1971 War and Creation of

Bangladesh: Moving Beyond

the Polarising Narratives
By: Nadeem Farooq Paracha

In July 1971, when the Pakistan cricket team was on a tour of

England, a civil war between militant Bengali nationalists and the
Pakistan Army had begun to take root in the former East Pakistan.
That region at the time was also being ravished by flooding due to
a cyclone. The English cricket board planned to auction a cricket
bat — signed by the members of the England and Pakistan teams — 
for the relief of East Pakistan’s flood victims. However, some
members of the Pakistan team refused to sign the bat. Most vocal
in this regard was Pakistan’s volatile opening batsman, Aftab Gul,
who claimed that the money would eventually end up in the hands
of Bengali nationalist militants. The then Pakistan cricket captain,
Intikhab Alam, advised the angry group of cricketers who were
being led by Gul, not to mix politics with cricket and just sign the
bat. Their refusal almost triggered an embarrassing diplomatic
row between the British and Pakistani governments when
Pakistan president and chief martial law administer, Gen Yahya
Khan, intervened and forced the players to sign the bat. Gul still
refused. However, eventually, he agreed to sign and was the last
Pakistani player to do so. This incident is recalled here to suggest
that over the decades, the 1971 East Pakistan debacle which saw
the region break-away and become Bangladesh (in December
1971) has increasingly generated highly polarizing debates and
narratives which have almost exclusively been painted in bold
black and white strokes. The grey areas in between the two poles
have hardly been investigated. Gul’s example suggests that the
issue and the ensuing tragedy was far more complex. Because Gul
was not a pro-establishment reactionary or a sympathizer of the
religious right-wing militias (Al-Badar and Al-Shams) who
supported the Pakistan Army in its attempts to brutally crush
Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan. On the contrary, Gul, before
he made his Test cricket debut in 1968, was a fiery Marxist student
leader who was at the forefront of the students’ movement against
the regime of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. Peter Bourne, in his
excellent book on the turbulent history of Pakistan cricket (The
Wounded Tiger), wrote that Gul, who was also a talented batsman
from the Punjab University, was selected to play in a Test against
the visiting England side in 1968 (in Lahore) because the selectors
believed that his selection would keep student agitators from
disrupting the match. It didn’t, because the match was taking
place during the height of the anti-Ayub movement. Gul sat in the
dressing-room marveling at the sight of students invading the
ground and demanding Ayub’s resignation.
Aftab Gul (third from left) with another Pakistani player, Talat Ali, talking to a couple of cops
during Pakistan’s 1971 tour of England. (Source: Aafia Salam)

In 1969 when Ayub was forced to resign and handed over power to
Gen Yahya Khan, Gul became a fervent supporter of ZA Bhutto’s
populist Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). He identified more with
the party’s early radical left-wing group being led by the likes of S.
Ahmad Rashid, Miraj Muhammad Khan and Dr. Mubashir
Hassan. So, since one pole of the divide suggests that the East
Pakistan civil war was between a conservative state and its right-
wing allies, how can one explain the example of men such as Gull?
Truth is, Gul was not an exception. Military action against Bengali
nationalists was not only supported by conservative outfits such as
the Jamat-i-Islami (JI), but also by the pro-China factions of the
left. At the time the communist world was split between pro-China
and pro-Soviet factions. In Pakistan, the pro-China leftists in the
PPP and pro-China student groups (the so-called ‘Maoists’) were
staunchly against the Bengali nationalists. The pro-Soviet groups
such as Wali Khan’s and Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo’s National Awami
Party (NAP) were opposed to the military action in East Pakistan.
So it really wasn’t such a straight forward right vs. left scenario.
What’s more, as Salil Tripathi demonstrated in his book, The
Colonel Who Would Not Repent, within the militant Bengali
nationalist groups were also pro-China and pro-Soviet factions;
and also the fact that the majority of Bengali members of the
Pakistan Army who had rebelled and sided with the nationalists,
were anti-India. Some of them would eventually go on to eliminate
the founder of Bangladesh (Mujib-ur-Rehman) and much of his
family in a blood-soaked military coup in 1975.
The anti-India group of Bangladesh military officers who toppled Mujeeb in a bloody coup in
1975. (Source: TIME)

The grey areas between the two poles were finally explored by
Indian historian, Sharmila Bose, in her book, Dead Reckoning. It
is a remarkable piece of revisionist history which unabashedly
confronts the narrative of the 1971 events constructed by the state
and various governments of Bangladesh. This narrative is also
often used by non-Bangladeshi writers and commentators. Bose
tracks declassified 1971 communiqués of the US Embassy in
Dhaka, and, more importantly, interviews dozens of men and
women who were caught in the middle of the bloody conflict.
When she compares these narrations with the official Bangladeshi
narrative about the war, she concludes that the Pakistani military
was not the only guilty party when it came to torturing, maiming
and killing opponents. Bengali nationalist militants, backed by
India, too were equally active killers. Thousands of men, women
and children lost their lives in the conflict, but these also included
thousands of non-Bengalis slaughtered by Bengali militants.
Bose’s book was vehemently criticized by many Indian and
Bangladeshi historians who conveniently ignored the fact that
Dead Reckoning did not really shift the blame of atrocities
committed during the 1971 East Pakistan civil war from the
Pakistan Army to the Bengali militants. What it did do was that it
documented that slice of the conflict which mostly goes missing in
discussions about the horrid commotion i.e. the numerous
carnages committed by Bengali nationalists against soldiers and
non-Bengalis. This is exactly why it was a particularly savage
conflict.

Bengali nationalists about to execute a group of non-Bengalis during the 1971 East Pakistan civil
war. (Source: Al-Jazeera)

The East Pakistan issue began to unravel just a year after Pakistan
came into being. Riots erupted in 1948 in Dhaka when Urdu was
declared as Pakistan’s sole national language, despite Bengali
being the language of a majority of Pakistanis. However, what
many historians who too point at the same incident as a starting
point in this context, somehow ignore the fact that five years later
in 1954, the state and government of Pakistan gave Bengali the
status of a national language (along with Urdu). Another aspect of
the East Pakistan issue which goes missing is that till the 1965
Pakistan-India War, Mujeeb-ur-Rehman’s Awami League (AL)
was not a separatist Bengali nationalist outfit. Just as the country’s
Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun nationalists had been doing, AL too
was demanding provincial autonomy within the Pakistan
federation. It was only after the 1965 war ended in a stalemate and
the once popular Ayub Khan regime began to erode that Mujeeb
overtly began to accuse the state of Pakistan of ignoring the plight
of Bengalis in East Pakistan. Mujeeb claimed that during the 1965
war, the army had left East Pakistan ‘unguarded’ and ‘open to an
attack by the Indian forces.’ Even though India concentrated on
attacking the country’s western wing (West Pakistan), Mujeeb’s
statement dramatically propelled AL into becoming a more
demanding Bengali nationalist party. And yet, Lawrence Ziring in
his book, From Mujib to Ershad wrote that when Mujeeb was put
under house arrest during the 1971 civil war in the East, he was
still discussing autonomy for East Pakistan within the Pakistan
federation with ZA Bhutto. Even when the region tore itself away
in December 1971 and Bhutto became the new President, Mujeeb
had no clue what had transpired because he was kept away from
all news. Ziring writes when he was released, Mujeeb was
surprised to learn that East Pakistan had broken away. The only
truth about the event that cannot be disputed is the fact that it was
a brutal affair. Thousands of Bengalis and non-Bengalis living in
East Pakistan and Pakistani soldiers were slaughtered. But over
the decades the debate between the aforementioned two poles has
simply failed to move beyond the question, how many of those
killed and maimed in the conflict were victims of Pakistani
military, and how many were murdered by the India-backed
Bengali nationalists. In fact, it is only recently that some historians
have begun to treat the nationalists as being equally brutal in their
tactics of mass murder.

Originally published at Naya Daur.