Pakistan's Army: Waging Jihad Against Other Muslims
This is the seventh installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series, Pakistan: Anatomy of a Failed State. Click here for the rest of the series.
In March 1970, Pakistan’s military ruler, Yahya Khan, decreed that the country’s first general election would be held the same year. But the election that should have produced the first people’s government of Pakistan led instead to its dismemberment: Created expressly to safeguard the Muslims of India, the original Pakistan ceased to exist the following year -- after committing the single most terrible slaughter of Muslims since the birth of Islam.
What is often forgotten is that a majority of Pakistanis at this point lived in the country’s Eastern wing; in what is now Bangladesh. Yet, for quarter of a century, East Pakistan had been exploited and neglected, its resources shipped out to fuel the Western wing’s needs, revenues from its jute and tea exports lavishly spent on imports for the Punjabi-dominated West, and its people marginalised and dehumanised.
In spite of their numerical strength, Bengalis occupied less than 20 percent of the country’s civil service posts and made up no more than 10 percent of the country’s army. In official circles, they were referred to as “Bingo bastards” and “black monkeys.”
More troublingly for the establishment, Bengalis were hostile to the refined Islamic identity invented by West Pakistan. For over two decades, West Pakistan attempted to erase Bengali culture, which was deemed too “Hindu,” and replace it with what it believed was an Islamic one.
Songs by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore were banned on state media because Tagore, beloved of the Bengalis, happened to be a Hindu. Denouncing Bengali as a Hindu language, West Pakistanis subordinated it to Urdu in the benighted belief that the latter was a Muslim language. When East Pakistan erupted with indignation, it was accused of turning its back on the culture of Muslims. Impoverished and crippled within Pakistan, Bengalis could scarcely feel any sympathy with West Pakistan’s efforts to “liberate” Kashmiris from “Hindu domination.”
So when Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League swept the polls in 1970, winning 167 of the 169 seats in the Eastern wing and trouncing Zulfi Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party to secure an overall majority in the National Assembly, Yahya Khan did not invite Mujib to form the government. What followed was a calculated campaign of butchery which the world, to its great shame, has all but forgotten.
More to come...