by PETER LEE
Lieutenant General A. A. K. Niazi, commander of the Pakistan army in East Pakistan (right), signs the Instrument of Surrender at the Race Course in Dhaka on 16, December 1971. By his side is India’s Lt. Gen. J S Aurora PHOTO/The Daily Star
The conditions for a direct Indian military intervention in the Balochistan independence struggle do not appear to exist. Balochistan may suffer the joys and sorrows of a liberation struggle. But they are likely to be unique to Balochistan and not a replay of the experiences of Bangladesh in 1971.
Balochistan separatists have unsurprisingly responded to Indian PM Narendra Modi’s “internationalization” of the issue of Pakistan human rights abuses in its province of Balochistan by imploring India to “do a Bangladesh” and assist in the separation of Balochistan from Pakistan.
Does Bangladesh provide a useful template for Indian intervention in Balochistan?
The basic outlines of the Bangladesh story are pretty simple.
In 1970, Pakistan ditched a program to maintain parity between (less populous but politically, militarily, and economically dominant) West Pakistan and East Pakistan and switched to a plain-vanilla direct election model for the national parliament. The Bengali-based and autonomy-leaning Awami League unexpectedly pretty much swept the East Pakistan races and was poised to control parliament and choose the prime minister of all of Pakistan.
This did not sit well with the military and civilian elites of West Pakistan, which tried to crabwalk out of the deal. In late March 1971, after a few months of negotiations and increasing polarization, West Pakistan opted for a military solution, suspending civilian rule and sending in the army to cow, disarm, and massacre the opposition as circumstances dictated (or permitted).
The East Bangladesh situation spiraled into a non-stop horror show of dirty war, insurrection, and communal violence, until India brought things to a close in December 1971 with a massive invasion, the surrender of the Pakistan army, and the establishment of East Pakistan.
That’s the simple part. Anything beyond a bare narrative of events is, as they say, contested terrain.
The prevalent narrative is that of the winning side, understandably. Bengali nationalists describe a genocide, with the Pakistan army and its affiliated paramilitaries butchering and raping their way across the country until the people of Bangladesh, with the assistance of the Indian army, put a stop to it by winning a war of national liberation.
The official Bangladesh figure is 3 million killed, and any attempt to tinker with the seven-figure death toll that bestows the coveted “victim of genocide” credential is treated with contempt and anger.
Contempt is reserved for the Pakistan government, which convened a commission to explain how half the country got lost and came up with a ludicrous number of 28,000 Bengalis killed.
Anger and condemnation as a holocaust denier for third parties who question the undocumented figure of three million and place the death toll at perhaps 300,000, in line with what the CIA was estimating at the time, a huge number but still one tenth of the canonical figure.
What is even more fraught is the question of who died and who did the killing.
Thanks to the work of Sarmila Bose, recorded in her book Dead Reckoning, an answer to both questions presents itself: pretty much everybody.
The Pakistan army apparently operated like the French in Algeria, conducting a campaign of state terror against a province in rebellion, arresting the ANP leadership as a bargaining chip, death-squading intelligentsia they didn’t arrest, brutalizing and intimidating the countryside in an effort to deny the insurgents access to the active support and assistance of a sympathetic citizenry.
Adjuncts to Pakistan’s dominion over the East—and the source of recruits for the Razakar militias—were the “Biharis”, the name given to Muslims who had migrated to East Pakistan from the eastern provinces of India, mainly but not exclusively Bihar, and spoke Urdu, not the predominant Bengali language.
Unsurprisingly, Biharis were subjected to reprisal massacres by Bengalis after the Pakistan army surrender. Post-conflict, many fled to refugee camps set up by the Red Cross and, remarkably, over 100,000 still live in those camps 35 years later, slowly trading their dreams of repatriation to Pakistan for assimilation into Bangladesh as second-class citizens.
But it appears that the primary, hidden victims of the violence attending the birth of Bangladesh were Hindus.
While suppressing the Awami League and the Bengali political movement, the Pakistan Army apparently conducted a program of ethnic cleansing, inciting through violence and the threat of violence a massive migration of East Pakistan’s Hindu population—which it considered at best passively disloyal and at worst a fifth column—to flee to India. The gigantic flow of refugees—up to 10 million, at least 80% of whom were Hindu, representing half of East Pakistan’s total Hindu population—created a humanitarian and political headache for India, one that the late prime minister Indira Gandhi framed as an intolerable cross-border crisis fomented by Pakistan that justified the subsequent invasion.
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