Fall of Dhaka remembered

EDITORIAL

Prime Minister (PM) Raja Pervez Ashraf said in a speech at a rally in Kasur on Sunday that opposition parties should end the politics of confrontation and help start a new era in politics. He made mention of the events of December 16, 1971, the day Dhaka fell and East Pakistan seceded to become Bangladesh. The PM said December 16 is a constant reminder that there is no room for any future blunders in politics. Ne’er was a truer word spake. Unfortunately though, we are a society of ostriches with our heads buried in the sand. Not only have we brushed the events that led to the breakaway of East Pakistan under the carpet, we have failed to educate successive generations after 1971 about those tragic times. The 1970-71 crisis finds no mention in our curricula or textbooks. The result is that there are many among us by now who are not even aware that East Pakistan once existed as the eastern wing of the country. How then, despite the PM’s good intent, are we as a people expected to know and learn the lessons from that debacle to avoid repetition of similar mistakes when we are wholly or partially uninformed? Pakistan came into existence as a result of partition in 1947 comprising of two wings separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. It was an unlikely construct to begin with. Subsequently, successive regimes (largely based on West Pakistani bureaucrats, Generals and politicians) treated East Pakistan like a colony, linguistically, culturally, politically and economically. The resentment that built up against domination by West Pakistan therefore was not an overnight phenomenon but accumulated over 24 years before culminating in the inferno of 1971. As early as 1952, the people of East Pakistan rose in protest against the declaration by none other than Mr Jinnah in 1948 that Urdu, and Urdu alone, would be the official language of the new state. Although it is the student protest in East Pakistan that is best remembered as offering the first Bengali language movement martyrs (at the hands of police firing) in our history, what is often lost or forgotten is that West Pakistan comprised at least four nationalities with diverse languages, culture and historical identity dating back hundreds of years. Their linguistic and cultural rights too were violated in the 1948 declaration. After that bloody 1952 episode, the die was cast for incremental bitterness amongst the people of East Pakistan against their treatment. That treatment consisted of denying the Bengali people their political rights, reflected in the arbitrary dismissal of the united front government in East Pakistan called the Jukto Front in 1954 and the removal of Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy’s government after just 13 months in power in 1957. The 1956 constitution had imposed one unit in West Pakistan and parity of seats between the two wings in a malign effort to deny the numerically greater people of East Pakistan the democratic right of one man one vote. During the 1950s and 60s, a process of extraction of the economic surplus and foreign exchange provided by East Pakistan’s jute exports was ploughed into infrastructure and industry in West Pakistan, a process that reinforced the sense of alienation of the Bengali masses. Mujibur Rehman, once a protégé of Suhrawardy, suffered imprisonment repeatedly for voicing the demands of the people of East Pakistan and was finally arrested in the Agartala Conspiracy case in 1967, a trumped up sedition charge that did not outlast the agitation that overtook the whole country, East and West, against Ayub Khan. The aftermath of that countrywide seven month agitation resulted in the departure of Ayub, martial law under the army chief Yahya Khan, extreme repression to quell mass unrest, the undoing of one unit (a popular and much iterated demand of the progressive political forces of both wings) and the announcement of general elections in 1970. Had Yahya accepted the results of the elections, which gave Mujib a majority and the right to form the government, Pakistan may well have been intact today. Instead, Yahya, in collaboration, it must be said with regret, West Pakistani political leaders like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, launched a genocidal military crackdown in East Pakistan that finally ended, after thousands of lives lost, rapes and other atrocities, in the fall of Dhaka on December 16, 1971 to invading Indian forces. The contention that we have learnt nothing from this past and stubbornly refuse to do so is proved by the fact that Balochistan’s political problems are being dealt with today in the same fashion: repression, military operations, kill and dump atrocities. The more things change, the more, it seems, they remain the same. Time to wake up to the dangers posed to the unity of remaining Pakistan before it is too late.