ON Independence Day, it is the old treachery you remember. It is a whole history of treachery and betrayal that you recall as the day dawns. You remember the flight of Yahya Khan in the gathering darkness of impending night on 25 March 1971. He was president of Pakistan and yet he did not have the decency to inform the country that his talks with the Bengali political leadership had collapsed, that he was flying back to Rawalpindi. And indecency was not all. Before his boarding of that PIA jetliner by stealth at Tejgaon airport, he ordered Tikka Khan to move against the Bengalis. Suddenly, for him, for the Pakistan army, the people of Pakistans eastern province did not matter anymore. They were the enemy. On the morning of 26 March, even as Pakistans soldiers burned and killed all across Dhaka, Pakistans brave military officers enjoyed a hearty breakfast in the cantonment. Tikka Khan offered A.R. Siddiqui, the brigadier in charge of inter-services public relations, fresh fruit brought over from West Pakistan. Into that room of happy killer-soldiers came Roedad Khan, the regimes information secretary, grinning from ear to ear. Yaar, imaan taaza ho gia (my friend, faith has been revived), he told his fellow West Pakistanis. It was just as well, for the soldiers had by then bulldozed the central shaheed minar to bits, had picked off respected Bengali academics and hundreds of students, had set the land on fire. Their imaan, or faith, was an insult to the religion they swore by. Roedad Khan, like so many others around him, was a man without shame. Close to four decades after 1971, he lied on a Pakistani television programme about his role in the heady days of the movement led by Bangabandhu in the province of East Pakistan. He had, said he, warned Yahya Khan against imposing a military solution on the country! There were others like him in Pakistan. Tikka Khan, asked by a Bengali journalist years after Bangladeshs liberation why his soldiers had killed so many Bengalis, replied without shame that the soldiers had killed no one, that indeed only two persons had died from stray bullets. There is the other lie, a collective one, that for years has been peddled by Pakistans elite and its general masses. They did not know, they said, what the soldiers were doing in Bangladesh. O, yes, they did know. They simply looked away from the truth, ostrich-like. And they thought all the media outlets outside Pakistan were out to malign Pakistan. Not even Benazir Bhutto, at Harvard and with access to ready information, saw the criminality Pakistan was resorting to in occupied Bangladesh. She believed what her father told her in his letters. And her father, do not forget, was one of the most notorious of liars in modern history. For Z.A. Bhutto, even if he was watching the offices of The People newspaper burning through the night between 25-26 March, it was the lie that mattered. At Karachi airport, in the fast-descending twilight on 26 March, he crowed, Thank God, Pakistan has been saved. He knew very well that Pakistan had decided to commit suicide. He did not have the courage to admit it in public. If Bhutto lied, there were Bengalis of the collaborationist mould who were not far behind. The Anglophile Syed Sajjad Husain, driven by some inexplicable zeal to create an England in the lives and minds of his students, nevertheless felt, in 1971, the necessity of saving Islamic Pakistan in Bangladesh. Despatched to the West, with other collaborators, to argue the case for Pakistan, he spewed brazen-faced lies. No academic had been killed at Dhaka University, he said, without batting an eyelid. He knew GC Dev was dead, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta was dead. He was lying. Treachery, mind you, was not new in Pakistan in 1971. It was there in 1948, when Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in a colossal ignorance of history, decreed that Bengalis would henceforth speak Urdu. And treachery came into full play in 1954, through the dismissal of the elected United Front ministry in East Bengal. Much as you admire H.S. Suhrawardy, try not to ignore the truth that it was through his enthusiasm that One Unit was set up in Pakistan and the numerically superior Bengalis were simply made to come level with West Pakistanis. Bengalis, said Suhrawardy, had come by 98 per cent of autonomy under the 1956 constitution! It was then for his disciple Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to cast his flawed notion out of the window, to point to the truth. The truth was the Six Points. And then liberation. On 26 March, the extent of treachery, the parameters of it, came through loud and clear. It would not be fair to trust a Bengali with power. So do the next best thing: repudiate the results of the election, condemn the Bengali leadership as traitors and kill as many Bengalis as you can. Treachery was when Jinnah sent in Pakistani soldiers disguised as tribals into Kashmir in 1947 and so clamped the lid on the question of Kashmirs future. Treachery was Grand Slam in 1965. You go back in remembrance, to raise the uncomfortable question of why India needed to be segmented into two bitter pieces. Something assails you; something of a question, to no one in particular, places you in distinct discomfort: how is it that while the Congress waged epic battles for Indias freedom, the Muslim League went into the job of dividing up the country into narrow domestic walls? On 26 March 2014, it is the old monstrosities you remember. The Muslim League let horror loose on the streets of Calcutta in August 1946. Muslims killed Hindus; and then Hindus killed Muslims. In March 1971, Pakistans Muslim soldiers initiated a killing of Bengali Muslims and Hindus in the name of national integrity, in the name of a faith they violated with impunity. They would not rest till they had murdered three million. They would rape two hundred thousand women. They were the worlds best fighting force --- losing wars, occupying their own country, indulging in serial obscenity. ...............................say Joi Bangla again.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 10:01:09 +0000
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