On the day Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in Dhaka in August 1975, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto could hardly contain his happiness. He quickly made it known that his government was according recognition to the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Bangladesh headed by the usurper Khondokar Moshtaq Ahmed. Besides, he made the announcement that Pakistan was dispatching aid to Bangladesh in the form of cloth and rice.
And once Sheikh Hasina’s government collapsed in Bangladesh in August 2024, a stream of glee coursed through the Pakistani government of Shehbaz Sharif. He cheerfully told a conference of young Pakistanis in Lahore — the country’s army chief General Asim Munir was also in attendance — that the damage being done to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s statues and murals in Dhaka was comeuppance for the man who, in his convoluted view, had broken up Pakistan.
It all takes us to the issue of Pakistanis, their leading figures as well as common citizens, who have
observed Bangladesh in the five decades-plus since Bengalis waged a war, and won that war, against the Pakistan army. Much comment as also cynicism was generated by Imran Khan’s telephonic call some years ago to Sheikh Hasina, when they were both in power.
Coming in the wake of the deteriorating state of diplomatic relations between the two countries at the time, it was quite natural for people in Dhaka to be taken by surprise by the call. Many people saw in the call an ulterior motive, and among them some dug up, very correctly, certain negative comments about Bangladesh ascribed to Imran Khan in his cricket playing days.
Where the sentiments of Pakistanis regarding Bangladesh are the issue, much can be said and equally much can be written. Imran Khan, in his days in political opposition in Islamabad, appeared on number of talk shows on Pakistani television channels to argue that the actions of the Pakistan army in Bangladesh in 1971 had put all Pakistanis to shame. This is a matter of record, which is perhaps a good reason why Khan chose to phone Sheikh Hasina. Of course, such calls have a dash of diplomacy attached to them, which is only normal.
There have been other Pakistanis who have properly felt contrite at the doings of their army in
Bangladesh in 1971. Air Marshal Asghar Khan, who died quite some years ago, was to the end of his life a politician who believed that the Yahya Khan regime’s act of cutting off negotiations with the Awami League and incarcerating Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in March 1971 signalled the death of Pakistan as it had been created in 1947.
He was to be proved right. When one brings into the picture the respected Pakistani academic and political analyst Pervez Hoodbhoy, one knows that there are people in Pakistan among whom a reservoir of sympathy and support for Bengalis, in light of the genocide they were subjected to by Pakistan’s marauding army, is to be noticed.
At an Islamabad Literature Festival, Hoodbhoy bluntly informed his audience that the two-nation theory on which Pakistan had been created was as good as dead and 1971 was proof of it. He did not fail to demonstrate, at that conference, the clear differences in political priorities in Dhaka and Islamabad. While coins in Pakistan carried the image of the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, a dig at the communal structure of the country, those in Bangladesh portrayed images of little boys and little girls reading books together. That, for Hoodbhoy, was a sign of the elevated politics on which Bangladesh was grounded in comparison with perspectives in his country. His fellow Pakistanis making up the audience broke into applause.
But not all Pakistani men and women of prominence have had the liberality of comprehending what
Bangladesh went through at the hands of their soldiers back in 1971. School textbooks in Pakistan have in the more than half century which has gone by since the emergence of Bangladesh continued to give children a wrong and prejudiced idea of the 1971 war. There are whole classes of Pakistani politicians, generals and academics who have refused to analyse the issues leading up to the conflict in 1971. Their parochial assessment has been self-defeating, for they have considered Bangladesh’s War of Liberation an Indian conspiracy forged in association with Bengali ‘secessionists’.
There is the curious story of the somersault of Roedad Khan over the Bangladesh issue. In March 1971, he was secretary in Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and was present in Dhaka all the way till the army cracked down on the Bengalis. Early on the morning of 26 March, as Brigadier A.R. Siddiqi, at the time chief of the Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Public Relations, reports in his book on the crisis, an ebullient Roedad Khan made his way to the Dhaka cantonment where Tikka Khan, Khadim Hussain Raja and other military officers were busy savouring breakfast. Across the city, Bengalis were being murdered by the army. A beaming Roedad Khan told the officers, ‘Yaar, imaan taaza ho gaya’ (friends, faith has been revived).
In later years, Roedad Khan changed his tune, though. Appearing annually on Pakistani television
channels on anniversaries of Pakistan’s fall on 16 December 1971, he held Bhutto responsible for the
disaster. He also stated, improbably, that he urged Yahya Khan in March 1971 to go for a negotiated end to the political stalemate in Dhaka. That a bureaucrat, no matter how highly placed, would take the liberty of advising a powerful military dictator on the means of arriving at a solution to a purely political crisis was hard to digest. Here was Roedad Khan, trapped between his March 1971 happiness and his 21st century recollections of the past.
No Pakistani government has had the wisdom or the political courage to formally apologise to
Bangladesh over the genocide committed by the Pakistan army in Bangladesh in 1971. An apology is not likely, given that no Pakistani politician would like to incur the wrath of an army confronted with internal censure over the actions of an earlier generation of soldiers. It brings to mind the repeated appeals made to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his foreign minister Kamal Hossain by the Bhutto government in the course of the April 1974 tripartite talks involving Delhi, Dhaka and Islamabad to let the 195 Pakistani military officers listed for war crimes trials in Bangladesh go free and face a trial process conducted by Islamabad itself.
Of course, nothing came of that promise, but it is significant to remember that Bhutto’s people told Bangabandhu’s government that if the officers were put on trial in Dhaka, the Pakistan army, despite its humiliation in Bangladesh, would overthrow the civilian government in Islamabad.
This continued failure on Pakistan’s part to offer an apology to Bangladesh has stymied efforts toward productive diplomatic relations between the two countries. Some years ago, the outrageous manner in which the Nawaz Sharif government adopted a resolution in Pakistan’s national assembly condemning the trials of local war criminals in Bangladesh was a sign that Islamabad was far from expressing any contrition for the genocide perpetrated in 1971.
The mindset remains as unchanged today as it was in the early 1970s, when a visibly angry Bhutto, visiting Bangladesh in June 1974, refused to doff his cap at the National Memorial for Martyrs in Savar and refused to make any comment in the visitors’ book. He pushed the book away with the sneering statement, “Enough of this nonsense.”
Some Pakistani leaders have engaged in a careful play of words over their attitudes to Bangladesh.
Visiting the National Memorial in 1985, General Ziaul Haque told the Bangladesh media, “Your heroes are our heroes.” That was mystifying. No one asked him how the Bengalis who had been murdered by hiscountry’s soldiers could be his country’s heroes. It was a shrewd way of evading any clear statement of apology on his part. Years later, the next Pakistani military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, expressed his regret over what had happened in 1971.
Expressions of regret are not the same as expressions of apology. Musharraf got away with his remark. Benazir Bhutto, who had the dubious distinction of believing everything her father wrote to her in 1971 on the Bangladesh situation and dismissing every media report on the killings by the army as international propaganda against Pakistan, made a brief visit to Bangladesh in the times of General Ershad to meet a ‘pir’ whose predictions she had been impressed with. She never made any comment on 1971, not then, not in her years in office or in opposition.
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Here’s the truth: Pakistanis do not have to follow in the footsteps of the army officer who stormed out of the room when Pervez Hoodbhoy spoke at the Islamabad Literature Festival of Bangladesh of 1971, of the demise of the two-nation theory.
