The Duel (14 page)

In Dhaka, Mujibur Rahman waited at home to be arrested. Many of his colleagues went underground. The military shelled Dhaka University. Artillery units flattened working-class districts; trade-union and newspaper offices were burned to the ground. Soldiers invaded the women’s hostel on the university campus, raping and killing many residents.
With the help of the intelligence agencies and local collaborators, mainly Islamist activists, lists of nationalist and Communist intellectuals had been prepared (as in Indonesia in 1965), and they were now picked up and killed. Some had been close friends of mine. I was both sad and angry. I had predicted this tragedy, while hoping it might be avoided. Immediately after the December 1970 general election I wrote, “Will the Pakistan Army and the capitalist barons of West Pakistan allow these demands to go through? The answer is quite clearly no. What will probably happen is that in the short-term Mujibur Rehman will be allowed to increase East Pakistan’s percentage of import and export licenses and will be allocated a larger share of foreign capital investment. These are the ‘concessions’ which the Army will be prepared to make in the coming few months. If Rehman accepts them, he will be allowed to stay in power. If not, it will be back to business as usual in the shape of the Army. Of course there is no doubt that in the event of another military coup there will be no holding back the immense grievances of Bengal and the desire for an independent Bengal will increase a hundredfold.”
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The Bengali political leaders had not prepared the people for this onslaught. Had they done so, many lives might have been saved. Bengali policemen and soldiers had been waiting for the word from above to desert with their weapons and defend their people. It was the death knell of Jinnah’s Pakistan. Bangladesh (Bengali nation) was about to be born. The struggle that now erupted between the Bengali liberation forces and the armed might of West Pakistani capital represented both a continuation of the mass movement that erupted in 1968–69 and a qualitative break.

There were two distinguishing features of politics in East Bengal from the beginning of 1971: on the one hand, the enthusiastic participation of the people in every level of an escalating social and national struggle; and on the other, the political deficiencies of the petit bourgeois notabilities of the Awami League, whose whole tradition of compromise and maneuver rendered them incapable of providing leadership
in a real independence movement. Mujib had addressed a mass meeting of nearly a million people on March 7, 1971, where he had fulminated against the delays and intrigues but refused to declare independence. Ordinary Bengalis paid the price for his prevarications.

Operation Searchlight was brutal, but ineffective. Killing students and intellectuals did not lead to the quick and clear victory sought by the Pakistani generals. Once the initial attack had failed, the military with the help of local Islamist volunteers (members of the Jamaat-e-Islami) began to kill Hindus—there were 10 million of them in East Pakistan— and burn their homes. Tens of thousands were exterminated. These were war crimes according to any international law.
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All this was taking place while most pro-Yahya Western governments averted their eyes and hoped for the best. As news of the offensive spread, the predominantly Bengali East Pakistan Rifles mutinied. Much was made in later propaganda by Islamabad about how the West Pakistan commander Colonel Janjua was woken up by a Bengali subordinate, taken to his office in his pajamas, sat down in the commanding officer’s chair, and executed by his batman. It was ugly, but what civil war is not? Few asked how had it come about that the only Bengali company in the country had a non-Bengali commander? It was part of the problem.

Guerrilla units emerged in different parts of the province, representing different political factions but united in the struggle for independence. The strongest of these was the Mukti Bahini (Liberation
Army), led largely by Awami League nationalists, but others operated locally, including groups inspired by Che Guevara and led by Tipu Biswas and Abdul Matin. These militants had been left with no other choice. The ruling elites in both India and Pakistan wanted a rapid conclusion to the struggle. This did not happen. Supreme power in Islamabad at this stage was exercised by a small circle of military officers, flanked by a few civilian advisers and accomplices. Yahya Khan himself had become a dim and slothful figurehead. Reports would later emerge of how late one night while intoxicated, he had rushed out stark naked onto the streets of Peshawar roaring with laughter, chased by his favorite mistress (widely known as “General” Rani), and had to be escorted back indoors by his unsurprised guards. This was at the height of the war. None of this would have mattered if he had been successful, but failure stared the army in the face.

The clique that ruled behind him and was conducting the war included five senior generals and a few civil servants, none of whom were distinguished for their competence. In his memoirs, General Gul Hassan, a senior officer at the time, recounts the chaos in GHQ during the war: dispatches full of lies, cover-ups designed to conceal military failures, the overextension of military units that left Dhaka vulnerable, and so on. Viewed coldly as a military operation, it was a disaster. General “Tiger” Niazi, commandant of East Pakistan, had boasted that he would crush the rebellion within weeks, but this braggadocio was to no avail. Gul Hassan could barely conceal his contempt for Niazi, who he felt was no more than “company commander material.” Hassan himself was not a great strategic thinker and came up with a madcap scheme to open a second front. This entailed a strategic thrust against India on its western frontiers. He argued that the best way to save East Pakistan now was via a full-scale war that would lead to a UN/U.S./China intervention to impose a global cease-fire. The risk here was that if, as was likely, this did not happen, then West Pakistan too might go up in smoke. His more friendly superiors patted him on the back for clever thinking but rejected the idea.
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They were not totally stupid. The complete
control of the state by the army now raised more fundamental questions.

The Pakistan army and civil bureaucracy have always enjoyed a relative autonomy from the landlords and businessmen of West Pakistan. But the converse does not hold. The latter were heavily dependent on the military-bureaucratic complex that dominated the state. This process had been accelerated by the mass upsurge of 1968–69. The oligarchy in the West became more and more acutely aware of its dependence on the continued strength of the military and civilian state machine. The army and its cohesion was thus needed as a political rallying point over and above its purely repressive functions. The Six Points of March 1971 had struck at the heart of oligarchic rule in the West. This explains the frenzied refusal to compromise with the Awami League, the ferocity of the action against the East, and the remarkable degree of unanimity in West Pakistani ruling circles in immediately supporting the coup of March 25. It also explains the fidelity of the United States and its British adjutants to the military regime, despite the fact that it had jeopardized “stability” in Bengal.

The United States did try to inflect the Pakistani dictatorship toward “moderation,” while shoring it up otherwise. Critical voices in Washington were annoyed by the threat posed to their global interests by the narrow national egoism of the Pakistan army. They were also nervous that the debacle in the East might destabilize the hitherto solid command structure of the Pakistani military.

Steeped in British conventions, the senior officers had hitherto always respected strict hierarchy of rank. Both Ayub and Yahya, when they assumed power in 1958 and 1969 respectively, were commander in chief of the army and formally acted in an ex officio capacity. A Middle Eastern– or Latin American–style putsch by radical younger generals or colonels would have represented a sharp rupture with this whole tradition. Such an eventuality was avoided in the nick of time after the crushing defeat of December 1971, when the domestic situation had already greatly deteriorated and the junior ranks were restive because of the ineptitude of the high command.

The war in Bangladesh had badly shaken the Pakistani economy, which had been depressed anyway since 1968. Foreign exchange had
drastically dwindled, while prices and unemployment rose in tandem. Jute exports had naturally collapsed, precipitating steep falls on the Karachi stock exchange. This grave economic crisis was, of course, caused by the cost of the expeditionary force in Bengal. Press estimates calculated this at something like $2 million a day (the equivalent of $40 million today), a massive burden when added to West Pakistan’s chronic import deficit of $140 million dollars ($2.8 billion today) a month. The Islamabad regime was thus faced with a domestic squeeze it had not bargained for when it embarked on its genocidal operations in March. It unilaterally suspended payments on its foreign debts and needed further large infusions of U.S. aid to ward off total bankruptcy.

New dangers loomed on other fronts. It soon became clear to the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, that a protracted struggle in East Bengal could have critical repercussions inside India in West Bengal. The latter province had been in the throes of a profound social crisis for three years now. Peasant uprisings and generalized social unrest had made the border province a powder keg. The Indian ruling elite, although far stronger than its Pakistani counterpart, was well aware of this and nervous that the infection might spread. Many reading this account today will be surprised by the thought that anyone in power ever feared a “Red revolution,” but they did. The strength of the Communist Party (Marxist) and Maoist groups to its left worried successive Indian governments.

This was one of the main reasons that Mrs. Gandhi was quick in her demagogic response to the events in East Bengal. Every opposition party in India had been urging New Delhi to intervene more forcefully. However, Indira Gandhi’s policy was to prop up the Awami League, while repeatedly disarming guerrillas crossing the border and instituting strict political control over the so-called “training camps” set up on Indian soil. Although it enjoyed great military superiority, the Indian government was initially daunted by the prospect of an intervention in East Bengal. It would anger the United States and China and might plunge the whole region into a turmoil that New Delhi feared it might not be able to control. Indeed, even if the Awami League succeeded in establishing what Indira Gandhi referred to as a “secular and democratic state” in East Bengal, the weakness of the indigenous elite and the
virtual absence of a developed state apparatus would have posed the question of some sort of a revolutionary solution with great rapidity.

T
HE MOST EFFECTIVE
political force in West Bengal itself at that time (as today) was undoubtedly the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), with its tens of thousands of militants and millions of supporters. The centrist inclinations of this party were in full view even then as it formed a coalition state government in the province, though once governor’s rule was imposed and the center took charge, it allowed itself more revolutionary rhetoric. Its leaders stated that Indira Gandhi and Yahya Khan represented equally reactionary social and political forces, which was a bit unfair. They argued that just as East Bengal was specially exploited by West Pakistan, so “West Bengal was especially exploited by the Indian Centre.” The logical conclusion to this view was to develop a strategy for a United Socialist Bengal. But to think in such terms necessitated a break with the past, and this the CPI(M) could not do. Perhaps it was a utopian notion, and perhaps it was the strong utopian streak in me that led me later, and quite independently of the CPI(M), to raise the demand for a United Socialist Bengali Republic. I found myself being denounced as an “ultraleft adventurist,” a criticism that, on thinking back, possibly contained a germ of truth. At the time it seemed a reasonable enough response to military dictators, compromised politicians, and ignoble businessmen.

It was as an “ultraleft adventurer” that I arrived on a pitch-dark night in Calcutta in 1971, disguised as a Hindu trader. My aim was to meet up with a courier from the war zone and cross the border with him into East Pakistan and establish direct contact with the Bengali resistance. I had shaved off my mustache for the first and last time and barely recognized myself. I was traveling on a fake British passport that had once belonged to a man called Muttabir Thakur, a Bengali trader from Brick Lane in the East End of London. I had no idea who he was, but he had volunteered to surrender his passport to help the Bengali struggle. I was at that time still a Pakistani citizen and was aware that then, as now, a Pakistani passport did not facilitate a quick entry into most countries and especially not India.

For some unfathomable reason, Sophie, the French militant who had dyed my hair in Paris, had given it and my eyebrows a reddish tint so that when I looked in the mirror, I saw someone resembling a Hollywood serial killer. I was carrying a revolver gifted indirectly by the IRA for this journey, which I had packed in my suitcase together with some ammunition.

At Bombay airport the immigration officer asked me a routine question: “What is your father’s name?” I had memorized Thakur’s address in Calcutta, but had stupidly not foreseen this question. I panicked, blurting out, “Mohammed.” The immigration officer was shocked, but before he could say anything, an elderly, ample-girthed Parsi lady queuing up behind me, evidently touched that a Hindu boy’s father had been named Mohammed, defused the situation by exclaiming, “How sweet!” Everyone smiled, my papers were stamped, and Customs did not bother to open my suitcase.

I had arrived determined to cross the border and establish contact with the guerrilla band of Abdul Matin and Tipu Biswas, who represented the most sympathetic, Guevarist wing of the Bengali left. One of their supporters had translated Che Guevara’s
Guerrilla Warfare
into Bengali, and it was now being read by soldiers in the Mukti Bahini, the official liberation army, which included former Bengali soldiers and officers of the Pakistan army. Matin and Biswas’s irregulars were said to be operating in Pabna, in the heart of the province between the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers, as well as in the northeast of the province, in the region of Sylhet and Mymensingh. This last had been the epicenter of the great Tebhaga peasant uprising for rent reductions in 1945–47, the most militant social revolt of the rural poor in the subcontinent to that date. The tradition had certainly not disappeared. A courier from the Bengali maquis met me in Calcutta. He must have been only eighteen years old, but his composure and authority belied his youth. He impressed me greatly. He told me that the resistance was growing and maturing every day and had succeeded in paralyzing the port towns of Chittagong and Khulna, thus reducing interzonal trade to a trickle. “Soon we will take Santa Clara and then Havana,” he said with a smile, the closest he came to revealing his political identity. In those days, given the diversity of groups engaged in the resistance, it
was better not to pry too deeply into political affiliations, especially if one was a Punjabi from West Pakistan.