Dread of ‘death’ on the day of a nation’s birth

26 March is an odd sort of day in my life. It is the day on which a whole new nation, Bangladesh, was born, giving me a new identity. But it was also the day in 1971 when, in all sincerity, I thought I was going to die.

We lived at the far end of the Azimpur Colony in Dhaka, bordering Lalbagh. Our flat was on the first floor of a three-storey building, one of four such blocks arranged around a playing field.

The Dhaka University campus was a stone's throw away; Pilkhana, the headquarters of the paramilitary East Pakistan Rifles, was not too far away either.

Sleep became impossible on the night of the 25th, as the silence was shattered by what sounded like heavy and repeated gunfire. The sound echoed in such a way that at times it felt as though the firing was happening right next to our building. Dhaka was not used to such a racket at midnight, being the sleepy provincial town that it was.

My father, then the Chief Sub-Editor at the Pakistan Observer newspaper, as well as President of the All-Pakistan Federal Journalists' Union, was at the office, doing his usual night stint at the news desk—stranded, no doubt.

He called my mother and told her that the Pakistan Army had begun its "crackdown".

The word "crackdown" did not fill me with dread. It was probably used deliberately to downplay the severity of what was unfolding in different parts of the city. It was not until the next day that I realised what catastrophe had befallen Dhaka.

Massacres and resistance

My first real sense of dread came early in the morning on the 26th, when I looked out of a window down a long road that ran through the colony to the other end, towards Pilkhana Road.

I watched as Pakistani soldiers got out of a jeep at the far end of the colony and started shooting at the roof of one of the buildings. There were two flags flying on the roof, and they wanted them taken down.

After 7 March, almost every building in the colony flew the green and red flag of Bangladesh, with the map of the country in gold at the centre of the red circle. Some also flew a black flag to commemorate the deaths of protesters in army shootings.

The soldiers did not stick around for long. Sounds of firing and explosions were coming from different directions. A sense of fear—real, genuine dread—was beginning to creep into me. And I was not the only one.

There was a trickle of people coming through our neighbourhood from other parts of the city—men, women, and children carrying whatever they could. As the morning progressed, the trickle became a flood.

They all had stories about how their areas were no longer safe. They spoke of the army storming the police headquarters and barracks at Rajarbagh, and of the police putting up stiff resistance, which spread to adjoining areas such as Shantinagar. We had relatives living in Shantinagar, which added to the anxiety.

The displaced and fleeing people narrated tales of massacres on the university campus, fighting in Pilkhana, and army shelling of Hindu-dominated areas of Old Dhaka.

People were trying to leave the city—and it was not even midday.

Khasru's heroic stance

At some point, a group of young men arrived in a jeep. They all carried weapons that looked more like hunting guns. A tall, bearded man, megaphone in hand, began making an alarming announcement. He called on the public to donate whatever weapons they had to the students so they could resist the army.

He said that Sheikh Mujib, leader of the independence movement, might have been taken prisoner, and that his son, Sheikh Kamal, might have been killed. Later, it transpired that Mujib had indeed been taken prisoner, but Kamal had not been killed.

After they drove off, some of the older onlookers identified the bearded man as Khasru, a pro-Awami League student activist. Khasru had earned some notoriety on campus for allegedly knifing a top "goonda" of the NSF, a pro-military student front, in the late 1960s.

To the pre-teen children looking on, Khasru became an instant hero. Surprisingly, however, after independence, he went on to become a film star—from a real-life hero to a make-believe one.

But such fighting talk from a heroic figure did nothing to dampen the feeling of dread that was relentlessly seeping through every sinew in my body.

By late afternoon, a deathly quiet had descended on the city, broken only by the crackling sound of distant gunfire. But the real fear of death came with the onset of evening. With the electricity cut, darkness engulfed our neighbourhood—possibly the entire city.

From the balcony of our flat overlooking the playground and Lalbagh beyond the boundary wall, the horizon glowed red in the night. Something was burning in the distance, somewhere in the old city—possibly in the vicinity of Moulvibazar. As the darkness deepened and the red glow grew brighter, it became clear that a massive fire was raging there.

East Bengal Regiment

There was a full curfew outside, with army patrols in and around the colony. With no electricity and the sound of sporadic gunfire piercing the still darkness, the tension became unbearable.

Our next-door neighbour asked us to come and join them, so there would be "safety in numbers". Or at least, talking might help to alleviate the tension and instil some hope in an otherwise hopeless situation.

Of course, the adults did the talking and tension-lifting. We children stayed quiet in the dark, convinced that a burst of gunfire would soon end our lives.

One of our neighbours kept twiddling the dial on his radio, hoping to find a station that would bring some news—any news—about what was going on. He tuned into a broadcast in Bangla, which spoke of fighting and resistance, and of course, swadhinota. But the thing that caught my attention was that the East Bengal Regiment was fighting against the Pakistan Army.

This mattered because, since the 1965 India–Pakistan war, we had been brought up on a diet of propaganda about the "heroism" of the Pakistan military, and in particular, the EBR. We were led to believe that the EBR was the best fighting unit in the whole world (in our childhood, the best way to make us believe anything was to say it was the best, biggest, or tallest in the world—not just in the country or even in Asia, but in the whole world).

Crackdown turns to war

The knowledge that the legendary EBR had rebelled and taken up arms against its "masters" created an extraordinary excitement in my mind—so much so that, for a while at least, I forgot I was about to die that night.

The night passed—a sleepless one—but I survived.

The curfew was lifted for a while the next morning, and a few of us hired bicycles to go for a ride. The campus was a short distance away, and the first hall of residence we came across was Sergeant Zohurul Huq Hall, formerly Iqbal Hall.

As we approached the main entrance, we froze in our tracks. A number of dead bodies lay in front of the anti-blast buffer wall built during the 1965 war.

We did not stay to find out who they were or whether there were more bodies inside the building. We had already caught a glimpse of what must have happened on the campus—to the students, teachers, and support staff living there.

The tales of massacre we had heard the day before from people fleeing the city were not mere "tales".

Strangely, the sight of dead bodies did not bring back the fear I had experienced the night before. Nor did I feel that my own death was imminent.

I probably did not realise it at the time, being only 12 years old, but from that point on my mind began to clear and my nerves to steady: this was not a "crackdown"—it was a war. We were going to win, and the nightmare that had descended on the city the previous night would come to an end.

The writer is a former Head, BBC Bangla and former Managing Editor, VOA Bangla. The writer can be contacted at: sabir.mustafa@gmail.com. Follow on X: @Sabir59.