Brutal birth of Bangladesh
For nine merciless months what used to be East Pakistan was ravaged by civil war. This is the saga of one country’s desperate struggle for freedom and independence
In post-colonial chaos, a new nation fights a bitter guerilla war for independence
Few conflicts in the late-20th century witnessed as much carnage as the events that shook East Pakistan from March to December 1971. The turbulent episode is often remembered as a stirring triumph orchestrated by imaginative Indian generals, but this coup de main only occurred in the final month of the war. Before that, the citizens of newly independent Bangladesh lived through indescribable horror.
The origins of the war date to the partition facilitated by the British at the end of their dominion over South Asia. In 1947 this partition created India and its troubled adversary Pakistan – the latter a geopolitical experiment that aspired to create a modern secular state for a multi-ethnic Muslim nation.
The existence of Pakistan, conceived by its urbane founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah, meant a confederation of the Punjab, Kashmir and the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan.
The scope of its territorial expanse became problematic when a local separatist movement flourished in Balochistan, while Kashmir’s ownership triggered a war with India.
Yet the most troubled portion of this confederation was East Pakistan, which had a majority Bengali population whose numbers had swelled to 72 million by 1970. Separated from West Pakistan by the Indian landmass, the East soon felt alienated, politically and culturally, from the West.
It took the dysfunctional domestic politics of West Pakistan to start the dominoes falling. In 1969 the decorated war veteran and armed forces chief Yahya Khan replaced the civilian president Ayub Khan. The Peshawar-born Pashtun was a career soldier who had fought under the British in Iraq and East Africa during World War II and had endured captivity in an Axis prison camp.
By the time he assumed power, Yahya Khan enjoyed widespread support, despite imposing a martial law regime over the whole of Pakistan. Wishing to restore civilian leadership, national elections were held the following year. This was when the trouble started, for the Bengali nationalists of the Awami League swept nearly all of the contested parliamentary seats.
This brought them into conflict with the ruling Pakistan People’s Party led by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who dreamt of the prime ministership for himself.
Yahya Khan knew full well the implications of the Awami League’s ascendance. If its leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman became prime minister he would have a solid bloc in parliament to alter the constitution and possibly grant East Pakistan autonomy.
To make matters worse, in November 1970 a powerful cyclone barrelled into East Pakistan, leaving a terrible death toll in its wake. Half a million people were killed by floods, and an inadequate response to the emergency by the government fuelled Bengali resentment towards West Pakistan’s political class.
As distrust toward the Awami League grew and rumours of rebellion swirled, Yahya Khan
“SEPARATED FROM WEST PAKISTAN BY THE INDIAN LANDMASS, THE EAST SOON FELT ALIENATED, POLITICALLY AND CULTURALLY, FROM THE WEST”
ordered the deployment of troops to suppress any widespread protests in Dhaka, the regional capital and elsewhere. This posed a challenge for Pakistan’s military, whose aircraft were prohibited from flying overland across India. The only alternative route was a circuit from Karachi to Sri Lanka and then on to a dozen airbases in East Pakistan.
The axe fell on 25 March – an auspicious date that was chosen to catch the Awami League and its partisans off guard. Within a week Pakistani soldiers, who were led by Punjabi, Pashtun, and Muhajir officers, rounded up hundreds of dissidents for mass executions. The violence soon spread to East Pakistan’s villages in the wetlands beyond the capital. Panic and fear set in as the death toll passed several thousand.
Reign of terror
India was a cautious actor in this travesty. As far as Delhi was concerned, the threat posed by Pakistan was concentrated in Kashmir. The last two wars, in 1947 and 1965, proved this. But the chaos that suddenly engulfed East Pakistan was far from a window of opportunity. There are no known records that suggest any covert meddling and subterfuge directed by India had stoked the fires of Bengali secessionism before 1971.
By April of that year, however, the Awami League’s cadres had fled to Calcutta and established a government in exile. As thousands of Bengalis spilled over the border in increasing numbers, rough plans were put together by Sheikh Rahman’s surviving cabinet for a guerrilla war.
The Bengalis had always laboured under the institutional discrimination imposed on them by West Pakistan bureaucrats and administrators. This was more apparent in the armed forces, where Bengali officers faced serious barriers to promotion, and units were organised along ethnic lines. During the March crackdown thousands of soldiers, such as the once-loyal East Bengal Rifles, mutinied and fled with their arms. The same occurred among students, civil servants and commoners who had suffered personal losses and witnessed their family, friends and loved ones butchered because of Yahya Khan’s vindictiveness.
On 10 April 1971 the independence of a new country was declared. Its name was Bangladesh, and its people were thirsting for revenge. Rebel deserters and young patriots, many of them just boys, were hastily organised and placed under the command of Muhammad Ataul Gani Osmani, a decorated officer recognisable for his handlebar moustache and stoic professionalism. The newly promoted General Osmani was the first head of the meagre armed forces that had the almost impossible task of extricating the Pakistani forces from the new country.
This new fighting institution assumed the name ‘Mukti Bahini’, a title derived from an earlier non-violent grassroots movement set up by the Awami League before the war. Other rebel factions existed, such as local communist militias and a handful of local partisan groups, but their dismal coordination and smaller numbers reduced them to footnotes in the broader struggle.
The Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s administration wasn’t eager to embrace the Bengali resistance too soon, as the refugee problem absorbed Delhi’s attention. The only tangible support the Mukti Bahini received in the first months of the war was limited backing from the Border Security Force, which functioned as India’s centurions along its rugged frontiers.
Still, General Osmani wasted no time in trying to establish a working order of battle. The untested Bangladesh Armed Forces had three broad groupings. These were Force-k, Force-s and Force-z. Each was roughly the size of a regiment but was lightly armed. The most widely available weapons were old Lee Enfields and Bren machine guns. It remains doubtful
“ON 10 APRIL 1971 THE INDEPENDENCE OF A NEW COUNTRY WAS DECLARED. ITS NAME WAS BANGLADESH, AND ITS PEOPLE WERE THIRSTING FOR REVENGE”
whether the Mukti Bahini ever fielded anything larger than mortars or pack howitzers.
Despite their best efforts, the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla campaign from late March until early May faltered and almost cost them the war. Simply put, their planning, logistics and resources were so limited that no meaningful action was able to dislodge the Pakistani military, who were spread across Bangladesh’s towns and villages.
From a geographical perspective, Bangladesh’s multitude of rivers and tributaries made it an ideal setting for asymmetrical combat. In practice, however, Pakistan’s brutality, close air support and seasoned leadership blunted the Mukti Bahini’s more ambitious efforts. Another weakness was the guerrilla force’s half-hearted attempts at fighting pitched battles that always saw them defeated by the superior Pakistani forces.
The quality of Pakistan’s soldiers was badly underestimated. The highest ranking Pakistani commander in Bangladesh, Lieutenant General A.A.K. Niazi, was a fine example of the army’s calibre. As a junior officer in World War II he had fought in Burma. Like many of his peers, Niazi rose through the ranks and distinguished himself in battle. Furthermore, many Pakistani officers had valuable experience battling insurgents either in Balochistan or along the Durand Line.
By May 1971 the Mukti Bahini’s operations within Bangladesh had diminished to insignificance. Rather than celebrate victory,
Lieutenant General Niazi and his staff were anticipating a broader war with India. The turmoil in Bangladesh had gone on long enough to draw the world’s attention, and the great powers were now compelled to weigh in on the quagmire unfolding in South Asia.
Meanwhile in Islamabad, Yahya Khan knew that Pakistan’s alliance with the US could break at any moment. Keenly aware of this, Pakistan’s military brass had sought closer ties with China since the 1965 war with India, when sanctions deprived Pakistan of American spare parts and ordnance. The Chinese hedging paid off to a certain extent. China had been at odds with India since the brief 1962 war over Arunachal Pradesh, and Pakistan’s courtship meant new J-7 fighter jets and medium tanks, along with thousands of small arms, were passed on to Pakistan’s military.
The armies assemble
India had its own alliances: it had cultivated a deep and lasting relationship with Moscow since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. This gave India access to more advanced conventional weapons than its geopolitical rivals Pakistan and China. What kept Delhi in check was Indira Gandhi’s own cautious leadership style. It didn’t help that the armed forces, numbering 1.1 million, were in a bit of a shambles. Though led by talented officers, the institution was a strange match of the high-tech and obsolescent.
Unlike the mechanised armies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, India’s vaunted military was caught in a strange flux. Much of its soldiers’ kit was of World War II vintage, and automatic rifles like the SLR were only just beginning to be standardised. The air force flew impressive Mig-21s and Su-7 bombers on questionable air fields. The pride of the navy was a hand-medown British aircraft carrier, renamed the INS Vikrant. It’s worth noting that neither India nor Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons in 1971, and nuclear conflict was never a threat.
But Delhi had to act. The intelligence coming out of Bangladesh was appalling. With the Mukti Bahini’s resistance in disarray, Pakistani atrocities continued unchecked. Almost every testimony from Bengali refugees described frightful scenes of carnage and rapine. Worse, there was growing evidence that the atrocities had a darker aspect: an unchecked epidemic of rape as Pakistani soldiers terrorised Muslim and Hindu Bengali women on a huge scale.
The civil war’s outcome needed to be decided soon. Several million refugees inhabited makeshift camps in Indian states like Assam, West Bengal, Meghalaya and Tripura, raising the spectre of mass starvation and local riots. Yet the fate of Bangladesh required a viable grand strategy. Delhi had to decide if it made sense to try and rearrange the balance of power in South Asia.
Indira Gandhi, who was one of the most powerful women in the world at the time, knew the risks posed by instigating a war. Disliked in Washington – both President Richard Nixon and his vizier Henry Kissinger detested her – and considered an arch foe by Mao Zedong in China, Delhi’s worst case scenario was for the Chinese to suddenly break out of the Tibetan plateau and swarm into Bangladesh to assist the Pakistanis. This possibility, coupled with a second front against West Pakistan, was even less appealing if any form of American intervention was factored in.
Preparation was key, and despite her lukewarm relationship with India’s armed forces, Indira Gandhi’s greatest assets were a collection of superb generals, foremost among them the eccentric General Sam Manekshaw.
As a product of the old school, Manekshaw still carried himself with characteristic British swagger and maintained an immaculate moustache to go with a spotless uniform. He was army chief of staff in 1971 and relished the idea of beating the Pakistanis six years after the 1965 conflict.
Indira Gandhi visited the miserable refugee camps in May and returned to her capital shaken by what she saw. Clandestine support for the Mukti Bahini was expanded, and on 9 August diplomats from Delhi and Moscow hammered out the Indo-soviet Treaty.
From then on it was the responsibility of Manekshaw and his staff to prepare for a blitz on Bangladesh. Owing to sub-par logistics and the local terrain, months were eaten up massing the requisite forces. By November these included an armoured division, six infantry divisions and an elite parachute brigade. The Indian Navy was in on the action too: its warships and submarines were poised to blockade the poorly defended coastline of Bangladesh. To conceal this build up, Indira Gandhi visited half a dozen foreign capitals, raising awareness for the millions of Bengali refugees in her country. India believed in peace, she insisted, and wouldn’t be responsible for a world war.
The plan conceived by Manekshaw and his staff was a combined arms offensive of awe-inspiring scale. Its goals were to encircle and smash the Pakistani garrisons within Bangladesh in record time and clear the way for the capture of Dhaka, a task reserved for Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora’s tanks. But first, an irrefutable casus belli was needed. The Pakistanis had to strike first and justify a massive counter-attack. A provocation was in order.
“WITH THE MUKTI BAHINI’S RESISTANCE IN DISARRAY, PAKISTANI ATROCITIES CONTINUED UNCHECKED. ALMOST EVERY TESTIMONY FROM BENGALI REFUGEES DESCRIBED FRIGHTFUL SCENES OF CARNAGE AND RAPINE”