Pakistan’s Trauma – and Revenge
This is the tenth installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series, Pakistan: Anatomy of a Failed State. Click here for the rest of the series.
On December 3, 1971, the Pakistani air force launched a massive pre-emptive attack on India from the western border, raining down bombs for 6 hours on airfields from Amritsar to Agra. Pakistan’s ground forces advanced into Rajasthan from Sindh. India’s retaliation the following day was devastating: in addition to immobilising airstrikes and ground attacks, the navy was deployed to seize Pakistan’s port city of Karachi. On the 6th of December, India officially recognised the exiled East Pakistani leadership in Calcutta as the provisional government of the “People’s Republic of Bangladesh.” As Indian troops advanced into East Pakistan, they found the slush terrain impossible to navigate. But virtually every Bengali was on India’s side. As AAK “Tiger” Niazi, the commander of Pakistani forces, later recalled in his memoir, the Indians were aware of all the Pakistani positions, thanks to the locals. In every village, ecstatic Bengalis greeted advancing Indian troops with garlands and cries of “Joi Bangla.” Tagore’s ode to “Golden Bengal” reverberated across the land that winter. “Forever your skies, your air set my heart in tune as if it were a flute... Ah, what a beauty, what shades, what an affection, and what a tenderness! What a quilt have you spread at the feet of banyan trees and along the banks of rivers!”
Niazi, however, still held out the hope for victory. “Remember,” he told reporters in Dhaka, “every Muslim soldier is worth ten Hindus... Gentlemen, the great battle for Dhaka is about to begin.” In reality, Niazi had 30,000 men defending Dhaka; India had 3,000 men on the city’s outskirts. General J.F.R. Jacob’s plan for Indian victory and Bengali liberation rested on bluff. He caught hold of Niazi on wireless on the evening of 13 December and terrified him with news of an imminent Indian attack aided by Bengali rebels. The next evening, Jacob had the Governor’s mansion bombed by the Indian air force. Niazi now agreed to a ceasefire. Jacob landed in Dhaka with an instrument of surrender. The Pakistani general was furious. Who said anything about surrender? He had merely agreed to a ceasefire. Jacob placed the document on the table. “General,” Jacob said, “I cannot give you any better terms. I will give you 30 minutes.” Smoking his pipe outside Niazi’s office, Jacob felt more anxious than ever: the war had been won, but Dhaka had not fallen, and Niazi’s fighting force outnumbered India’s by 10 to 1. Jacob morphed back into a monster as he walked back inside. “General, do you accept this document,” he asked. Niazi was in tears. Dhaka had fallen. But Jacob was not satisfied with this enormous victory. He wanted Niazi to surrender at the Ramna Green racecourse in Dhaka, in front of the Bengali masses. “I won’t,” Niazi said. “You will,” Jacob snapped. “You will also provide a guard of honour.” On December 16, 1971, 38 years ago this week, General Niazi surrendered to General J.S. Aurora, commanding officer of India’s ground forces, in the Dhaka racecourse. Over 90,000 Pakistani soldiers were taken into custody as prisoners of war. Bangladesh was born that day – and the Pakistan that was created in 1947 ceased to exist, the rationale for its creation blown to bits. In 13 days, India had liberated Bangladesh.
Even as mass graves were surfacing everywhere in Bangladesh and horrifying tales of Pakistani brutality began to emerge, in what remained of Pakistan in the western wing, the war was being depicted as a battle between Islam and the kafirs. One Pakistani newspaper reassured its readers that like the invader Ghori, Pakistan would reemerge “with renewed determination to unfurl the banner of Islam over the Kafir land of India.” In New York, Zulfi put on a spectacle at the UN, tearing apart documents and pledging to “fight for 1,000 years as we have fought for 1,000 years in the past,” casting Hindus and Muslims as inexorable enemies of each other and appropriating a distorted past of the Muslims. Another newspaper echoed Zulfi’s sentiments: “Today for the first time in 1,000 years Hindus have won a victory over Muslims.” This must have appeared odd to the men who led Indian forces to victory – because none of them was a Hindu. India’s air marshal was a Muslim (Idris Latif); the commander of its ground forces in Bangladesh was a Sikh (J.S. Aurora); the chief of the armed forces was a Parsi (Sam Manekshaw); and the brilliant strategist who captured Dhaka and pushed Pakistan into abject surrender was Jewish (J.F.R. Jacob). The war of 1971 was between secular pluralism and the forces of religious bigotry.
After losing half of its territory and a majority of its citizens, what was Pakistan? And after killing so many Muslims, what moral right did it retain to speak for the Muslims of Kashmir – or indeed Muslims anywhere? Bigotry, however, has a tremendous ability to breed self-righteousness. Not a single Pakistani official was held to account for the crimes in Bangladesh. Instead, Pakistan convened a major international Islamic conference two years later. Without a hint of remorse or irony, assorted heads of the world’s Islamic states gathered in Lahore as “dear brothers in Islam” to hear Zulfi issue condemnations of Israel. For all its hypocrisy, this was mere rhetoric. The real trouble had begun brewing elsewhere. In 1971, as jubilant crowds mounted the Indian general on their shoulders after Pakistan’s surrender in Dhaka, a young Pakistani student of metallurgy was watching the events with mounting dismay on his television 3,500 miles away in Belgium. His name was A.Q. Khan.