional Government of Bangladesh, because it wanted to (a) buy time to make proper war plans, (as suggested by Maneckshaw) and b) insulate Mujibur Rahman, then imprisoned in West Pakistan, from treason charges and the execution of a death sentence, which would immediately follow such charges. Nevertheless, it allowed the Provisional Government of Bangladesh  to operate under its protection from Calcutta. It also hosted the roughly six million East Bengali refugees, including Mukti Bahini fighters, who fled into West Bengal in India after Operation Searchlight began.

However, Indian Intelligence agencies, paramilitary forces and finally the Indian Army began aiding and supplying East Bengali Mukti Bahini fighters, first informally (mainly Border Security Force) from March 1971, and then with some formality, with the Eastern Command of the Indian Army operationalising Operation Jackpot, from May 1971 onwards, thereby laying the ground for joint operations between Indian army soldiers acting without uniforms and Mukti Bahini irregulars.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gandhi traveled the world to try and build up the case for Bangladesh, in support of Indian intervention, and against Pakistan.

The first significant diplomatic dividend of this effort was the securing of the India-USSR treaty of Friendship, which committed the USSR to supporting India in the event of India being dragged into war. This was a major guarantee for the success of the build-up of the Indian war effort.

File photo of Indira Gandhi and Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the USSR.

The US was determined to push the region into war early, as that would have been to its strategic ally Pakistan’s advantage. The CIA used its clients in India (which included a mole inside Mrs. Gandhi’s cabinet) to try and muster a consensus around the position that the India-USSR treaty was a betrayal of Bangladesh as the USSR would not allow India to ‘recognise’ Bangladesh. This was faithfully reported in cables from the CIA station in Delhi to superiors in Washington and Langley. In all probability the CIA station was telling the mole what to say, and then reporting what the mole said, as an index of its penetration into the uppermost echelon of power in India at the time.

Curiously, this position – that the India-USSR Treaty was a ‘betrayal’ of the ‘Bangladesh Cause’ – was also the line taken by the Right Wing opposition party, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, parent of today’s Bharatiya Janata Party. This may be readily gleaned from two Jana Sangh documents, ‘Recognise Swadhin Bangladesh’ (July 2, 1971) and ‘Indo-Soviet Treaty, August 13, 1971, Delhi, Central Working Committee,’ both, cited by Rahul Sagar in his 2019 essay, ‘Hindu Nationalism and the Cold War’.

The Jan Sangh, the RSS, and its leaders, particularly Atal Bihari Vajpayee, were pushing publicly, and in parliament, for an early commencement of hostilities. They either did not know, or pretended not to know that this would do immense harm to the armed struggle being waged within East Pakistan, with covert Indian military support, by the Mukti Bahini, as it would immediately draw the US and China into direct support for Pakistan.

Pakistan signing the instrument of surrender in December 1971.

The notion that the Jan Sangh and Vajpayee, were naive and did not understand the implications of what they were doing is the generous explanation. Less charitable explanations could also be offered.

And so, a ‘Recognise Bangladesh Satyagraha’ of August 1 – 11th, 1971 undertaken by the Jan Sangh in Delhi, which culminated in a rally to protest against the India-USSR Treaty of Friendship which had been signed three days earlier, on August 9, 1971 was a set of moves that sought to jump the gun on Bangladesh. It’s primary objective was to agitate for war, despite the lack of preparation, and also to steer public opinion against the Indo- Soviet Treaty – which the Jan Sangh wanted to prove was a ‘betrayal of Bangladesh’. The Times of India reported at the time that Vajpayee spoke at a massive rally in Delhi on August 12, 1971 and said that the Indo-Soviet treaty implied ‘a conspiracy between Delhi and Moscow to deny recognition to Bangladesh’.

This is the ‘Satyagraha’ which Narendra Modi is claiming to have participated in. He has spoken about this in an earlier trip to Bangladesh as well – when he went to receive Bangladesh’s highest civilian award on behalf of the ailing Atal Behari Vaipayee (the citation of this award also refers to the Jan Sangh Satyagraha of August 1971.

It is also being being claimed that Modi actually wrote this in Sangharsh Maa Gujarat, a book published in 1978. However, native Gujarati speakers who have read the 2000 edition of the book (available as a PDF on Modi’s web page report that the book makes no mention of this, even though ‘imprisonment in Tihar Jail due to participation in Bangladesh Satyagraha’ is mentioned, in passing, as part of the then young author’s ‘achievements’ in the short author’s bio note printed on the back cover.

What is curious is the coincidence of the Jan Sangh’s position with that of the ‘mole’ in Mrs. Gandhi’s cabinet in 1971 – the bogus suggestion that the Indo-Soviet treaty would make it harder for India to recognise Bangladesh.

Modi, a young man of 21 in 1971, may or may not have then had the delusions of grandeur that he certainly has now. It is hard to say whether or not his possible involvement in this ‘Satyagraha’ of August 1971 and the undertaking of the hallowed Indian ritual of ‘courting arrest’ was impelled by an overflowing of emotions in favour of the emancipation of East Bengal. What is certain is that the protest he was part of was furthering a demand that would have weakened India’s ability to wage war later that year for the liberation of Bangladesh.

Had India entered the war with a US-and-China-backed-Pakistan prematurely, even as late as August 1971, instead of in December 1971, as the Jan Sangh wanted it to, it is quite possible that Pakistan would have prevailed and that Bangladesh would not have attained actual independence in December. So when Modi says that he acted to support Bangladesh’s independence when he was 21 years old, perhaps he is letting his imagination get the better of reality. But we have come to expect that of him, anyways, by now.

Note: This article has been edited to correct the number of East Pakistan economists who had taken refuge in Delhi in 1971 from three to two. The reference to Modi’s Gujarati book has also been corrected to note his claim of taking part in a satyagraha for Bangladesh is mentioned only in his author biographical note on the back cover rather than in the book’s text.

With the Creation of Bangladesh, a Longstanding Dream of the RSS Was Achieved

Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the RSS supported Indira Gandhi and Golwalker ‘Guruji’ also wrote her a warm letter hailing her.

The year 1971 was marked with several ‘big victories’ – in politics, cricket and in war – all of which had long term implications for India. The national mood was buoyant, even if the country continued to struggle with endemic problems.

Fifty years later, we look back at those times and evoke some of that mood. In a series of articles, leading writers recall and analyse key events and processes that left their mark on a young, struggling but hopeful nation.

In June 2015, Bangladesh conferred the prestigious ‘Liberation War Honour’ on Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As the Bharatiya Janata Party veteran, then 90 years old, could not attend the event, the award was received on his behalf by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The citation hailed Vajpayee as a “highly respected political leader” and acknowledged his “active role” in support of the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971.

Vajpayee was the president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) at that time, and the citation mentioned that as president of BJS and a member of the Lok Sabha, Vajpayee took various steps towards the freedom of Bangladesh. According to the Organiser, “Vajpayee had welcomed Bangabandu Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s historic declaration of independence and called upon the government of India to recognise the government of Bangladesh and provide necessary assistance to the freedom fighters.”

Also read: Bangladesh at 50: Created in Violence and Still Bearing Scars of a Troubled Birth

Interestingly, the president of Bangladesh Abdul Hamid in 2015 spoke about how despite being in the opposition, Vajpayee had the political pragmatism to lend his strong support to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for the cause of Bangladesh.

It is no secret that BJS, founded on October 21, 1951, was one of the strongest votaries of the liberation of what was then East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. The BJS had a compelling reason to support the creation of Bangladesh.

An altered political landscape

The split in the Congress in 1969 had posed a serious leadership challenge to Indira Gandhi. The BJS was poised to occupy the space vacated by the right of centre parties like the Swatantra Party and the local leadership of individuals under the ‘Syndicate Congress’ umbrella. The BJS emerged as a worthy challenger to Indira Gandhi’s leadership, (even after the failed attempt by the Jan Sangh to smear her victory through the ‘invisible ink’ allegation).

Vajpayee had by then emerged as the undisputed leader of the BJS and even of the combined opposition to some extent. The RSS resolution, and the direction that it provided through the mobilisation of public opinion on the atrocities by the Pakistan army, gave the much-needed platform for the Jana Sangh to spread its wings.

The massive ‘Recognise Bangladesh’ marches and allied activities supporting the government in handling the situation arising out of refugees pouring into border states actually provided support to Indira Gandhi who was probably determined to do what was part of the RSS agenda to break the back of Pakistan.

Meanwhile, as the Indian political landscape was changing, the RSS too had to traverse a chequered path. In 1947, Partition had imposed a heavy work burden on its cadre, especially in the north, where the RSS was organisationally strong and wielded enormous influence in undivided Punjab and Sindh. Even as its acceptance and popularity grew phenomenally, the developments after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination when the RSS was banned for being guilty, came as a huge setback to the RSS cadre and its immediate activities.

Under the able and strategic leadership of the then Sarsanghachalak Golwalkar ‘Guruji’, the RSS gradually regained lost ground through increased activities and support to the government in the 1962 Chinese aggression, the 1965 misadventure by Pakistan and then the 1971 Bangladesh liberation movement.

The RSS resolution of July 1971 called upon the government to assure the safety and security of the Hindus of (East) Pakistan. Soon it was evident that the target of the Pakistan army was not just Hindus but rather the Bengali intelligentsia that formed the backbone of the resistance and liberation movement.

Also read: 1971: The Year India Felt Good About Itself

When Pakistan mounted an attack on India on December 3, 1971, RSS declared, “Our government and the army is capable of meeting the challenge.”

The extent of the ‘close’ relationship between the once-shunned RSS and Jana Sangh’s bête noir Indira Gandhi, especially on the issue of annulling Partition, albeit partially, could be gauged from the letter that the then Sarsanghachalak ‘Guruji’ Golwalkar wrote to Indira Gandhi after the 1971 victory.

Lieutenant Gen Niazi signing the Instrument of surrender under the gaze of Lieutenant General Aurora. Photo: Indian Navy website/GODL-India/Wikimedia Commons.

The letter reads, “In the creation of the strength of national unity infused with national pride, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is and will always be with you. I have confidence that as the representative of the country you will take all these factors into consideration while determining our domestic and foreign policies. May the prestige of Bharat grow like this under your leadership.”

1971 war and the RSS

The British plan to create a large geography in the eastern part of India consisting of Assam and Bengal as an ‘independent country’, not joining either the Dominion of India or Dominion of Pakistan was mooted by Lord Mountbatten on April 26, 1947, during his discussions with Suhrawardy and later with Jinnah.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah reportedly told Mountbatten, “…what is the use of (divided) Bengal (as East Pakistan) without Calcutta? They had much better remain united and independent; I am sure they would be on friendly terms with us.”

But Hindu leaders including Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, K.C. Neogy and Binoy Kumar Roy strongly opposed the idea of an “independent country of Bengal”. “Hindus will not be safe in a ‘united but independent Bengal’” appeared to be the general consensus, as riots broke out and the communal situation turned volatile. Both Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru assured these leaders that they were both against “a sovereign Bengal unconnected with the Union”.

Amidst the post-Partition riots and growing anti-Partition sentiments, Nehru visited Kolkata, then Calcutta, to assuage frayed tempers. Hindu Mahasabha leader Ashutosh Lahiri met him along with a team of leading citizens to impress upon him to ‘wage a war’ on East Pakistan to protect the Hindus. Nehru rejected the suggestion, and for dismissing the idea of a war to protect the Hindus, he was ridiculed for his ‘misconceived Gandhian pacifism and perverted democratic secularism’.

Also read: The True Story of India’s Decision to Release 93,000 Pakistani POWs After 1971 War

A Gallup Poll was held in Calcutta in March 1950 showing that 87% of the respondents favoured military action on East Pakistan. Nehru was heartbroken and returned to Delhi and offered to resign. But, in the meanwhile, Liaquat Ali Khan agreed to come to Delhi and ‘do something about the protection of minorities’ on both sides of the divide (see The Partition in Retrospect by Amrik Singh).

The Nehru-Liaquat pact was strongly opposed in Calcutta as it was seen as an instrument to encourage migration of Hindus from the then East Bengal. No one believed that Hindus would be able to go back to their original homes in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

In such a tumultuous political atmosphere, return to normalcy and protecting the interests of Bengal were top priorities for Mukherjee. He was already elected to the Constituent Assembly by the West Bengal Legislature and was the industries minister in Nehru’s Cabinet but resigned on April 15, 1950 in protest against the terms of agreement with Pakistan, popularly known as the Nehru-Liaquat Pact.

M.S.Golwakar (L) and Syama Prasad Mukherjee (R). Photo: Facebook/RSS Page.

Though Mukherjee was the president of the Hindu Mahasabha (1943-1946) and the Mahabodhi Society at the same time, he was determined to keep religion out of politics but give priority to Hindus and Buddhists, especially those who were victims of Partition.

At one stage he even discussed the idea of converting the Hindu Mahasabha into a political party and also open its door to non-Hindus as well. Those from the Savarkar school of thought were not very favourable to this idea. In fact, Savarkar was strongly of the view that Hindu Mahasabha with non-Hindu members (meaning Muslims) would be akin to being the B-team of the Congress.

In fact, Mukherjee’s political thinking was independent of the thought process of the Hindu Mahasabha, of which he was the president, or that of the Congress, of which he was a member. He was unhappy over Nehru’s handling of the Pakistan issue and what he felt was the first cabinet’s callous attitude towards the Hindu minority in Pakistan, especially in the then East Pakistan.

He discussed the idea of floating a political party with some of his colleagues in Hindu Mahasabha, but was firm on his views of a “non-Hindu” party, very much as a parallel to the Congress and not a political party “exclusively for Hindus”.

His original idea was to convert Hindu Mahasabha into a broad-based political party that would include non-Hindus as well, as members and desist from appeasement of Muslims under the garb of protecting the religious minorities. An independent India with a democratic constitution that adopted adult franchise and rejected the idea of a separate electorate has no place for a Hindu party or Minority Commission, he felt. But his own organisation rejected his appeals and as a result, he quit Hindu Mahasabha in 1948.

While Mukherjee could not agree with the Hindu Mahasabha on some issues, B.R. Ambedkar and even the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had serious differences of opinion on some of Savarkar’s ideas.

Meanwhile, post-Mahatma Gandhi assassination, the need for a political platform was hotly debated within the RSS. Finally, after the death of Sardar Patel in 1950 and the perception that Congress may not any more enjoy the confidence of Hindus post-Partition, West Bengal became the epicentre of a new political party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The Partition of Bengal was still a live issue and the Jana Sangh was avowedly committed to the annulment of the tragic Partition, at least in the eastern part of India.

The 1971 war and the announcement of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, therefore, came as a god-sent opportunity for the Jana Sangh to inch towards its objectives of Akhand Bharat, as Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya had envisaged in his booklet Akhand Bharat Kyon where he wrote “undivided India is not just a political slogan, it is the fundamental ethos of our life”.

The dream that the founders of Jana Sangh and the RSS saw in 1951 was realised 20 years later in 1971. Ironically, in the same year, in the thick of the conflict, the US had threatened to move its Seventh Fleet closer to theatre of war and block the Indian Navy from assisting the ground forces and Mukti Bahini in East Pakistan.

The US even tried to rope in China to open a third front against New Delhi. China strategically refused fearing the entry of the Soviet Union. But, as history is witness, 20 years later in 1991, there was no Soviet Union, and China had all of Bangladesh and Pakistan to itself, enjoying a free entry to the Indian Ocean.

Fifty years after 1971, the eastern front is quiet, the Jana Sangh is no longer in existence, the architect of the ‘Liberation war’ Indira Gandhi had passed away, the Soviet Union is gone, China’s ‘not-so-peaceful’ rise is challenging the supremacy of the US and the dynamics of geopolitics call for a newer and bolder strategy.

Narendra Modi’s foreign policy, akin to that of Indira Gandhi’s, seems to be an ideal mix of soft and hard power diplomacy, strategic outreach, not negotiating out of fear but not afraid to negotiate, making optimum use of the changing dynamics of geopolitics and above all a forceful show of political will power. The RSS would be more than willing to play its part. If 1971 repeats in 2021, well, it may not be ‘all quiet on the Western front’ for long.

Seshadri Chari, a former editor of Organiser, is a political commentator and strategic analyst. He is the Chairman, China Study Centre, MAHE, Manipal. 

Bangladesh at 50: Created in Violence and Still Bearing Scars of a Troubled Birth

The differences in language and political and economic inequities – laid the groundwork for Bangladesh’s independence struggle. This history continues to have an impact today.

March 26 marks 50 years since the start of Bangladesh’s liberation war, a bloody nine-month campaign that culminated in the nation’s independence on December 16, 1971.

It was a violent birth, with some of its roots in the 1947 partition of India – when Pakistan was created as a separate nation.

As the British Empire left the subcontinent, an estimated 200,000 to 1.5 million people were killed in sectarian violence associated with the partition and 10 million to 15 million were forcibly displaced.

Newly independent Pakistan comprised two separate geographical areas separated by over a thousand miles of Indian terrain. While both regions included significant Muslim populations, West Pakistan was made up largely of Punjabi, Pashtuns, Sindhis, Baloch and other smaller ethnic groups. In contrast, the population of East Pakistan, which became modern-day Bangladesh, was predominantly ethnically Bengali, as the territory was formerly part of the Indian region of Bengal.

As a scholar of conflict, I argue that each of these factors – particularly the differences in language and political and economic inequities – laid the groundwork for Bangladesh’s independence struggle. This history continues to have an impact today.

Deepening fault lines

From early on, the issue of language was a difficult one. In 1948, the founding leader of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, emphasised that only Urdu, spoken by Muslims in the north and northwest in British India, should be the state language of the country. Bangla, spoken overwhelmingly by East Pakistanis, was considered by West Pakistani leadership as a “non-Muslim” language.

The Urdu-only policy aimed to create a single identity out of two culturally distinct regions united by a common religion – Islam. More broadly, it aimed to consolidate the national identity of the recently independent Pakistan.

In East Pakistan, the declaration was followed by the banning of Bengali books, songs and poetry by Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Bangla language as the medium of education and primary mode of instruction was also banned.

All currency and official documents, including postal stamps and railway tickets, were printed in Urdu.

The language ban deepened tensions that had already emerged between West and East Pakistan. A major reason for this was significant economic disparities between the two regions. West Pakistan controlled the country’s industry and commerce while East Pakistan was predominantly the supplier for raw materials, setting up a situation of unequal exchange.

In 1959-60 the per capita income in West Pakistan was 32% higher than in East Pakistan. By 1969-70, it was 81% higher in West Pakistan. Investment policies including in educational infrastructure consistently favoured West Pakistan.

East Pakistanis had little access to the Central government, which was located in the West Pakistani city of Islamabad. They were severely underrepresented in politics. West Pakistani political leadership did not see Bengalis as “real” Muslims. Both in political circles and socially, Bengali cultural practices were considered of a lower social status.

Mass uprising

The efforts to “Islamise” East Pakistanis through Urdu and “purify” Bengali culture from “Hindu influences” resulted in massive nonviolent demonstrations and strikes.

On February 21, 1952, students and other activists launched a language movement called the “Bhasha Andolon,” which demanded Bangla be recognized as the state language for East Pakistan. Thousands of school and college students protested, defying Section 144 of the Criminal Procedural Code, which prohibited assembly of five or more people and holding of public meetings.

The crackdown that followed claimed several lives. From 1950 to 1969 it also galvanised a growing movement for autonomy across East Pakistan.

A mass uprising in 1969 was brutally put down by police and led to the imposition of martial law.

In 1970, a devastating cyclone called “Bhola” in East Pakistan claimed 300,000 to 500,000 lives. The indifferent response of the West Pakistan government further inflamed tensions.

A big turning point came the same year when the sole majority political party in East Pakistan, led by Bengali politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory in national elections. The Pakistani leadership was reluctant to accept the results because it did not want an East Pakistani political party heading the federal government.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Photo: Flickr/Adam Jones CC BY-SA 2.0

This resulted in the start of a civil disobedience movement in East Pakistan.

As the demand for Bengali autonomy grew, the Pakistani government launched Operation Searchlight, a military operation to crush the emerging movement. According to journalist Robert Payne, it killed at least 7,000 Bengali civilians – both Hindus and Muslims – in a single night.

On March 26, Bangladesh was declared independent and the liberation war began.

The violent birth of Bangladesh

The liberation war was fought mostly by civilians – men and women, Muslims, Hindus and non-Bengali Indigenous people.

Bangladesh’s independence struggle took place in the broader context of the Cold War, which meant external actors were involved in the conflict. During the Cold War, India allied with the Soviet Union, while the US allied with Pakistan to counter Soviet influence in South Asia and to protect its geostrategic interests vis-a-vis Afghanistan and China.

When the Pakistani military intensified its campaign to quell the independence movement, it did so with the knowledge and support of the Nixon administration.

The Pakistani military and its local collaborators specifically targeted Hindus, who in the 1961 census represented 18% of East Pakistan’s population of 50 million.

An estimated 10 million Bengalis became refugees in India. A further 20 million were internally displaced. An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Bengali women were systematically raped.

Independent research estimates 500,000 to 1 million people were killed in the genocidal campaign. The Bangladesh government maintains that 3 million Bengalis were killed in the war.

On December 3, India officially entered the war on the side of Bangladesh.

Ten days later, in one of the last military operations, over 300 Bengali academics, doctors, engineers, journalists, artists and teachers – Hindus and Muslims alike – were massacred by Pakistani soldiers and their local collaborators.

On December 16, 1971, the Pakistani military surrendered to the Indian Army, marking it as Bangladesh’s Victory Day.

Lieutenant Gen Niazi signing the Instrument of Surrender under the gaze of Lieutenant General Aurora. Photo: Indian Navy website/GODL-India/Wikimedia Commons

Challenges today

Soon after its independence, in a meeting between officials of the United States Agency for International Development and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Bangladesh was labelled a “basket case.” Years of economic inequities, the 1970 cyclone and the war had left over 70% of its population living below the poverty line.

However, in the 50 years since its independence, Bangladesh has made some significant strides. It has aggressively tackled infant mortality, gender inequity and economic development. Today, with a booming economy, it is on track to graduate from the United Nation’s least developed country category.

Nevertheless, Bangladesh still faces enormous challenges. Violence against women and girls, corruption and lack of press freedoms remain serious concerns.

Founded on the principles of secularism, the country today faces a rise of Islamists.

The divide between those who participated in the independence struggle and those who collaborated with the Pakistani military continues to shape Bangladesh’s political landscape today.The Conversation

Tazreena Sajjad, senior professorial lecturer, American University School of International Service.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.