1971

Srinath Raghavan

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674731271
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Indian & South Asian History

The war of 1971 was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since its partition in 1947. At one swoop, it led to the creation of Bangladesh, and it tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of India. The Line of Control in Kashmir, the nuclearization of India and Pakistan, the conflicts in Siachen Glacier and Kargil, the insurgency in Kashmir, the political travails of Bangladesh—all can be traced back to the intense nine months in 1971.Against the grain of received wisdom, Srinath Raghavan contends that far from being a predestined event, the creation of Bangladesh was the product of conjuncture and contingency, choice and chance. The breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh can be understood only in a wider international context of the period: decolonization, the Cold War, and incipient globalization. In a narrative populated by the likes of Nixon, Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, Indira Gandhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Tariq Ali, George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and Bob Dylan, Raghavan vividly portrays the stellar international cast that shaped the origins and outcome of the Bangladesh crisis.This strikingly original history uses the example of 1971 to open a window to the nature of international humanitarian crises, their management, and their unintended outcomes.

1

THE TURNING POINT

The morning of 25 March 1969 was unseasonably cloudy in Islamabad. Dressed in a light gray suit, his hands deep in his pockets, Field Marshal Ayub Khan paced the presidential lawns, which were ringed yellow with brilliant lilies. He was waiting for General Yahya Khan, the commander in chief. When the latter arrived, they retired to his study wherein Ayub recorded his last speech to the people of Pakistan. Explaining his abdication, Ayub declared, “It is impossible for me to preside over the destruction of our country.” “The whole nation demands,” he lamely observed, “that General Yahya … should fulfil his constitutional responsibilities.” By the time Ayub was finished, the presidential residence seemed funereally sedate. The two military men parted after a bluff handshake. As the speech was broadcast that evening, a curtain of rain swept the president’s house and hammered the roof.¹ His public life at an end, Ayub Khan withdrew into an embittered seclusion, insisting that “democratic methods are foreign to our people.”²

Ayub’s departure was not merely the result of another military takeover. Yet the erosion of his authority had been remarkably swift. A little over a decade earlier, Ayub had seized power in a coup d’état. Stability and growth were the watchwords of his regime. He dispensed with Pakistan’s parliamentary democracy and introduced a presidential system based on indirect elections. For this achievement, he was hailed by a prominent American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, as a leader akin to “a Solon or Lycurgus or ‘Great Legislator’ on the Platonic or Rousseauian model.”³ Over these years, Pakistan emerged as the first of the Asian tigers. For the first ten years of Ayub’s rule, annual economic growth rates had averaged 5.5 percent. Pakistan also began rapidly to industrialize: large-scale manufacturing grew over the same period at nearly 17 percent a year.⁴

Starting in late 1968, however, a series of protests racked the regime and eventually brought down the field marshal. The uprising that shook the regime of Ayub Khan was, of course, fired by the specific social, economic, and political context of Pakistan. But it had been touched off by a rash of revolts that had erupted across the world, and its aftershocks would shift the tectonic plates that underlay united Pakistan. The crisis of 1971 had a global dimension from the outset.

I

Nineteen sixty-eight was a year of global tumult triggered by student protests. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) observed that “youthful dissidence, involving students and non-students alike, is a world-wide phenomenon. It is shaped in every instance by local conditions, but nonetheless there are striking similarities.” It went on to note, “Student protest is visible, highly vocal, increasingly militant and feared by many to be interconnected world-wide … Student Power is no longer a chimera.”⁵

Indeed, more than twenty countries across the globe pulsated with protests. North America and Western Europe, China and Eastern Europe, East and West Asia, Africa and Latin America—none were immune to the contagion of youthful dissidence. Yet the hefty literature on the Sixties remains entranced by the events in Western Europe and the United States.⁶ Even the emerging scholarly work that attempts to view 1968 in a wider framework barely acknowledges the significance of the year for South Asia in general and Pakistan in particular.⁷ This is especially regrettable because the uprising in Pakistan was arguably the most successful of all the revolts in that momentous year.

The upheavals of 1968 at once reflected and accentuated the incipient process of globalization, but they were also shaped by the other historical currents washing through the Sixties: the Cold War and decolonization. The uprising in Pakistan mirrored, in many respects, the movements in other parts of the world. First, in Pakistan as elsewhere, the roots of the student movement lay in the expansion of higher education over the past two decades. The number of colleges affiliated with these universities also rapidly increased. Dhaka University, for example, had over 50,000 students in 1968, of whom over 7,000 resided on campus.⁸

Second, the student movement had gathered steam from earlier protests over educational issues. The Education Commission constituted by Ayub Khan had decided in 1962 to extend undergraduate education from two to three years, to tighten the grading criteria, and to provide only one opportunity for failed students to make good. The students felt that these steps would not only delay their entry into the employment market but also undermine their career prospects. This led to widespread protests in both the eastern and western wings, especially in East Pakistan.⁹ Since the mid-1960s, students had also been chafing at the government’s interference in the functioning of universities and the servile acquiescence of the university authorities. By 1968, reform of the university was as important to Pakistani students as to their counterparts elsewhere.

Third, there was an economic dimension to the events of 1968. The postwar economic performance of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States had both benefited the Sixties generation and drawn their ire. As the West German student icon Rudi Dutschke observed, “Not until 1964–65 when the growth of industry suddenly sank from 6–8% per annum to 2.5–4% per annum did we begin to realise that capitalism had not eliminated its inherent contradictions.”¹⁰ Pakistan, too, had experienced an economic boom under Ayub Khan. Much of this impressive growth, however, benefited Pakistan’s small private sector. This was not an unintended consequence: Ayub’s economic policies—designed and implemented with Western assistance—were aimed at fostering the bourgeoisie. Between 1963 and 1968, the absolute number of impoverished people rose from 8.65 million to 9.33 million.¹¹ Consciousness of this disparity grew after the revelation by the chief economist of the planning commission that a mere twenty-two families owned or controlled 66 percent of the country’s industrial wealth and 87 percent of banking and insurance. Among the student protesters, “22 families” became a favored slogan. The regime’s attempt to celebrate the “Decade of Development” under Ayub in late 1968 provided another target for the students.¹²

Fourth, the movement in Pakistan, much like elsewhere, had a generational dimension. Access to a university education in an urban setting made the students self-conscious about their difference from their parents—many of whom had limited education, if at all, and lived in the villages—and so weakened traditional family hierarchies. Further, the students did not share their elders’ unstinting admiration for the Pakistani state. Their parents belonged to the generation that had struggled to bring Pakistan into existence, but the students had come of age after the authoritarian turn taken under Ayub. Nowhere was this truer than in East Pakistan, where the students were increasingly impatient with their elders’ willingness to work with the central authorities.

Fifth, this generational divide was widened by new cultural mores influencing the youth of Pakistan. The counterculture of the Sixties found a fertile bed among Pakistani youngsters—even if all the movement’s flowers could not bloom in this cultural context. In the finest memoir of that decade, Sheila Rowbotham noted that for her generation “music was the barometer of consciousness.”¹³ Indeed, rock ’n’ roll was an important vector for the global diffusion, including to Pakistan, of the spirit of the Sixties.

Sixth, as in the United States and Europe, the student protests of 1968 in Pakistan were a revolt against the Cold War and the stultifying structures it imposed.¹⁴ The focal point for Pakistani students, too, was opposition to the Vietnam War. The radical writer Habib Jalil’s poem, calling on “Global defenders of human rights” to speak and reminding his audience that “Vietnam is on fire,” caught the mood of the students.¹⁵

The students were also acutely alert to the fact that the authoritarian, military-bureaucratic regime was being propped up by the Cold War alliances in which Pakistan was entangled.

Finally, the language and forms of student protest in Pakistan were directly inspired by the upheavals in other places. In particular, the vocabulary and texts of the revolutionary left provided the terms on which much of the students’ activity was conceptualized and debated. “Every student was reading Marx, Lenin, Mao,” recalled a student of Punjab University who graduated in 1969. On the last night on campus, “we gave revolutionary speeches and were very emotional. At the end we sang the Internationale and tore apart our degrees and promised that from here on we will not go to our homes, rather we will go to the factories and the fields to work for revolution.”¹⁶ Similarly, the entire gamut of protest used elsewhere, from sit-in to street fighting, was adopted by the students of Pakistan.

All this was possible owing to technological advances that enabled almost instant transmission of news to different parts of the globe. Throughout 1968, the English and vernacular newspapers in Pakistan extensively covered the protests in the United States, Western Europe, and elsewhere. Also, 1968 was the year that television came to Pakistan. In late 1967, three television stations had been set up in the West Pakistani cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, and another station was inaugurated in early 1968 in Dhaka. Though television, like print and radio, was subject to censorship, Pakistanis congregating before their neighborhood television sets were exposed to news and images of the global uprisings.¹⁷

In addition to technology, the students in Pakistan had a direct link with the British student movement in the person of Tariq Ali. Born into a wealthy and well-connected family with socialist leanings, Ali was prominent in student politics in the early 1960s. His role in organizing protests against the Ayub regime made him a marked man. Fearing for his life, his parent bundled him off to Oxford. In 1965, he was elected president of the Oxford Union, and soon he was active in a Trotskyist splinter-group that was in the thick of the protests against the Vietnam War. By 1968, he had become the face of the protesting youth in Britain. For most Pakistani students, Tariq Ali was an iconic figure. But he was also a more direct source of inspiration and assistance. In early 1969, at the height of the student protests, Ali received a rousing welcome from the student groups in Pakistan.¹⁸ In reviewing the situation, a British diplomat wrote that “the only agreeable aspect from the strictly British point of view is that Tariq Ali has left us to return to Pakistan, where I wish him no greater success than he has achieved here.”¹⁹

All said, there were important differences between the student movements in the West and in Pakistan. For one thing, they differed in their objectives. Although the Western protests were couched in the language of the revolutionary left, the movements sought not to overthrow the regimes but to transform interpersonal relations and to open up decision-making processes in the state, the university, and the workplace. The essentially libertarian character of these movements was captured by the slogan “It is forbidden to forbid.”²⁰ By contrast, the Pakistani students aimed at deposing the regime and effecting a fundamental transformation of the state. For another, unlike their counterparts in the West, the Pakistani students operated in an environment bereft of organized political forces or democratic structures. Their movement, in consequence, had a more direct impact on the political trajectory of the country.

II

The protest began on 7 November 1968 with a minor incident involving a group of students from Gordon College in Rawalpindi. The students were returning from an outing to Landi Kotal, a shopping center near the Afghan border, with a few thousand rupees worth of contraband. Though such “smuggling” happened routinely in a town filled with officials, the students’ booty was impounded by the local authorities, and charges were leveled on them. Instead of tamely submitting to such treatment, the students of Gordon College organized a strike and marched in procession to the deputy commissioner’s office. Soon they were joined by students from another college in Rawalpindi. When the crowd refused to disperse, the police charged with their truncheons and opened fire. One student was killed. Thereafter, the situation rapidly worsened. Over the next two days, students from various colleges in town picketed government offices and engaged in running battles with the police. Within days, campuses and towns across West Pakistan were aflame with protesting students.²¹

By 28 November, the protests had acquired substantial momentum. Ayub noted in his diary that “there have been widespread disturbances by students and hooligans in several towns. They indulged in looting and arson … The curious thing is that young school children of 10–12 years of age have also taken to violence.”²² The next day, the students issued a call for a general strike in Rawalpindi and asked workers, shopkeepers, and the unemployed to march with them. The workers responded to the call: “Many onlookers,” a newspaper reported, “also joined the procession.”²³ Unnerved by the scale of the turnout, the police attempted to break up the demonstration with force, resulting in a six-hour standoff with the students. The latter, joined by the workers, retaliated against government installations: two police stations were razed to the ground.

Soon, the students in East Pakistan joined the fray. On 6 December, they issued a call for a general strike in Dhaka, aimed to coincide with Ayub Khan’s visit to the city. The authorities imposed a curfew but failed to deter students and workers from forming a massive procession. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested and several wounded when the police opened fire.²⁴ This was followed by a string of strikes in Dhaka and other towns, in which workers and vendors, slum-dwellers and the unemployed, rag-pickers and white-collar employees joined the students. More worrying for the authorities was the students’ success in fanning out to the countryside and mobilizing peasants and rural workers. This was made possible by the students’ organic links with the villages through their families and other networks of kinship as well as their skill in harnessing local grievances for large...