A few days after his rousing, indeed messianic oration at the Race Course on 7 March 1971, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was asked by the correspondent of a foreign media organisation if he was willing to speak to President Yahya Khan on a solution to the growing political crisis in Pakistan. At the time, given that the chief of the Awami League had already made it clear that the Bengali goal had moved from a demand for autonomy to a movement for independence for Bangladesh, the military command in Rawalpindi had been sending out feelers to Bangabandhu about his thoughts on a Yahya visit to Dhaka.
Bangabandhu’s response was emphatic. Yahya Khan, he told the newsman, would be welcomed in Dhaka as ‘our guest.’ The implication was obvious. Bangladesh was on its way out of the Pakistan orbit. It was territory over which Pakistan’s writ did not run any more, not since 1 March when the postponement of the National Assembly session by the President triggered the launch of a non-cooperation movement in Dhaka and all over the province. The growing movement for Bangladesh’s independence was an unmistakable reality. Students of Dhaka University had already raised independent Bangladesh’s flag on the campus. Every day, indeed every minute, processions by Bengalis of all professions streamed toward 32 Dhanmondi to affirm their support for Bangabandhu.
March 1971, in the light of history, was a period when the junta headed by Yahya Khan did little to assuage the anger felt by the Bengalis. The President, having had long hours of conversation with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the minority Pakistan People’s Party in the new National Assembly scheduled to convene in session in Dhaka on 3 March, suddenly called off the session. It was a move that was as tactless as it was injudicious. Neither Yahya nor Bhutto had expected — and that was naivete on their part — the degree of protest that was unleashed in Dhaka as a consequence of the postponement.
Yahya Khan and his team, comprised largely of military officers, arrived in Dhaka on 15 March. It was for them an eerie situation, for nowhere was there any sign that Pakistan mattered to Bengalis any more. The President, ensconced at the President’s House on Hare Road, met Bangabandhu for the first time since late December 1970. Over the next few days, their meetings, along with their delegations, would continue. No progress, though, would be noticeable. Yahya Khan and his team were not seen in public, for they did not venture out of the President’s House. At the end of his talks with the President, Bangabandhu would speak to the media at the gates of the President’s House before moving off to his residence.
In West Pakistan, meanwhile, the feeling that East Pakistan was on its way out of the federation seriously began to sink in. Bhutto came under relentless criticism from West Pakistani politicians for his decision to boycott the inaugural session of the National Assembly. Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Ghaus Buksh Bizenjo and Air Marshal Asghar Khan were among the political figures who travelled to Dhaka to discuss the situation with Bangabandhu. In their public statements they demanded that power be immediately transferred to the Awami League. Asghar Khan told the media, ‘Sheikh Mujib is the last link between East and West Pakistan.’ He made it clear that beyond the Bengali leader there was little hope of the country staying on as a single entity.
The atmosphere was getting increasingly grim as the days wore on. The army resorted to shootings in such areas as Savar and Gazipur when Bengali crowds blocked the movement of military vehicles in those areas. Slogans such as ‘bir Bangali ostro dhoro Bangladesh shadhin koro’ were heard all over the province with increasing frequency. The Yahya-Mujib talks continued, with little report of any progress, at the President’s House. At the same time, a massive troops build-up by the regime was underway, with the soldiers arriving from West Pakistan in Dhaka by way of Sri Lanka (since overflights over India had been banned by New Delhi earlier in the year when a commandeered Indian aircraft had been blown up in Lahore by its Kashmiri hijackers).
There is little hint, at this remove in time, to suppose that the Bengali leadership actually thought the junta would launch the kind of military operations it did on 25 March. On 17 March, newspapers in West Pakistan took the unprecedented step of offering greetings to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on his birthday. At the President’s House, the Awami League team comprising Bangabandhu, Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, Khondokar Moshtaq and Dr Kamal Hossain explained to the President’s team the details of the constitution that would be framed for Pakistan on the basis of the Six Points of the party. Rather surprisingly, Yahya Khan called for a copy of the Six Points, a broad hint that he had not studied the very document that had been a major premise of Bangabandhu’s political programme since the mid-1960s.
On 21 March, Bhutto, heading a PPP team, arrived in Dhaka on being summoned by Yahya Khan. The President had earlier wanted to know from Bangabandhu if he would have any objection to Bhutto’s participation at the negotiations then underway. Bangabandhu had no objection, but he was clearly not interested in talking to Bhutto. For his part, the PPP chairman would later claim — and it was a claim never verified or proved to be true — that on 22 March, Bangabandhu took him by the hand to the lawns of the President’s House and suggested that both of them together find a solution to the crisis. As Bhutto would relate in his book, The Great Tragedy, published in the latter half of 1971, the Awami League chief told him that the military would first destroy him and then destroy Bhutto. Known for his penchant for hyperbole, Bhutto claims his response was, ‘I would rather be destroyed by the military than by history.’
At the three-way talks at the President’s House, only the Awami League had its draft of the constitution prepared. Neither the junta nor the People’s Party had any formula ready in relation to the constitution to be deliberated on by the National Assembly. On the streets of Dhaka, demands for Bangabandhu to declare Bangladesh’s independence grew exponentially. On 23 March, his car flying the Bangladesh flag, Bangabandhu went to the President’s House for what would turn out to be his final meeting with Yahya Khan and Bhutto. A deadlock had been reached, to a point where the next day, 24 March, Bangabandhu instructed his team to inform the junta that the Awami League had revised its position and now envisaged Pakistan as a confederation rather than as a federation of five provinces. General S.G.M.M. Peerzada, on the Yahya Khan team, hit the ceiling when presented with the Awami League’s new plan but promised to get back to Dr Kamal Hossain and his colleagues with a response.
No response came from the junta, not on 24 March, not the next day. All day long the Awami League team waited for communication from the junta. The wait was in vain. Unbeknownst to Bangabandhu and his colleagues, General Yahya Khan and his delegation surreptitiously left Dhaka on the evening of 25 March, albeit after leaving instructions with General Tikka Khan that military operations should commence later that night but not before the President had safely landed in Karachi. Tikka Khan then told General Khadim Hussain Raja, ‘Khadim, it is tonight.’
Operation Searchlight was unleashed on an unsuspecting Bengali nation at around 11.30 pm on 25 March. In the early minutes of 26 March, Bangabandhu declared Bangladesh’s independence through a wireless message to M.A. Hannan, the Chittagong Awami League leader. Sometime later, he was picked up from his residence by army commandos and whisked off to detention at the Dhaka cantonment. A few days later, he was flown to West Pakistan in iron-cast secrecy. As the soldiers fanned out all over Dhaka on 25 March, Bhutto watched, from his suite in the Intercontinental Hotel, the offices of The People, a pro-Awami League newspaper, burn across the street. The soldiers had torched the newspaper establishment. The next day, arriving back in Karachi, Bhutto cheerfully told waiting newsmen at the airport, ‘Thank God, Pakistan has been saved.’
Meanwhile, with the onset of the army’s operations, Tajuddin Ahmad and Barrister Amir-ul Islam made their way out of Dhaka and would eventually cross the border into India. Once there, they would shape strategy for a guerrilla war against the Pakistan army.
Yahya Khan would never visit Dhaka after March 1971. Tikka Khan would leave in September of the year. Bhutto would visit a sovereign Bangladesh in June 1974 at the invitation of Bangabandhu. And Bangabandhu would be tried before a military tribunal in Pakistan but freed once his country stood liberated.
Thus history as it was forged fifty-five years ago, a chronicle of time instrumental in the destiny we shaped for ourselves in the face of seemingly insurmountable roadblocks. It is a tale which must be passed on to the young, to the men and women who breathe the air of freedom today because of the struggles for liberty led by the national leadership and upheld by the generation which went to war to seize light out of sepulchral darkness.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on
politics, diplomacy and history