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.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:50:21 +0000
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