Bangladesh: Wali Khan: He rallied for Mujib, against Yahya

At the war crimes trials, some of the accused Jamaat-e-Islami leaders justified siding with the Pakistani military during Bangladesh’s war of independence, saying they had done that to save the unity of Pakistan. But then there were some West Pakistanis who tried to save that unity not by siding with the military, but by trying to stop its bullets.

Khan Abdul Wali Khan, former president of the National Awami Party (NAP) and son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known as the Frontier Gandhi), was one of them. A staunch believer in democracy in Pakistan, he faced persecution by the ruling military junta for opposing the General Yahya Khan's decision to ignore the people’s verdict in the 1970 elections, where Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League won a landslide victory.Together, Wali Khan and Sheikh Mujib formed the Democratic Action Committee to restore democracy in Ayub Khan-dictated Pakistan. Wali Khan received the “Friends of Liberation War Honour” during the seventh phase of the award-giving ceremony on Tuesday. His son Senator Asfandyar Wali Khan, current president of the party now known as the ANP, received the award on his behalf. In a conversation with The Daily Star on the same day, Asfandyar reminiscedx about the contributions of his father to the independence of Bangladesh. He had arrived at the lobby of the Sonargaon Pan Pacific Hotel for the interview, after a visit to the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum. “Being here is difficult for me,” he said in English. “I am here for the first time since independence, and I had to see how a man was assassinated by the very people he had liberated. Sheikh Mujib was very close to my father. After every meeting, the two would spend the evening together.” Asfandyar told this correspondent that the ANP always thought that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had rightfully earned his place as the prime minister of Pakistan, after pulling the Awami League through the landslide victory in its first democratic elections.“My father warned that if they opposed Sheikh Mujib, Pakistan would be divided. But the junta did not pay heed. He used to quip through quoting an Urdu saying, ‘You are trying to earn love with bullets, washing the land with blood. You think you are reaching the goal, but you do not know when you lost it,’” he recalled. Right before the crackdown on March 25, 1971, Abdul Wali Khan had gone to General Yahya Khan to negotiate with him about handing over power to Sheikh Mujib. “Yahya told my father to get out of the country because he planned to shoot. My father replied, ‘Shoot a Pakistani chest with a Pakistani bullet?’ But Yahya was unmoved,” said Asfandyar.He recollected that throughout April and May of the year, NAP workers were persecuted and its top leaders arrested. “We were enraged. I was a part of the student wing. We went and vandalised Yahya Khan’s mansion. I am not proud of having done that, but when our constitutional methods of dissent are taken away, we often react unconstitutionally. Our liberties were taken away, similar to East Pakistan.” Their hostels were raided that night, and they were placed under arrest, Asfandyar said. “The 1970 election was the first chance for the oppressed Baloch, Pashtun and Bengalis to protest. The West Pakistani politicians did not care about us. None of them even visited East Pakistan during the 1970 cyclone, the worst storm in the history of the land.” However, Asfandyar believes that the bloodshed during the Liberation War of Bangladesh could have been averted if the West Pakistani top brass had paid heed to the people’s verdict. He went on: “We have a lot more in common than what we have in contrast, and a functioning democracy that protects the rights of the oppressed Bengalis and the minorities could have been formed, if only the junta gave up power. It was a flawed political decision, but the flaw did not show up until now. Now we are trying to establish cooperation among two nations that have bred nothing but hate for each other for the last 42 years.” Many people were not happy that he was coming to Bangladesh to receive the award, he noted. “However, I believe that we would only have been eligible for gratitude from Bangladesh, if we could have persuaded the junta not to go to war against its own people.”