On 7 May 1954 Gen Giap handed a comprehensive defeat to the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. And into the vacuum thus created the U.S was keen to feed its army.
There was a history of the white man’s genocidal killings of the brown inhabitants of the Americas. They cleansed up south and central America of its local inhabitants without meeting much resistance. And those we know as Americans, did the same to the American Indians of the north. This history, in part, went to make for the U.S self-assurance that they were far superior to all the brown people of the world.
The inhabitants of Vietnam were a brown people clad in pajamas and flimsy straw hats, much smaller than the brown populations of the Americas which the white invaders had eliminated. They therefore offered a great inducement to the Americans as a target for conquest. And so, the U.S faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 2nd Aug 1964 as an excuse to land their troops in Vietnam, and on 8 Mar 1965 they landed their first contingent of 3500 Marines near Da Nang.
After ten years of war in which they lost 58000 soldiers, having killed nearly three million Vietnamese, the U.S stood defeated, and their last evacuation helicopter took off from the roof of their embassy in Saigon on 29 April 1975.
Similarly, our path to 1971 began way back in history when a certain concept of racial disparity became etched in our subconscious. Recall, if you will, the ” Match Wanted” classified advertisement columns in the newspapers, in which those desirous of getting into wedlock laid out their requirements for the partners they were seeking.
Invariably almost all the young men of the subcontinent, while listing what they wanted in their brides, made a point of emphasizing that the brides they were looking for had to be “tall and fair.
This consensus among our maritally inclined young men, that there was little to a woman beyond these two physical attributes, were subconsciously also the indices by which they measured racial standards.
This has been with us ever since the Aryans moved into the subcontinent. The contrast and distinction between the tall and fair Aryans [the noble “Aryas”], and the dark and small local inhabitants [ the “Dasas”], who were considered to be demonic, was immediately visible, was recorded, and has never gone away. And this manifestation of our arrested mental development has remained arrested ever since.
After all, why else on earth did we, to begin with, decide that despite the fact that Mujib ur Rehman, who had won the elections with a huge majority in 71, would not be handed over political power? And having so decided, what was it that gave us the confidence that we could deny this power to the holder of a substantial public mandate, even if this meant that we may have to enforce this denial by the force of arms, and that we would prevail in doing so?
How did we hope to logistically support our army in East Pakistan when the two wings of the country were separated by a thousand miles of enemy territory, with the likelihood that this enemy would intervene in the event of a political upheaval? And how did we expect to win this contest of arms when almost the entire population of East Pakistan was against us, and no general in history had ever defeated a whole population and kept it subdued?
I have little doubt that we did not hand over power to the Awami League because we considered ourselves “superior” and treated East Pakistan like our colony. And a colony never rules the colonizer.
We had the confidence that we could deny the hand-over of power by force of arms, if necessary, because we were so far superior that if we shouted at the Bengalis at the tops of our voices, stamped our feet hard on the ground, and fired a few shots in the air, this would cow the Bengalis down, or send them scurrying into Burma.
This confidence was underpinned by stupendous reserves of stupidity and insensitivity, and I was witness to its random expression among all ranks. Without this overweening stupidity being counted as a military resource, we could not have marched into East Pakistan with our asinine bravado that we did. No one stopped to ask, “what if the Bengalis did not oblige us by running for the exits and decided to fight back?”
And so, the army crackdown in Dacca, which began under the name of operation “Searchlight” on 25 Mar 1971, ended in the surrender of our army on 16 Dec 1971. What broke that day was not just our country, but also the myth of Aryan supremacy in the subcontinent that the taller and fairer was also better!
Unfortunately, what was left of Pakistan in 1971, is under threat by the successors of the same army that brought about the disaster of 71. But they have gone a step further. They are not even willing to test who has the mandate to govern the country despite the demand of the constitution. I hear voices of mutual reassurance resounding in the hallowed halls of GHQ in a faint echo of half a century ago: ” our first volleys will scatter the people and they will never grow the heart to come out in protest again”!
Because they have decided to deny power to the most obvious candidate on the political map, having lost total credibility themselves, they are willing to bet the future of the country on a whim, moulded by a bias, and see the country being destroyed.
Where we had Yahya with his drunken cronies sheer off one half of Pakistan in 1971, we now have our Hajis and Hafiz’s ready to smash the other half into smithereens. Where the High Command of 1971 was drunk on scotch, the dwarfs of today are intoxicated by hypocrisy!
They are certain they will not be held to account for this. But every villain backs up his villainy on the basis of such hopes. And so did the likes of Mussolini, Ceausescu, Saddam, Najibullah, Sadaat, and the Shah.
If people lost their faith in the efficacy of villainy, villainy itself would cease to exist and the devil would go into retirement.
But GHQ has yet to order this retirement. So, one may expect plenty of mischief in the days ahead.
Because the dynamics and distribution of forces are different, the events which will unfold here will differ from those of the East Pakistan of 1971. Yet because the same stupidity underpins the hubris of the army today, which it did then, there is bound to be a reaction. It will probably start from resentment of the man on the street and then gather steam to infect the army itself. However this unfolds, its end is not likely to be pretty, and those responsible will have to pay. No army can permanently subdue a population standing against it.
P.S I would most humbly suggest that Gen Amjad Shuaib’s photo taken behind bars be enlarged and displayed during every conference of the Corps Commanders. This may remind them of their stupidity and create some humility among them. Unchecked arrogance makes generals go rogue.