The Longest August (30 page)

When Yahya Khan announced elections for the provincial and national assemblies in October 1970 on the unprecedented basis of adult
franchise, he mandated that the national parliament should act as a constituent assembly and adopt a new constitution. Aware of the popularity of the Awami League, led by Shaikh Rahman, in East Pakistan, Yahya Khan instructed the ISI chief Brigadier Muhammad Akbar Khan to deny the Awami League a majority in the elections, and allocated some funds for the purpose. This project did not get very far.

The ISI had an active rival in East Pakistan: RAW. The Indian agency devised ways to fund the Awami League because its election manifesto, demanding a federal constitution with only the center dealing with defense and foreign affairs, suited Delhi. As a result of hurricane and floods in East Pakistan, elections in the province were postponed for two months.

Later, RAW agents operating in Dacca (later Dhaka) would warn their handlers in Calcutta of an upcoming army crackdown on the Awami League in February 1971 irrespective of the election results. They advised Shaikh Rahman to leave Dacca, but to no avail.
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In the general election held on December 7, the Awami League won a stunning 288 of the 300 seats in the provincial legislature and 160 out of 162 places allocated to East Pakistan in the National/Constituent Assembly of 300. Earlier, in West Pakistan, Bhutto's PPP had gained 81 of 132 National Assembly seats and 144 of the 300 in the Provincial Assembly. The voter turnout was 63 percent. When on December 17 Shaikh Rahman reiterated his six-point demand for a loose federation of Pakistan, Bhutto rejected the proposal and declared that no constitution could be framed or government run from the center without his party's cooperation.
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The tenuous geographical linkage between the two wings of Pakistan was highlighted when, in the aftermath of Kashmiri militants hijacking an Indian aircraft headed to Lahore and blowing it up in January 1971, India banned Pakistan's flights over its air space. This compelled the Pakistani authorities to reroute air traffic between the two wings via Colombo, Sri Lanka—an expensive, time-consuming alternative.

In its assessment of Pakistan, RAW painted an alarming picture of its military capabilities—which were duly reproduced in the Indian media—quantifying its troops and weaponry, and concluding that Islamabad had achieved “a good state of military preparedness for any confrontation with India.” It judged “the potential threat” of an attack on India “quite real, particularly in view of the Sino-Pakistan collusion.” Besides, it added, the constitutional crisis in East Pakistan might encourage the generals to undertake a diversionary adventure, to begin, as in August 1965, with “an infiltration campaign in Jammu and Kashmir.”
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The opening of the National/Constituent Assembly in Dacca on March 3 was postponed indefinitely by Yahya Khan when Bhutto threatened a general strike in West Pakistan if the Assembly met as scheduled.

On March 2 Shaikh Rahman called a five-day general strike in East Pakistan. It was followed by a campaign of noncooperation by the Awami League. Yahya Khan settled for the inaugural of the National/Constituent Assembly on March 25.

On March 7 Shaikh Rahman declared that the Awami League would attend the National/Constituent Assembly only if martial law was immediately revoked and power transferred to the elected members of the Provincial Assembly. That day, Yahya Khan appointed the mustached, unsmiling, leathery faced General Muhammad Tikka Khan as military governor of East Pakistan. He then ordered the airlifting of troops from West Pakistan to Dacca, albeit in civilian clothes, to shore up the thirty-thousand-strong force, of which eighteen thousand were Bengalis, most of whom would defect or be disarmed. Once that was accomplished, he flew to Dacca on March 15 to work out a compromise between Shaikh Rahman and Bhutto. Five days later, when he announced a plan to introduce an interim constitution that would end martial law on March 20, Bhutto rejected it.

Behind the scenes, Yahya Khan and Tikka Khan finalized plans for a military takeover in East Pakistan to overcome the resistance offered by the Bengalis of the East Bengal Regiments, East Pakistan Rifles, and police as well as nationalist students and other civilians. On March 23 Shaikh Rahman issued a “declaration of emancipation” for East Pakistan. And when, as anticipated, the final round of talks between him, Yahya Khan, and Bhutto broke down at ten
pm
on March 25, Tikka Khan mounted Operation Searchlight to crush the popular upsurge. He sent the sixty-five-thousand-strong army to accomplish the atrocious task.

He outlawed the Awami League, flew the arrested Shaikh Rahman to West Pakistan to be tried for treason, expelled foreign journalists from East Pakistan, and imposed censorship.
48
This was the opening phase of violent turbulence that culminated in the ground war between Islamabad and Delhi in East Pakistan eight months later.

10: Indira Gandhi Slays
the Two-Nation Theory

The run-up to the Indo-Pakistan war in East Pakistan in 1971 went through three phases: March to May, June to September, and October to November 21. These were determined as much by political-diplomatic developments as by the weather in the eastern part of the subcontinent. The end of monsoon—June to September—is a preamble to the harvest season, spanning October and early November. The transportation of crops to urban centers clogs up the railways, which are needed for mass transport of heavy military hardware from garrison towns to the front lines.

It was left to India's chief of army staff (COAS) General Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw to explain the linkage between harvesting a seasonal crop and preparing the army for war. A slim, blimpish Zoroastrian with a walrus mustache, Manekshaw also pointed out that with the approaching winter closing the mountain passes in the Himalayas, Chinese leaders would be inhibited from intervening in the fight on the side of Pakistan. The cabinet agreed.

The buildup to this armed conflict—called the Bangladesh War or Bangladesh Liberation War—and its duration witnessed complex diplomatic maneuvering—unrivaled in history since World War II. Besides India and Pakistan, it involved the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China (henceforth China). Following the expulsion of the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) from the United Nations, China acquired a permanent seat on the UN Security Council on October 25, 1971. This was a consequence of the clandestine trip to Beijing on July
10–11 by US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, primarily to discuss the fate of Taiwan.

Overarching Aim of the “Butcher of Bengal”

General Tikka Khan mounted Operation Searchlight on March 25, 1971, to decimate intellectuals, the wellspring of Bengali nationalism, as a prelude to a more ruthless goal. According to Anthony Mascarenhas, an assistant editor of the Karachi-based
Morning News
, the official policy consisted of three elements. “One: the Bengalis have proved themselves unreliable and must be ruled by West Pakistanis,” he reported in mid-June. “Two: the Bengalis will have to be re-educated along proper Islamic lines. The Islamization of the masses—this is the official jargon—is intended to eliminate secessionist tendencies and provide a strong religious bond with West Pakistan. Three: when the Hindus have been eliminated by death and fight, their property will be used as a golden carrot to win over the underprivileged Muslim middle-class.”
1
Though Hindus were only one-seventh of East Pakistan's population of seventy-five million, they disproportionately owned far more property.

Pakistani troops singled out the university in Dacca as well as Hindu neighborhoods for their attacks. On March 31 the Indian parliament passed a resolution in support of the “people of Bengal.” In Delhi, open interference in the internal affairs of Pakistan went hand in hand with feverish activity by Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agents operating in Calcutta. They played a central role in helping the Awami League leaders who had escaped the army's dragnet establish a government-in-exile in Calcutta on April 17.

Calling itself the provisional government of Bangladesh, with Shaikh Mujibur Rahman as its president, it soon formalized the assorted groups of armed resistors to the regime inside East Pakistan under the generic term of Mukti Bahini (Bengali: Liberation Army). Placed under the command of (Retired) Colonel Muhammad Ataullah Gani Osmani, the Mukti Bahini was organized, funded, armed, and trained by the Indian government. In its secret correspondence it started describing the events in East Pakistan as the “struggle for Bangladesh [Bengali: Bengali Nation].”

Like the regime in Islamabad, China viewed the Indian move with ill-concealed concern. “The Chinese Government holds that what is
happening in Pakistan at present is purely an internal affair of Pakistan which can only be settled by the Pakistani people themselves and brooks no foreign interference whatsoever,” wrote Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to President Yahya Khan on April 21. “Your Excellency may rest assured that should the Indian expansionists dare to launch aggression against Pakistan, the Chinese government and people will, as always, support the Pakistan Government and people in their just struggle to safeguard state sovereignty and national independence.”
2

On April 7 the bright-eyed, oval-faced, clean-shaven Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, a veteran of several battles since World War II, was dispatched to Dacca to assist General Tikka Khan. With that, the uprising in East Pakistan intensified—and so did India's involvement, covert and overt.

On Niazi's advice, Tikka Khan coopted the Islamist Jamaat-e Islami (Urdu: Islamic Society), popular among Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslim immigrants. Its leaders declared a jihad against the Bengali liberation forces and their Indian backers. This chimed with Islamabad's claims, widely publicized in the media, that the Awami League had close ties with Bengali Hindus and that they were part of “an Indo-Zionist plot [hatched] against Islamic Pakistan.”
3
The latter statement had a nugget of truth in it, as later revelations would show.

Jamaat-e Islami's student wing joined the military government's move in May to set up two paramilitary counterinsurgency units. This arrangement was formalized by Tikka Khan under the East Pakistan Razakar Ordinance on June 1. It stipulated the creation of a trained, voluntary force to act as auxiliaries to the regular army.

“A separate Razakars Directorate was established,” wrote Niazi in his memoirs
Betrayal of East Pakistan
.

Two separate wings called Al Badr and Al Shams were recognized. Well educated and properly motivated students from schools and madrassas were put in Al Badr wing, where they were trained to undertake “Specialized Operations” while the remainder were grouped together under Al Shams which was responsible for the protection of bridges, vital points and other areas. The Razakars were mostly employed in areas where army elements were around to control and utilize them. . . . This force was useful where available, particularly in the areas where the rightist parties were in strength and had sufficient local influence.
4

Al Shams also supplied logistics and intelligence to the army. Its members often patrolled Bengali nationalist strongholds in jeeps, arrested suspects at random, and took them to local torture centers.

This strategy was implemented after the army's first round of violence had overpowered the local nationalist forces, consisting of militant civilians and Bengali army deserters (described as “miscreants” by the authorities), in major cities by mid-May. To inform the outside world of its success, the government in Islamabad selected eight journalists, including Mascarenhas of the
Morning News
, for a ten-day guided tour of East Pakistan.
5

On their return home in early June, seven of these journalists produced pro-government reports, which were published after military censors had cleared them. Mascarenhas, a square-faced, mustached man with soulful eyes behind his glasses, stalled. “He told me that if he couldn't write the story of what he'd seen he'd never be able to write another word again,” his wife, Yvonne, would reveal later. He told her that if he wrote what he had seen he would be shot. Pretending that his London-based sister, Ann, was seriously ill, he flew to London. There he met Harold Evans, editor of the
Sunday Times
. Even the earlier exposure to the outrages committed in East Pakistan had not prepared Evans to hear what he did from Mascarenhas. The Pakistani journalist told Evans that “what the Army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale,” and that he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a “final solution.” Tikka Khan, the architect of Operation Searchlight, would acquire the sobriquet of the “Butcher of Bengal.”

But Evans could run this spine-chilling account only after the eyewitness's wife and five children had left Pakistan. Once that was accomplished through a ruse, and the Mascarenhas family had arrived in London on June 12, the
Sunday Times
ran a three-page report by Mascarenhas the next day under the headline “GENOCIDE.”“I have witnessed the brutality of ‘kill and burn missions' as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages,” he reported. “I have seen whole villages devastated by ‘punitive action.' And in the officers' mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honorable men proudly chewed over the day's kill. ‘How many did you get?' The answers are seared in my memory.”
6

The sensational, meticulously recorded, firsthand account by a long-established Pakistani journalist was quoted worldwide. It played a vital
role in turning international opinion against the military junta in Islamabad. According to Evans, Indian premier Indira Gandhi told him that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her “on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India's armed intervention.”
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In stark contrast, this distressing reportage left topmost American officials unmoved. The stance of President Nixon was aptly encapsulated in his scribbled note on a memorandum from Kissinger on April 28, 1971, in which the latter suggested that the future of East Pakistan was “greater autonomy, and perhaps eventual independence”: “To all hands, don't squeeze Yahya at this time.” Nixon was unaffected by the letter Indira Gandhi sent him in May about “the carnage in East Bengal” and the flood of refugees burdening India. The declassified transcripts of the White House tapes released in June 2005 contained the following snippet of conversation between Nixon and Kissinger on May 26, 1971:

KISSINGER: They are the most aggressive goddamn people around there.

NIXON: The Indians?

KISSINGER: Yeah.

NIXON: Sure.
8

On June 22 the
New York Times
ran a report by Ted Szulc, headlined “US Military Goods Sent to Pakistan Despite the Ban.” It revealed that to circumvent the Congressional ban on arms to Pakistan since the September 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, the Nixon administration was shipping weapons to Pakistan via Iran and Turkey.

At that time Kissinger and Nixon were pursuing a plan for Kissinger to visit Beijing secretly to exploit the virtual breakdown in Beijing-Moscow relations. The deterioration started with a series of border clashes between the communist neighbors, originating in March 1969, and escalated in October with a military alert by Beijing following a failed meeting between Zhou and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin in September. The number of Soviet divisions deployed along the Chinese border rose to thirty in 1970 amid rumors that the Kremlin was planning a surgical strike on the Chinese nuclear testing site in Xinjiang.
9

As the military buildup by both sides continued in 1971, Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity for the United States to seek rapprochement with China, using Pakistan as a courier, to reinforce its leverage over its primary adversary, the Soviet Union.

Warming Up Phase

On June 28 Yahya Khan announced plans for the drafting of a new constitution, proposing that the task should be completed in four months. A month later he claimed that normality had returned to the eastern wing. His assertion clashed with the fact that the first India-trained, 110-strong Bengali guerrilla unit managed to infiltrate East Pakistan to reach its central town of Madaripur in July.
10
It destroyed tea gardens, riverboats, and railway tracks—acts that tied down Pakistani troops, undermined local industry, and destroyed communications between Dacca and two important provincial cities.
11

The concerned governments tried diplomacy to grapple with the deepening crisis. In his meeting with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, in Moscow in June, India's foreign minister, Swaran Singh, remarked that China was the only country to give “all out, full, unequivocal support” to the military regime in Islamabad. “The Chinese are against everything the USSR stands for,” said Gromyko. “Any cause we support invites their opposition, and anything which we consider unworthy of our support secures their support.”
12

The two ministers discussed a treaty initially suggested by Gromyko's ministry to Durga Prasad Dhar, the Indian ambassador in Moscow, to act as “a strong deterrent to force Pakistan and China to abandon any idea of military adventure.” This led to Singh meeting Premier Kosygin, who endorsed the proposal. Following an exchange of drafts, the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, valid for twenty years, was finalized. It was signed on August 9 in New Delhi by Singh and Gromyko.
13

“Each of the High Contracting Parties” to the treaty declared that it would maintain “regular contact with each other on major international problems affecting the interests of both the states,” that “it shall not enter into or participate in any military alliance directed against the other Party,” and that “in the event of either Party being subjected to an attack or a threat thereof, the High Contracting Parties shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.”
14

This historic document was inked a month after Kissinger's clandestine visit to Beijing, where he met Zhou Enlai. “In our opinion, if India continues on its present course in disregard of world opinion,
it will continue to go on recklessly,” Zhou told him. “We, however, support the stand of Pakistan. This is known to the world. If they [the Indians] are bent on provoking such a situation, then we cannot sit idly by.” Kissinger told Zhou that Washington's sympathies also lay with Pakistan.
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