Bajwa’s incorrect interpretation of history

General Qamar Bajwa is wrong in his assessment of the Bangladesh war of 1971. On the verge of retirement as Pakistan's army chief of staff, diminished in light of recent reports about his family's coming by wealth beyond legitimate means, Bajwa has, in his own self-serving way, sought to put history in perspective.

The loss of East Pakistan in 1971, the general says, was a political rather than a military failure. That is where his assessment of incidents leading up to the crisis more than a half-century ago goes wrong. 

The military defeat inflicted on Pakistan's soldiers in December 1971 was as much a failure of the army — failure because of the endless atrocities it committed throughout occupied Bangladesh in the nine months of the conflict and the consequences — as it was of Pakistan's political establishment.

The refusal of the political class led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party to acknowledge the primacy of the Awami League once Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had led his party to untrammelled victory at the general election of December 1970 certainly precipitated the crisis.

Photo: Collected

But there is too the reality that the triumph of the Awami League in East Pakistan upset the calculations of the military, senior figures of which had been convinced that the vote would result in either a hung national assembly or a coalition government that would have no place for Mujib and his party. 

Once Bhutto made his intention known of not joining the national assembly session scheduled for 3 March 1971, the army took off from there.

Beginning in February and continuing through March, a steady build-up of soldiers and ammunition, transferred from West Pakistan to East Pakistan, took place. All signs were there, strengthened by the shooting of civilians in such places as Joydevpur, that the army was preparing to strike even as the façade of negotiations involving the Yahya Khan junta, the Awami League and the People's Party was maintained in Dhaka. 

The army's plan to punish Bengalis went into implementation mode within hours of the surreptitious departure of Yahya Khan and his team from Dhaka on the evening of 25 March without calling a formal end to the political talks.

General Bajwa has carefully papered over these facts as also the vicious manner in which the army fanned out in Dhaka, killing university academics, students, policemen and general citizens in a so-called Operation Searchlight that would leave millions of Bengalis dead and Bangladesh devastated. Tikka Khan's fury, aimed at sorting out the Bengalis, was very much a military approach, one that was subsequently adopted by AAK Niazi. 

For Pakistan, the crisis in 1971 was a wholesale failure on the part of its army, which was unable to handle the rise and increasingly successful guerrilla operations of the Mukti Bahini. The atrocities committed by the soldiers throughout Bangladesh have been well-documented by global media organisations. Bajwa certainly is aware of those reports and yet has gone for a selective assessment of the reasons why East Pakistan broke away from the rest of Pakistan in 1971. 

Here is the historical truth: Pakistan's entrenched political circles and its civil-military establishment were psychologically unwilling to hand over power to the Awami League following the 1970 election. In a convergence of interests, both politicians and soldiers in West Pakistan decided on the next best course, that of launching an assault on the country's majority province. The result was a disaster. General Bajwa was cleverly trying to shield the army from taking the blame.

The retiring army chief informs his audience that it was not 92,000 but only 34,000 Pakistani soldiers who laid down their weapons in December 1971. The rest, he says, were drawn from other services and organisations. Here too he deliberately confuses his listeners. The records speak of close to 93,000 soldiers surrendering to the Indo-Bangladesh Joint Command and transferring to India as prisoners of war. 

Again, Bajwa speaks of Pakistan's soldiers having had to deal with 250,000 Indian troops and 200,000 guerrillas of the Mukti Bahini. Given the build-up of Pakistani forces in occupied Bangladesh between February and November 1971, the figure of 34,000 soldiers Bajwa cites does not reflect the correct situation.

The general has let Pakistanis know that the army will no longer intervene in politics. The fact is that where the army has not directly seized power through a coup d'etat, it has managed to keep control of all the levers necessary for the state of Pakistan to function or go into dysfunction. 

The army regularly reprimands the media, warns 'erring' journalists, builds its network of loyalist politicians, hounds dissidents and decides when and how governments will be formed and dismissed. 

General Bajwa is being disingenuous here. And when he asserts that in Pakistan's history mistakes have been made by institutions, political parties and civil society, he ignores reality. The breakdown of politics and administration in Pakistan commenced with the Pakistan army seizing the state in October 1958. 

The process of the commandeering of the state has continued, through varied means by the military. Democracy has not flourished in Pakistan, progressive politics has consistently been suppressed, and consequently, institutions have been administered in a haphazard fashion.

General Bajwa should be the last person to speak of history and offer lessons in morality. His role in the undermining of Nawaz Sharif, in raising Imran Khan to high office and then dumping him before engineering the rise of a new coalition in Islamabad will be the factors on which he will be judged in Pakistan's history.

Pakistan's generals have left Pakistan grievously damaged over the decades. General Qamar Bajwa is no exception. 

Sketch: TBS