The Duel (15 page)

His instructions were to take me across the border, from where others would be responsible for my transportation. He insisted that we could not travel with any weapons in case we were stopped and searched by the Indian border police. So, reluctantly, I left the revolver behind. As we moved in the direction of the border, we began to encounter roadblocks and signs of heavy Indian troop movements and tanks. The border was obviously being sealed off. We were warned by activists en route that border crossings were virtually impossible. There was no option but to abort the mission. The courier kept his cool. He left me at a safe location in Calcutta and returned. I never discovered his real name. Some years later a Bengali friend told me that he was dead.

Over breakfast one morning at the Great Eastern, a dilapidated but atmospheric relic of the raj in central Calcutta, I was chatting with friends when an English journalist, Peter Hazelhurst of the
Times,
walked over and stared at me. I looked up, gave no sign of recognition, and turned away. We all fell quiet and buried our faces in newsprint. Hazelhurst hovered around, then returned to our table. He said something to me but I ignored him. He now insisted that he had recognized my voice, congratulated me on the effectiveness otherwise of my disguise, and threatened to expose my presence unless I gave him an exclusive interview as to what I was doing there. I was trapped and agreed. Afterward he gave me twenty-four hours to get out and helped to throw pursuers off the scent by writing I was heavily bearded and heading for Delhi. In fact I went to the airport and hopped on the first flight to London. In the interview I had raised the desirability of a United Red Bengal, a beacon for the whole region, a spark that would set the prairie on fire. Words came easily in those days. Hazelhurst agreed that a Red Bengal would alarm Delhi even more than Islamabad and reported me accurately, a rare enough occurrence at the time. These stray reflections stirred a hornet’s nest. The Maoist groups, in particular, saw this as a “petty-bourgeois nationalist deviation.” The prospect of a united Bengal was viewed with equal alarm by Washington, which perceived it as a stepping-stone to the possible Vietnamization of South Asia. This
became clear when, astonishingly but to my immense delight, the following editorial appeared in the
New York Times
:

Mr. Ali’s radical vision of chaos on the Indian subcontinent cannot be taken lightly....

A prolonged guerrilla conflict in East Pakistan would have profound repercussions in the neighboring violence-prone Indian state of West Bengal, already shaken by the influx of more than three million refugees from the Pakistani Army’s campaign of terror. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is under mounting pressure to intervene to try to check this threat to India’s own internal peace and integrity.

It is obviously in nobody’s interest to allow the Bengali “spark” to explode into a major international conflict, one which might speedily involve the major powers. Nor is it wise to permit the situation in East Pakistan to continue to fester, inviting the gradual political disintegration of the entire subcontinent.

To deprive Tariq Ali and his like of their “big opportunity” it is essential that Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan come to terms speedily with the more moderate Sheik Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League, which won an overwhelming popular mandate in last December’s national and state elections. Such an accommodation with East Pakistan’s elected representatives should be a pre-requisite for the resumption of U.S. aid, except for relief assistance, to Pakistan.
*

But Yahya Khan was out of it by now. It was Mrs. Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, who would deprive us of our “big opportunity.” It had become obvious to New Delhi that the Pakistan army could not hold the province for long, and if the guerrilla war persisted, the Awami League leadership might be bypassed by more radical elements. Accordingly, on December 3, 1971, the Indian army crossed the East Bengal border, were greeted as liberators, were helped by the local population, and advanced toward the capital, Dhaka. Within a
fortnight they had compelled “Tiger” Niazi to surrender himself and the rest of his command. Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force, and just under a third of its army. The rout was complete. Within weeks Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been released from a West Pakistani prison and flown to Dhaka via London. Washington, fearing chaos in his absence, had pressured Islamabad for his swift release. A defeated leadership had little choice but to oblige. East Bengal now became Bangladesh, a country of 70 million people. Within several weeks the Indian army had left, leaving the new state to construct its own apparatus.

The ferocious cyclone that had struck East Bengal in 1970, a year before the Pakistan army, had claimed two hundred thousand lives. Nature was kinder than the war. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman insisted that 3 million Bengalis had been killed in the war. The Pakistan army disputed these figures without supplying their own. A senior State Department mandarin, presumably relying on U.S. intelligence reports, wrote that “one million people were killed in Bengal between March and December [1971]. Some four million families—up to 20 million people—appear to have fled their homes, nearly half of them to refuge in India. Between one and two million houses were destroyed.”
*
These are shocking figures, dwarfing the massacres at the time of partition and even the appalling Bengal famine of 1943. General A. O. Mitha, with the help of the U.S. military, had created the Special Services Group (SSG) in the sixties. Its purpose was to carry out specialist missions behind enemy lines (India), and its commandos had been sent to East Pakistan long before March 1971. In his memoirs, Mitha describes being stationed in Calcutta as a young officer and witnessing the heartrending plight of the famine victims. The same general, this time part of the war machine, exonerated the military commanders and blamed the politicians for the bloodbath.

Back in Islamabad, General Hameed, the man responsible for the prosecution of the war and on behalf of the high command, addressed all the officers in GHQ to explain why they had surrendered and lost
half the country. Thirty years later, Mitha, who had thought the meeting was a bad idea but had to attend, described the scene when Hameed invited questions:

All hell broke loose. Majors, Lt. Colonels, Brigadiers screamed and shouted at him and called him and Yahya filthy names. The gist of what they shouted was that the reason for the defeat was that all senior officers were interested in was getting more and more plots and more and more land.... Hameed tried to calm them down but nobody would listen to him now, so he walked out.
*

General Gul Hassan, who was at the same meeting, wrote in his memoirs, “One incessant demand I vaguely recall was that all officers’ messes should be declared dry.” He was convinced that a group of conspirators in the army were planning to use the SSG to either arrest or kill Bhutto when he returned to Islamabad from New York, where he had been addressing the United Nations Security Council. Gul Hassan noted:

I do not know what role was contemplated for the SSG in Rawalpindi, but I can state categorically that the one purpose it was not intended for was to furnish a guard of honour to Bhutto at the airport. Had this drama been staged, it would have smacked of a re-enactment of our military action in Dhaka. Whether the President [Yahya Khan] was a party to this design, I am in no position to say. General Mitha, with his potent credentials, was the obvious choice to set this plot in train. . . . The discipline of the Army was on the verge of snapping and the repugnant odour of anarchy was in the air. . . . The induction of a company of the SSG, by no stretch of imagination for a Samaritan role, was a move so reckless that, had it materialised, it could have dispatched the country into oblivion.
^†

In his memoirs, General Mitha denied the charge and accused Gul Hassan of pandering to Bhutto and “lying.” What none of them could deny was that their fun-loving president, General Yahya Khan, had presided over a monumental political and military disaster. Having successfully liquidated the old state, he was now asked to relinquish power. His reign had lasted less than three years. The debate as to the inevitability of this loss continues to this day within the military elite, and a hard-line view of the conflict insists that it was all an Indian plot and Pakistan will have its revenge in Kashmir provided it is permitted “strategic depth” in Afghanistan. Action based on half-baked ideas of this variety might, on the contrary, lead to a repeat performance of 1971 and further dent, if not destroy, the state.

What would happen to a remaindered Pakistan? The overwhelming electoral success of the Awami League had stunned Bhutto. It utterly upset his plans for taking power. He had emerged as the most vociferous defender of the traditional hegemony of West Pakistan, had hysterically denounced the Six Points, and after confabulations with top army generals had whipped up an intensely chauvinistic atmosphere in Punjab to prepare his supporters for war.

In the 1970 elections in West Pakistan, Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) had emerged as the largest Western party in the new constituent assembly. But smaller parties had also emerged with significant regional bases in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier, and Bhutto knew that at best he would be a junior partner in any coalition government at the center. If the Awami League chose to govern alone, he would be acknowledged only as the leader of West Pakistan. Bhutto had won the elections in Punjab and Sind after his party had campaigned on a radical platform promising massive land reforms, extensive nationalization, food, clothing, and shelter for all, universal education, and an end to the economic power of the twenty-two families who, according to the Planning Commission, controlled 70 percent of the country’s industrial capital, 80 percent of banking, and 90 percent of the insurance industry. These were improbable promises. Because of the virtual eclipse of the left, he was able, for a while, to don the socialist mantle. People close to him at the time, experienced veterans of the caliber of Meraj Mohammad Khan, Mukhtar Rana, Dr. Mubashir Hassan (the
first finance minister in the PPP government), would later reveal that the radical rhetoric was little more than a mask designed to win and retain power. It was never meant seriously, and Bhutto would often laugh at the early descriptions of him in the Western press as an Asian Fidel Castro. It undoubtedly tickled his vanity, but his ideas and plans were far removed from any revolution. If anything, he believed in a form of social autocracy on the Lee Kuan Yew pattern in Singapore. A city-state could not, however, provide a model for even the new, reduced Pakistan.

Bhutto’s party organization was an improvised assemblage of feudalists, racketeers, lawyers, and bandwagon petit bourgeois together with some of the most dedicated student activists who had helped topple the dictatorship. Its electoral success owed a great deal to Bhutto’s deals with powerful landlord cliques in the provinces (his pact with leading Sindhi feudalists, of which he was one, was particularly notorious). However, the PPP also reflected, captured, and confiscated the genuine popular aspirations for social transformation of towns and villages. He made his party the only possible conduit for change and had destroyed the stranglehold of traditional landlord politics in the Punjab. For the first time peasants defied their patrons and voted for Bhutto.

According to the wits in Lahore’s teahouses, “even a rabid dog on the PPP ticket” would have won that year. This was proved by the election of Ahmed Raza Kasuri, one of Bhutto’s early and more eccentric supporters, who would later be a turncoat and accuse his former leader of murder. I remember well, in 1969, Bhutto arriving at a wedding in Lahore, preceded by Ahmed Raza in butler mode announcing, “Everyone, please rise for Chairman Bhutto, who is about to arrive,” a remark that caused much merriment and was greeted with ribaldry.

So great was the enthusiasm and so deep the desire for social change that in those early months a great deal could have been accomplished. That the chairman of the Peoples Party was no visionary was revealed by his attitude to East Pakistan. Serious class tensions within Bhutto’s electoral bloc and the hollowness of its party organization meant that the only cement to hold it together was a popular national chauvinism as embodied in the language and style of its leader.

The generals who had lost the war and some of their junior officers hated references to themselves by critics of every hue as “wine-soaked generals and bloodthirsty colonels.” Nor were they alone. West Pakistani bureaucrats, state television executives, and numerous others who had been caught up in the euphoria unleashed by the chauvinism were now afflicted with a deep melancholy. Instead of calmly evaluating what had happened, they retreated into a fantasy world, occasionally quoting the poetry of Faiz to enliven otherwise dull and dreadful memoirs. They were careful never to mention the three grief-stricken poems Faiz wrote about blood-soaked East Bengal after 1971, the voice of a nation that had lost its tongue. The second of these was a bittersweet plea for truth and forgiveness:

This is how my sorrow became visible:
Its dust, piling up for years in my heart,
finally reached my eyes,

the bitterness now so clear that
I had to listen when my friend
told me to wash my eyes with blood.

Everything at once was tangled in blood—
each face, each idol, red everywhere.
Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.

The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.
The sky promised a morning of blood,
and the night wept only blood.

The trees hardened into crimson pillars.
All flowers filled their eyes with blood.
and every glance was an arrow,

each pierced image blood. This blood
—a river crying out for martyrs—
flows on in longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.