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The defeated men of 1971

Syed Badrul Ahsan reads a shallow narrative
Khadim Hussain Raja's book on the 1971 Bangladesh war, published posthumously in Pakistan, has predictably created a stir in his country. And here in Bangladesh, a very negligible part of the book, that which deals with Tikka Khan's stated desire to have Sheikh Mujibur Rahman tried in public and hanged, was carried by the media. The impression, at that point, may well have been that Raja's book was sympathetic to the Bangladesh cause. It was anything but. Raja, a senior officer in the Pakistan army and at that point a leading figure in the military hierarchy in East Pakistan (he served in Dhaka from 1969 to early 1971), was fully in on plans for a crackdown on the Bengalis then being shaped by the Yahya Khan junta. Indeed, even as the talks between Yahya Khan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Zulflkar Ali Bhutto went on at President's House, Raja and Major General Rao Farman Ali met in the former's office to work out the details of what would later come to be known as Operation Searchlight. If anything, the work makes it clear that the civil-military bureaucracy based in West Pakistan had definitely reached the conclusion that power could not be transferred to the electorally triumphant Awami League.
A Stranger in My Own Country brims over with shallowness right from the beginning, especially when Raja cheerfully disseminates his views of Bangladesh, its political leadership and its people. He naively assumes, like so many others in Pakistan at the time (and even now) that a tiny minority of Hindus were behind all the restiveness among the population of Pakistan's eastern province. He has little time to go into serious studies of the factors which gradually drove East and West Pakistan apart, no understanding at all of the economic and political realities which defined the growing nationalism of the Bengalis. To him, all that matters is the 'Pakistan nation', a point which loses sight of the bigger picture. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, despite having won the elections, is an individual who for Raja remains 'insufferable1. He fails to understand or deliberately looks away from the fact that General Yahya Khan's postponement of the national assembly session on 1 March 1971 only fuelled further the fires of Bengali nationalism in the country. Raja's attitude does not appear to be much different from that of Yahya or his other fellow generals. It was Mujib who was taking Pakistan down the road to disaster. The villain of the piece, Zulflkar Ali Bhutto, remains nearly unscathed.
In a very large sense, a reading of A Stranger makes it clear once again why Pakistan collapsed in Bangladesh. While dwelling on Operation Searchlight, the writer glosses over the terrible atrocities committed on the night between 25 and 26 March and makes it appear that military operations were only geared to dealing with criminals and once that was done, everything was back in order. There is nothing in the book about the murder of students and academics at Dhaka University, nothing to inform Pakistanis — and other readers — of the macabre behaviour in which the Pakistan army had begun to deal with the Bengalis. General Khadim Hussain Raja says not a word about the ten million refugees who fled 'East Pakistan' and crossed over to India.
Plain disbelief will strike you, for there is no mention of any Bengali woman being raped or any freedom fighter being tortured to death. But, yes, there is mention of women (to Raja's horror) when the writer meets a newly arrived AAK Niazi and tries briefing him on the situation on the ground. Niazi has no time for the briefing, but he does ask Raja for the telephone numbers of his Bengali women friends! Niazi's perverted psychological make-up comes through yet once more when, at a meeting with senior military officers in the cantonment, he loudly states his sinister intentions in Bangladesh.
Read, in Raja's own words:
“To our consternation, Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu, he said: Main is haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga. Yeh mujhe kiya samajhte hain. He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. Officers looked at each other in silence, taken aback by his vulgarity."
Raja makes some rather intriguing claims about Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman asking him, through emissaries, to be taken into custody. As Raja would have us know, on two occasions these emissaries turned up at his cantonment residence and spoke to him of Mujib's fear that his life was under threat and that he would like to be arrested by the army. The writer's claim, given that he does not, conveniently, recall the names of the individuals who came to see him, if they came at all, can be swiftly binned. When the Bengali leader was eventually taken into custody, by a lieutenant colonel named Z.A. Khan, he was first taken to a girls’ school in the cantonment before being moved to the GOC's residence. Raja does not say when Mujib was flown to West Pakistan. But Raja is pretty scathing about the manner of General Yahya Khan's departure from Dhaka on the evening of 25 March. Listen to him again:
“The President had apparently decided to dump East Pakistan and let it go its own way. He seemed to be concerned about his personal safety only. Therefore, he left Dhaka under some sort of a cover plan at about 7 p.m. on 25 March, which fooled nobody except, probably, himself.”
For all his condescending attitude to the people of Bangladesh, Khadim Hussain Raja throws up nuggets of information about some of his army colleagues that might quite take people by surprise. There is the story of Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, a Pakistani whom many Bengalis regard with respect because of the perception that he quit his position as martial law administrator in Dhaka as he did not agree with Yahya Khan's militaristic approach to the crisis. The truth, however, is something else. When Yaqub Khan came to know that the president would on 1 March postpone the national assembly session in Dhaka, he briskly put together a plan he called Operation Blitz, to be switched into implementation mode through arresting Mujib and putting the Awami League out of action. Raja writes:
"In essence, Operation Blitz meant the suspension of all political activity in the country and a reversion to Martial Law rule. This meant that the armed forces of the country would be permitted to move against defiant political leaders and take them into protective custody...
General Yaqub directed that we be ready to put Operation Blitz into action at short notice. I was also informed that 57 Brigade, ex 16 Division at Quetta, was already on the move to Karachi from where it would be ready to fly to Dhaka at a given codeword."
Bengali phobia is what Raja suffers from. In 1971, he is worried about the 'suspect loyalty' of Bengali troops. Earlier, with the East Bengal Regiment coming into place, he feels that a separate army is being built for the Bengalis. His suggestion about Bengali soldiers being made part of existing units and regiments of the army rather than they being part of a solely Bengali regiment does not far, for men like General Khwaja Wasiuddin quickly shoot it down.
The extent to which the junta went to discredit the Bengali nationalist movement shines through the meanness the army employed in keeping track of Bengali politicians and others. Army intelligence fixes a recording device in a car used by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, picks up everything he says and then sends the tape to President Yahya Khan in Rawalpindi. On his own. General Raja tricks Brigadier M.R. Mozumdar, the highest ranking Bengali officer in the Pakistan army in East Pakistan then based in Chittagong, into travelling with him to Dhaka in March 1971. Mozumdar is then taken prisoner, sent off to West Pakistan, where he will stay until his repatriation to a free Bangladesh.
Khadim Hussain Raja left Dhaka on 12 April 1971. Before handing over to General Rahim Khan, he decides to issue a posting order to West Pakistan for his 'Bengali ADC who 'through no fault of his, had become redundant. He was a fine young man with deep Muslim League connections.’ Raja moves on, to shower praise on a relative of the ADC. The relative, Colonel Abdul Qayyum, stayed loyal to Pakistan in 1971 and indeed believed as late as a couple of days after Pakistan's surrender that his brother, the intellectual Munier Chowdhury had been murdered by the Mukti Bahini. The irony cannot be missed. The state the Bengali colonel defends zealously ends up murdering his own sibling.
SYED BADRUL AHSAN IS WITH THE DAILY
STAR.