RSS Feed MenuThis 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.
Mandos // Jan 6, 2010 at 3:32 am
I just saw this series and, uh, it seems like an elaborate way of reconciling the self-image of India’s elite with neoconservative military-political ideology and general American conservative critiques of Muslims. As a South Asian-Canadian Muslim living in the USA with a genealogical foot in both countries and both independence movements, I have to say that it elides a large number of very important issues to create this narrative. I have one set of grandparents who were heavily involved in the All-India Muslim League up to Partition and who thereafter moved to Pakistan, and another set involved in the Congress and remained involved in Indian politics, and I think I have a particular perspective as a scion of two independences on this that runs counter to Komireddi’s interpretation of history.
The Muslim elite of India before partition was faced with the crisis with which postcolonial minorities are often faced: how best to preserve their identity, culture, and position given the weight of history they were under, coming from a severe disadvantage it had to the majority Hindu community created by its Long Sulk during British rule. And ultimately many of them concluded—rightly or wrongly (though my Pakistani grandparents were completely convinced until their deaths)—that they did not have any confidence in Gandhi and Nehru to create the conditions under which the Muslim story (Urdu as a language, the greatness of the Mughal heritage, the Indian Muslim identity and customs even apart from religion itself) could return and flourish.
My Indian grandparents turned out to be very successful in doing exactly that in their own local environment, validating the Indian dream in spades, and there are still Muslims in India who do quite well and are very integrated in the Indian social and political structure—particularly in the south of India, which has its own resentments against Indian federalism at act as a bulwark against Hindu nationalism.
But it’s still a really mixed bag. In parts of India, Muslims really *are* a minority with emphasis on the “minor”—unable to defend themselves from a Hindu majority that is periodically incited by demagogues against them. Periodically, it’s made *very* clear that they are there at best on the forbearance of the majority even in New Delhi, with the occasional election of the BJP. Indian Muslim heritage sites are periodically destroyed.
Even Muslim history is not necessarily given its full measure in India. Not too long ago, an Indian-sponsored museum exhibition came to the Canadian Museum of Civilization on Indian history with hardly a mention of the Mughal Empire, not even everyone’s favorite, Akbar. It largely seemed to skip it over. That’s an enormous ellision of Indian history, entirely focused on its Muslim component. And it was pretty telling.
For my Pakistani grandparents, their work was the guarantor of the success of my Indian grandparents. (Anyone who is honest should see the similarity with Israeli self-conceptions.) To them, it was an impetus for India to restrain its strongest Hindu-nationalist impulses—and it created a place for Muslim South Asia to establish its version of South Asia (which, for my grandparents as for Jinnah, was ideally to some degree Westernized/modernized), given that the Congress had not shown itself to be reliable in extending the guarantees of self-determination they felt they needed inside a united India. Guarantees that, for example, the Québecois francophone polity partly has in Canada, and is still unsatisfied.
Against this backdrop, it’s really hard to see how Komireddi’s attempt to connect the events in Bangladesh to his view on Jinnah’s personality defects holds a lot of water. Prior to the Zia coup, Pakistan was *not* the home of a fanatical military elite, was not highly affected by religious parties, and so on. It was not the case during Z. A. Bhutto’s time.
Instead, Z. Bhutto is emblematic of the problem; the Bhutto family is powerful only because it is a family of Sindhi feudal lords. Land reform mostly failed in Pakistan, allowing the capture of the state by a narrow and hypocritical few. This is partly true of India as well, but to a much lesser extent, and to the great betterment of that country. People like my grandparents languished outside of the political sphere while said sphere was eaten up by the extremely vain and corrupt. This ultimately lead to the Bangladesh war, and the loss of East Pakistan.
And yes, Pakistan’s founding ideology made it extremely difficult for the Pakistani elite to admit to itself anything of fault in that war, and made it very tempting to appeal to some amount of religious demagoguery (nothing compared to what happened during Zia’s reign).
Now it’s obvious where Komireddi is going with this misguided “failed state” hypothesis and its connection to Bangladesh, but it’s historically very off—if convenient to the triumphalism born of the perpetual inferiority complex of the current Indian political elite. In reality, Pakistan’s big decline happened when it turned fully into a pawn of great powers, and the narrow partly-feudal elite that had completed the capture of the state thereafter. And the slide into sectarian chaos, etc, came about when Zia needed a bank of legitimacy and found it in religious fanaticism.
But it did not stem from some original sin of Jinnah’s alleged personality defects or the founding ideology and concerns of the Muslim League in India, that is for sure.
And what of this for US and world interests? Well, no one’s interest but a narrow Indian one is served by an attempt to delegitimize Pakistan, a strategy whose ultimately end would be the validation of the victim mentality that is often admittedly endemic in some Muslim societies. (I won’t argue about whether it is ever justified, a big topic in itself!) Rather, ultimately, a solution to the Kashmir situation—the one of paramount interest to the Pakistani military elite—must be found. This will alleviate many of the internal pressures in Pakistan, alleviate its economic situation, and allow it to focus on solving its internal conflicts. The delegitimization strategy permits both the Indian and Pakistani elite to avoid doing this, and helps to perpetuate a maze of entrenched regional conflicts in the area.
Vinod // Jan 10, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Mandos, you do make some interesting points. However, you are also apparently falling in the same trap of blaming all of Pakistan’s problems on someone else. Kashmir is merely a symptom of Indo-Pak tensions, not the real issue. The real issue is the self image Pakistan has of being an inheritor to the Islamic legacy in India. Pakistan has a self image of being the natural inheritor to all those invaders who plundered the subcontinent and murdered millions of people here.
That is why this constant talk of “parity” with India. Read some excellent articles by Mr. Irfan Husain on this:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_30-8-2004_pg3_4
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/grow-up,-and-smell-the-coffee-629
knaraya937 // Feb 14, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Thanks Mandos, for your unique perspective. Certainly these views are very pertinent – you mention that you have grandparents on both sides of the great divide.
I was born in India and migrated to the US in the mid 1970’s and have lived in the US ever since. My view of India is that of an independent nation, and certainly don’t appreciate being lumped into the generic term “South Asian”, that term to me is an invention of those who wish to perpetuate the injustices of both Muslim and British rule in India.
You did mention the “great sulk” during British rule – and that comment is very revealing in and of itself. My perception has always been, and continues to be, that the Muslims in Pakistan continue to view themselves as the natural rulers of India, with the ultimate aim of converting all the “kafirs” in India to Islam, as they themselves were converted many generations ago.
Yes, this may be a hard thing to admit, but many of the ancestors of the inhabitants of the state of Pakistan, if you go back several hundred years, perhaps even a thousand years, were originally Hindus who were converted to Islam at the point of the sword – invaders from Mahmud of Ghazni’s time, possibly earlier, indulged in this practice to their heart’s content, murdering hundreds of thousands of Hindus in the process. This “Hindu genocide”, which is mirrored in present-day Kashmir with the genocide of thousands of Hindus receives scant attention in the worldwide press even today.
Fortunately for many Indians, there is a massive “wake-up” that is happening throughout India, and there is also a deep understanding happening in parallel that to retaliate against these historical injustices is to fall prey to the very same victimization that holds many Indian and Pakistani Muslims in peril – those who live by the sword shall die by the sword indeed! I have so many Hindu and Muslim friends and relatives, who live together in harmony because they understand their shared heritage, and they understand that democracy, with tolerance to all spiritual faiths, is the only answer, since their mutual survival is at stake – to choose any other path is akin to the insane murder and plunder of the past.
But I am sad to see that this same “shared heritage” view does not exist in Pakistan. Most Pakistanis of the current generation have been brainwashed into believing that the existence of India is in itself a blasphemy that must be eliminated at all costs – this view will surely result in the destruction of the Pakistani state in the short to medium term – Indians have learned from the lessons of the past and understand, now more than ever, that the ultimate successful future of Kashmir lies in being a free and democratic state of India and they are ready to defend their motherland and Indian way of life, come what may, forever. Freedom is something that is worth fighting for.
harkol // Mar 19, 2010 at 5:19 am
Mandos:
Your unique perspective misses out some factors on the ground.
Jinnah’s views were flawed because he was in a minority of one, in thinking that Pakistan could become a modern islamic society within which Hindus and Muslims could co-exist. This fact is evident in the statistics which show that Hindu population of West Pakistan, which was 18% at the time of Independence is at an abysmal 1.xx% today. This is precisely the reason Kashmir can’t be seperated from India on the idea of it being a muslim majority state. The hindus there have already suffered hugely, and will be all but eliminated.
Komireddy is bringing in a perspective that is perhaps Indian, but he is basing them on facts and published articles. Can one deny the Pakistani thinking of “1 muslim = 10 Hindus”, even before Zia ? What about Pakistan’s attempts at making Pakistan a Islamist state, even before Zia?
Jinnah gave a shape to abstract fears of Indian Muslims and aroused passions for Muslim Pakistan. He committed the mistake of thinking that a nation born in the name of a religion, can easily fall in to the grip of undemocratic radicals. Democracy needs a spirit of tolerance of differences, and accommodation of all different views. Qualities which weren’t there in movement for Pakistan.
Check when was the slogan “Pakistan ka Matlab kya – La ilahi illalla” was coined by poet Asghar Saudai. It was in 1946, and Jinnah did nothing to counter that in any of his public meetings. As a terminally ill man, he saw to the birth of a nation, without able, secular leadership, and left it to a bunch of generals to spoil completely.
Result is what we are seeing today.