YAHYA/BANGLADESH

After widespread student and labour agitation against the increasingly authoritarian rule of Ayub helped to displace him from power, he was succeeded by another General, against the formula for succession established under the 1962 Constitution.

Yahya declared an intention to hold elections under the Legal Frame­work Order of 1970. The Order dissolved the One Unit system and decreed that the basis of the coming elections would be strict propor­tional representation. Sheikh Mujibur Rehman led the Awami League to a decisive win in Bengal and thereby gained the majority of seats at the Centre. He campaigned on the platform of a renewed federation centred on a list of demands, the Six Points.

The Six Points indicated that the fiscal, administrative and security apparatus should be expressly controlled through constitutional means. They also contained a proposal to limit federal powers to controlling only currency, foreign affairs and defence. Zulfiqar Bhutto, as leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which commanded the second greatest number of seats in the Assembly, declared that the Six Points in practice would lead to an effective dissolution of the federation.

It is not hard to see how, given a shared history of nearly 30 years, the growing disparities in opportunities between East and West neces­sitated a thoroughgoing renegotiation that would unearth the real basis of such inequality, beyond simply the focus on issues of representation alone. Mujib’s demand was for a viable nation and he was bargaining for the right to rule over all of Pakistan in the negotiations that would get underway soon after the elections.

Yahya stalled on calling an Assembly. Following the failure of negotiations between Mujib and Yahya, and then between Mujib and Bhutto, ‘Operation Searchlight’ was launched by the military to identify recalcitrance from the Bengalis by March 1971. The violence unleashed by the Pakistani army was unremitting, so much so that this year is recalled as the ‘year of chaos’ amongst Bengalis who lived through the events.^[147]

India had surreptitiously been supplying arms and aiding secessionist groups within East Bengal but intervened outright when such rebels were unable to match the force of the Pakistan army. It used the pre­text of a large influx of Bengali refugees into its territory and made a general worldwide case for ‘humanitarian invasion’ for its eventual involvement, leading the Pakistanis to counter-strike in Western India.^[148] It was a short-lived war and the Pakistani army laid down its arms, its commanders having their stripes cut and surrendering their badges to the Bengalis who for posterity within Pakistan would be remembered unfairly as traitors rather than as people who were seeking redress for their grievances.

The conditions for an independent Bangladesh were not propitious, ‘drained of economic resources over the past decades, with little indus­try, with an acute shortage of trained administrators, with no army to speak of’.^[149] It has thus been inferred that it was not Mujib’s desire to secede altogether, much in the way that revisionists argue in reference to the Pakistan demand, as discussed in the previous chapter. Nonethe­less, independence was declared by Bangladesh in March 1971, Yahya resigned on 20 December 1971 and asked Bhutto to assume the posi­tion of Chief Martial Law Administrator, which he accepted and then relinquished in favour of the office of President under a new interim Constitution the following year.

East Pakistan’s succession was the second instance of mass vio­lence that had beset a state born in the throes of turmoil and human transfer. However, even as some of the war against India was experi­enced in West Pakistan, the absence of direct experience of what was happening in the East has resulted in vast denial of the army’s role in perpetrating a veritable genocide there.^[150] No official apology has been tendered from the Pakistani government or military to the Bangladeshi people. A judicial enquiry commissioned in 1972 submitted a report that remained classified until 2009. Although it laid blame on a range of politicians and military functionaries, it has never been made the basis for even mild rebuke of those involved.

VII.