The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 1: Land of Broken Maps

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

Before we jump into the show today, I’d like to take a moment to briefly acknowledge an important milestone we’ve reached here on Conflicted. It’s hard to believe, but today’s episode is the 50^th episode of the show. I started the podcast about five years ago, in September 2019, and in that time, I have been absolutely blown away by the kindness, warmth, and passionate feedback I’ve received from all of you, all over the world.

So, to listeners new and old, near and far, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Your encouragement, support, and constructive feedback is what keeps this train chugging along. I really, truly, am grateful. Here’s to you - and to many, many more episodes of Conflicted. As long as y’all keep listening, I’ll keep making ‘em.

Now with that bit of housekeeping out of the way, we can get down to business and jump right into the good stuff. You are listening to the first episode in a brand-new multi-part series, a topic that sits right at the intersection of two of my absolute favorite historical subjects: The Indian subcontinent and the Cold War.

Today, we’re going to be talking about something called the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Truth be told, this is a story that’s not very well known outside of South Asia; Hell, even in South Asia, you’d be hard-pressed to find a version of it that isn’t drenched in nationalist revisionism or riddled with strategic omissions. But I have to say, when you patch it all together, it is one of the most captivating, densely layered, and frankly complex topics we’ve ever covered on this show.

At its most basic level, this is the story of how, in 1971, the nation of Pakistan imploded in a vicious, irreconcilable civil war. For the better part of a year, the country tore itself apart. What started as a simple contested election, spiraled out of control and bloomed into a full-blown regional conflict involving two nations, three superpowers, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. After nine months of killing, a new nation came kicking and screaming into the world: Bangladesh – that troubled, waterlogged republic at the tip of the Bay of Bengal.

In a year when most of the Western world was still mourning the breakup of The Beatles, the Indian subcontinent was being violently re-arranged into a geopolitical jigsaw that would affect the region for decades to come. Despite its deep-cut status in historical memory, the 1971 Bangladesh War is, in the words of Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal: “the single most important watershed in the subcontinent’s post-independence history.”

“Few contemporary conflicts have been so brief and localized but had such protracted and global ramifications,” wrote another historian, “At one swoop, it led to the creation of the large and populous state of Bangladesh, and tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of the former. The consequences of the conflict continue to stalk the subcontinent.”

One of the most exciting things about this topic, at least for me, is its cast of characters. This story is populated by a fascinating ensemble of historical figures. A motley menagerie of world leaders and freedom fighters, muckraking journalists and political luminaries. We’ll meet subcontinental titans like Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and the Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. We’ll spend time with US President Richard Nixon, and his loyal attack dog Henry Kissinger. Not to mention countless other secondary characters and ordinary eyewitnesses that make this story so unique.

In this first episode, we’ll introduce our setting, meet some of the big personalities driving the events, and establish the key themes and threads that will carry us through the series.

But before we kick things off, one last little note.

In some ways, this series is a kind-of sequel to another series we did back in 2022. In that year, we spent about six months exploring the 1947 Partition of India in painstaking detail. Now if you haven’t listened to that series yet, I’d definitely recommend giving it a whirl. A deeper understanding of Partition can only enrich your appreciation of the 1971 conflict.

That said, you do NOT need to have listened to that series to understand what’s happening in this one. We’ll definitely touch on Partition, and establish the broad strokes, because as one historian put it: “Without an understanding of Partition and its effects, it is not possible to make sense of contemporary Bangladesh.” But if you need something to pass the time between episodes of this series, the Partition of India is a worthy companion to this topic.

So now, with all that preamble out of the way, we can begin our story. And it begins as all good stories do – on a dark and stormy night.

Welcome to The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 1: Land of Broken Maps.

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It’s the morning of November 8^th, 1970.

We’re in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 450 miles from land.

Out here, there’s nothing. No ships, no seabirds, no people for as far as the eye can see. Just endless water and open ocean in every direction. But something is happening out here in the middle of nowhere. Something that will alter the course of history.

This morning, the atmosphere is thin, and the water is warm, and the waves are as flat as a pane of virgin glass. In other words, the conditions are perfect.

It starts with a rushing of air.

A sudden snap of electricity.

Imagine a pair of lungs. A massive, mile-high pair of invisible lungs drawing breath, sucking air into its center. A breeze becomes a gust becomes a gale. At a molecular level, oxygen and nitrogen congeal into currents of energy, veins of matter flowing back to a restless, hungry heart.

The wind gets faster, the air gets hotter, and vapor rises like a pillar into the sky. As the warm air soars upward, newer, colder air rushes into replace it; and this process repeats itself, over and over, faster and faster. Rise and replace. Inward and upward. In a matter of hours, a self-sustaining reaction has been achieved.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how cyclones are born.

Above the equator, tropical storms are called “hurricanes” or “typhoons”; But here, in the Indian Ocean, they are called cyclones. And this cyclone is getting very strong, very fast.

By this point, the lungs have formed a body. Thick clouds, black as squid ink, begin to rotate around the epicenter, drawing air in and intensifying the storm. It’s barely noon, but visibility is almost non-existent. The power of the cyclone has beaten the sky black-and-blue. The only light comes from twitching tendrils of electricity; spasms of lightning that flicker in the gloom.

And as November 8^th becomes November 9^th, the storm continues to spin like a massive wheel, drawing more wind, more energy, more power into its maelstrom. It is, to borrow a phrase from one writer, a “ocean-fed engine”. By the third day, it is wider than a thousand football fields, taller than any commercial flight path, and stronger than ten thousand nuclear warheads – and like all wheels, it is on the move.

The Bhola Cyclone, as it will become known (B-H-O-L-A, Bhola), is heading northeast. In two days, it will make landfall. In two days, it will cross 800 miles of open ocean and slam into the most densely populated region on the planet:

A place called Bengal.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BENGAL

For most people west of the Prime Meridian, ‘Bengal’ [that’s B-E-N-G-A-L] refers to an endangered tiger or a sports team from Cincinnati. But for 250 million people, Bengal means home. This area, this region, is situated at the very heart of our story. So before we go any further, we need to understand where this place is, what it looks like, who lives there, and why.

For me, personally, history only truly makes sense when I can picture the geographic space where the action is happening. After all, you can’t have drama without a stage. So let’s hit pause on the perfect storm, and pull out our maps for a quick - hopefully painless - geography lesson.

In your head, picture the Indian subcontinent, that huge, angular landmass that juts down into the Indian Ocean. Now everyone visualizes things differently, but to me, the subcontinent has always a resembled a shark’s tooth, with India forming the point of the tooth, like an upside-down triangle. And with areas to the north like Pakistan and Nepal forming the ‘gums’ above it.

Well, Bengal is the area just slightly to the east of the tooth, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers pour down from the Himalayas, fan out into a delta of hundreds of different channels and marshes, before emptying into the ocean. As the historian Willem van Schendel writes in his chronicle of the region:

“Imagine yourself high in the air over the Himalayas. Look down and you see a forbidding landscape of snow-capped mountains and harsh vegetation. But now look to the southeast and discover an immense floodplain stretching between the mountains and the sea. That shimmering green expanse is Bangladesh. [Bengal]”

For any Americans grasping for a stateside analogue of Bengal, think Louisiana or the Carolina low country. It’s wet, it’s hot, and the food’s pretty damn good. Today, of course, Bengal’s rivers are clotted with plastics and particulates, choked from above by a level of air pollution that’s shaved an average of 6.8 years off the lifespan of its residents. But for most of its history, the Bengal delta was an undeniably beautiful place.

One American diplomat in the 1970s said that the country was “so emerald green it almost hurt your eyes.”There were “wonderful rice paddy fields, rivers with fantastic dhows with tattered sails,” another remembered, “Everything was so flat you could see what looked like boats sailing through rice paddy fields. They were actually miles away.”

It was, in the words of one historian, “a great green Eden of water and vegetation”

For thousands of years, and hundreds of generations, Bengalis hauled and reaped a living from those abundant waters. Rice and fish, cotton and jute. And across the long centuries, political realities shifted as often as the fickle waterways themselves. In many ways, the constantly changing geography of Bengal is a perfect metaphor for its political history - always rearranging, always in a state of flux. Kings coming and going. Trade waxing and waning. Empires advancing and receding with the regularity of lunar tides.

But then, about 400 years ago, everything changed.

Over the years, Bengalis had seen many different ships, from many different shores. Trade junks form China, sloops from Sri Lanka, carracks from North Africa. But in the late 1600s, a new flag fluttered off-shore. It was red and white, striped with the cross of St. George.

The British East India Trading Company had arrived.

Now it would be disingenuous to suggest that the arrival of the British in Bengal was a sudden, concerted, or even malicious development. As if an armada of greedy colonizers spontaneously assembled on the horizon with sharp knives and dull consciences; just waiting to murder, enslave and exploit. In reality, the British conquest of India was slower, messier, and some ways accidental.

By the early 16^th century, maritime technology in Europe had developed to the point where young, hungry, ethically flexible explorers could sail far and fast in search of lucrative trade opportunities; And in the Bengal delta, they struck a goldmine. It was the “richest, most fertile and densely populated region in India” writes historian Lawrence James. Not that they were the first to find it; As a conduit between India’s inland rivers and the open ocean, the delta had always been an important trade hub. A cultural estuary, as well as a literal one. As Van Schendel writes:

“It was in the coastal waterways of Bengal that Southeast Asians, North Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Arabs, Central Asians, Persians, Ethiopians and Tibetans met from very early times.”

Archeologists have even found Greek coins dating back to 300 B.C. in the Bengali mud.

But these Englishmen were different. They were not just passing through; they were here to stay. In a few short decades, the East India Company had established fortified outposts at the peripheries of Mughal India, like ticks on a gilded elephant. And the most profitable of these outposts was in Bengal. The English quickly discovered why Dutch pirates called Bengal the ‘fat meadow’. It was bursting with wealthy, opportunity, and a fragmented local government that was easily manipulated.

Once the Company wormed its fingers into Bengal’s guts, they squeezed, and squeezed hard. Rules did not seem to apply to these pale, hygiene-challenged Europeans. They bullied, bribed and bankrupted native Bengalis while their ships’ holds grew pregnant with riches bound for England. But the Bengalis were not content to let the East India Company siphon their wealth and starve their children.

There were some who resisted the slow crush of English encroachment.

On June 23, 1757, a massive army assembled on the floodplains of western Bengal. 50,000 men with a single purpose: Kick the British out for good / once and for all. After decades of wheeling, dealing and stealing, the Bengali army was going to cut the East India Company out of their delta like a tumor. And what an army it was. Cannons and cavalry and war elephants; glittering spears swaying like a field of grass; all the might of Mughal India brought to bear.

The battle itself promised to be ugly, but the chosen battlefield was anything but. Beneath mango trees and monsoon rains, the Bengali forces marched across a “liquid waterscape where islands of land appeared to float amid network of streams and rivers”, according to historian William Dalrymple. From a distance, it might’ve looked as if the entire army was walking on water.

On the other side of the battlefield, a tiny force of red-coated Company men stood soaking in the rain. English infantry, barely 3,000 of them, dwarfed by a native army fifteen times their size. On paper, the corporate mercs of the East India Company never stood a chance. The math was immutable. The odds, insurmountable. But the notorious EIC had a weapon more powerful than any cannon, musket or war elephant. They had a traitor on the inside. As they say, the pen is mightier than the sword- especially when it’s writing a check.

It was a smart solution to a vexing obstacle. The problem with Indians, the English decided, was that there just so damn many of them. The population of Bengal alone was five times that of Great Britain. But if you could turn them against each other, play them off each other, find the fault lines and rip them open…you didn’t have to get your hands bloody at all. Let them eat themselves alive, and scoop up what was left. It was a tactic the British would use over and over and over again in the years to come; and on that rainy day in 1757, it worked like a charm.

At a key moment during the battle, a large portion of the Bengali army turned their backs on their friends and defected; “A general rout ensued” was the way the British commander described it to his superiors back in London. And just like that, the East India Company achieved full control of India’s richest province. Measured in death, the Battle of Plassey, as it came to be known, was only a “skirmish by European standards’, according to one historian. Out of 53,000 men on the battlefield, and only 522 were killed.

“No one who had taken part in the battle of Plassey imagined for a moment that it had marked a turning point in British and Indian history,” writes Lawrence James, “For them it was merely a solution to a local problem: the future security of the Company’s operations in Bengal.”

And yet, the consequences of that ‘skirmish’ altered the course of world history. As Willem van Schendel writes:

“For the British, the victory at Plassey marked not just the fact that it gained commercial, military and administrative control of an area much larger than Britain and with five times its population; it meant the beginning of empire. They used Bengal’s riches to conquer the rest of India and other parts of Asia. For the people of Bengal, the British victory at Plassey meant not just the emergence of yet another foreign overlord. It meant the beginning of European domination, new forms of capitalist exploitation, a racially ordered society and profound cultural change.”

British colonial rule was born in Bengal. And for the next two hundred years, they shook that mango tree for all it was worth. It was, writes James, “the key that opened the treasure house”. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that of all the trinkets English sailors hauled back home, one of the first was a simple colloquialism that foretold the subcontinent’s fate. As Dalrymple writes:

“One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.”

The long colonial history of India is tragic, complex, and easily capable of sustaining several years’ worth of episodes. We, however, have a schedule to keep; We gotta keep moving. So rather than get bogged down in the myriad intrigues and atrocities of the East India Company, or the Raj that replaced it, we need to head back to the future. All the way to the 20^th century.

In August of 1947, not long before our story takes place, the British flag was no longer flying over Bengal. The crusty stripes of the Union Jack had been replaced with a white crescent moon and star, floating on a field of green.

The flag of the nation of Pakistan.

BECOMING EAST PAKISTAN

[AUDIO] contextual newsree

“On August 14^th, 1947, a new nation was born. And several weeks later, the infant country, Pakistan, took its place among the free governments of the world, tin the family of United Nations. Carved out of the subcontinent of India, Pakistan ranks 5^th in population among the countries of the world. Its land area is split into two non-contiguous geographical units in the eastern and western sections of what had been Britain’s Indian empire.”

When the British conquered India, they built a time bomb.

At the Battle of Plassey, rain-soaked, smoke-choked, Eden-green Plassey, a fuse was lit. And that long, winding wick trailed/slithered across the centuries, building and burning and intensifying, until finally, in the mid-20^th century, it detonated.

The truth was – the British had never really understood their South Asian colony. Not its land, not its religions, and certainly not its people. To the princelings and politicians back in London, India was a glorified ATM. A subcontinental trust fund. But they quickly discovered that managing an area of 4.4 million square miles, filled with 170 million people, hundreds of languages and dozens of faiths is no simple task.

The only way the Brits could make sense of all this dizzying diversity was to think inside the box: Hindus in this box. Muslims in that box. And other little bitty boxes for the Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and all the rest. Contain, catalogue, and categorize. Four thousand years of history, crammed into a filing cabinet. As Willem van Schendel writes:

“It was under British rule that, for the first time, specific versions of Hindu and Muslim identity became politically acute. This resulted from a combination of factors that were not restricted to Bengal but concerned all of British India. First, British attempts to ‘read ’ the colonized leaned heavily on categorization by creed. They canonized religious identities in legal practice (for example personal law) and in the population censuses, which sought to order society by grouping people according to faith, sect and caste, as well as by ‘ race ’, ‘ tribe ’ and language.”

Over time, those boxes became just as real to the people in them as the colonialists who’d built them. The British certainly did not invent religious tensions in India – after all, Hindus and Muslims had been fighting and killing each other since the 8^th century – but under the Crown, those divisions became inflamed and ossified. Made permanent with lawyer’s ink. In other words, under a British flag, India’s two major religions learned to think of themselves as distinct, separate, and fundamentally adversarial. It’s a big subcontinent, they said, but it ain’t big enough for the both of us.

And as those Royal colors went up and down the flagpole - day after day, year after year - the time bomb kept on ticking.  

By the summer of 1947, it was ready to blow.

With its treasuries emptied by the financial strain of World War 2, and buckling under pressure from independence activists like the famous Mohandas Gandhi, Great Britain decided that it had no choice but to give up the colony it had once called its ‘crown jewel’. As one historian put it:

“The end of WWII financially overdrew Britain, and India was no longer the famous storehouse of rubies and spices that had helped finance Britain’s rise to world power. After the war, the government had to beg for a $3.75 billion loan from the United States (US); after months of difficult negotiations, the money was approved only in May 1946.

Towards the end of WWII, the Indian subcontinent became a thorn and almost impossible to rule by the British Raj. Strikes were incessant and held by everybody from tram drivers and press workers to postmen and industrial workers in cotton mills, potteries and factories.”

It didn’t seem real, but after 200 years, the British were finally leaving India, coattails between their legs. But an empty chair never stays empty for long. Naturally, India would need new leadership, a new government, to fill that vacuum. The question on everyone’s mind was: who would it be? Who could possibly have a mandate to rule over a region as massive and diverse as the Indian subcontinent? Well, after decades at the forefront of the independence movement, the Hindu-majority Congress Party seemed poised to inherit the scepter of power from the departing British.

And that made the minority religions in India, especially Muslims, very, very nervous. As one contemporary told the journalist Anam Zakaria:

“The Muslims felt very threatened, especially the young and educated ones. They asked themselves, “When the British go away, what will happen to us?” They felt that their jobs might become insecure, they might be victimized, discriminated against, their careers in jeopardy.”

Muslims were a sizable minority in the subcontinent –about 25% percent of the population. But they were still a minority. In a democratic system dominated by Hindu representatives, Muslim politicians were terrified of becoming second-class citizens, shoved into the wings and relegated to accessories in a nation that could never truly be theirs. Was democracy even democracy, they asked, if your stake in it was too small to be impactful? The tyranny of the majority loomed large in their minds.

Hindus and Muslims were so different, they argued, so incompatible in creed and culture, that the two groups could never hope to live together peacefully. For all intents and purposes, they weren’t just two different religions, but two different nations entirely. This “Two-Nation Theory”, as it came to be known, was passionately argued by the future founder of Pakistan, the prickly, rail-thin, London-educated demagogue, Muhammed Ali Jinnah:

AUDIO [1:30

“Hindu India and Muslim India must be separated, because the two nations are entirely distinct and different, and in some ways antagonistic to each other. Let me tell you some of the differences […] One India is impossible to realize. It will inevitably mean the Muslim will be transferred from domination of the British to caste Hindu rules. We will be outnumbered 3-to-1. Which will mean one nation ruling another, by means of the ballot box.”

But what if there was another solution? Jinnah asked. What if Hindus and Muslims didn’t have to share a country at all? What if the Muslims could have a chunk of the subcontinent all to themselves? A so-called ‘homeland’ for Islam and its followers?

Well, that idea was the seed that eventually became Pakistan.

“Pak”, writes journalist Declan Walsh, “is the Urdu word for ‘clean’, so ‘Pakistan’ translates literally as ‘Land of the Pure”. But in practice, the creation of this new nation was anything but a clean cut.

After many long months of tortured, table-pounding negotiations, it was decided by the British and their Indian successors that some kind of separation was inevitable. Mr. Jinnah was getting what he wanted, or at least what he said he wanted. A Partition – or a split - would have to take place. The subcontinent would be carved up into two new nations, India and Pakistan, based on religious identity. In theory, any area that was majority Muslim would belong to Pakistan, and any area that was majority Hindu would belong to India.

The result was a disaster.

Frankly there is not even an adequate adjective to encapsulate the horrors that Partition unleashed. As the Indian writer Shashi Thraroor puts it: “Geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart.” The Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal, agreed: “India and Pakistan crossed the threshold from colonial subjection to freedom amid rivers of blood.”

The British, anxious to wipe their hands clean of their former colony, organized a partition that was, in the words of writers Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, “hastily devised and extremely sloppy.” Like a party guest who’s stopped having fun, the British were itching to leave the problems of India behind. Consequently, what should have been a careful and thoughtful allocation of territory to each nation was rushed and haphazard. Completed in weeks rather than years.

The British talked like surgeons, but worked like butchers. The new borders, drawn by a paper-pushing judge who didn’t know Delhi from Detroit, zigged and zagged through ancient communities with schizophrenic abandon. When Independence Day finally arrived on August 15^th, 1947, millions of people woke up in the wrong country. According to these new maps, they were on the wrong side of the border, surrounded by people who did not want them there. Hindus in Muslim territory, Muslims in Hindu territory, Sikhs with no territory at all.  It was a cartographic catastrophe that sparked ethnic cleansing, and a refugee crisis, and in the end, ordinary people paid the price.

AUDIO:

“The rains come to India. It’s the monsoon season. Fields are flooded, rivers overflow their banks, and all the time the bloodshed goes on. As the new dominions of Pakistan and India take over their own affairs, communal hatred flares up in the Punjab. Fleeing from their looted blood-stained towns comes a new exodus, a million displaced persons. Independence has not yet brought them peace. Rejoicing turned quickly into horror and mourning. Throughout this vast land, Hindus and Muslims seek safety in new surroundings. Peace loving people, theirs is the real tragedy. The fortunate few flee in army transports or buses […] 1 million people become refugees overnight.”

All that tension, that fear, the polarization and prejudice, it had to go somewhere. The time bomb went off. And when the dust finally settled, anywhere from half a million to two million people were dead. 15 million were displaced. At least 75,000 women had been kidnapped and raped, and countless families had been destroyed. The scale of the misery was almost unimaginable. Again, there is no adjective for it. One Bengali poet attempted to capture his feelings in a poem entitled ‘Broken Bengal’:

“They shook violently the roots of the land. And people were flung about who knows where, None kept account of who perished or survived. … The two parts of the land stretch out their thirsty hands Towards each other. And in between the hands Stands the man-made filth of religion, barbed wire.”

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Across India and Pakistan, tens of millions grieved; but in conference rooms in Washington and Moscow, they shrugged their shoulders, sent flowers to the embassies, and put new maps on the wall.

And the new map of South Asia looked very odd indeed.

The majority of the subcontinent - the shark’s tooth, as it were - was claimed by India. In terms of shape, it was solid, it was cohesive, it made sense. But the new nation of Pakistan was a bit more unorthodox. “Pakistan,”observed the writer Hajari Nisid, “would be one of the strangest-looking countries on the postwar map of the world.”

Another writer put it a bit more indelicately, calling Pakistan a “freak of history”.

Prior to Partition, Muslims were scattered all over India, but they were most densely concentrated in the northwestern and northeastern areas of the subcontinent. Punjab in the West, and Bengal in the East. Two regions that were a thousand miles apart. But because they were both majority Muslim, they were tethered together, and repackaged into one very odd-looking country.

Historian K.M Panikkar used a simple, but memorable metaphor to help visualize the new state of affairs: “Hindustan (or India) is the elephant…and Pakistan the two ears.”

Apart from their shared faith, the two ears/halves of Pakistan could not have been more different. As Hajari Nisid explains: “One half would encompass the fierce northwestern marches of the Indian subcontinent, from the Khyber Pass down to the desert that fringed Karachi; the other half would include the swampy, typhoon-tossed Bengal delta in the far northeast.”

“Any country born with two parts separated by 1000 miles of a hostile country, formed solely because the two shared a common religion,” wrote another historian, “would be considered to have a serious birth defect.”

But there was at least one person who wasn’t bothered at all by this seemingly dysfunctional geography. And that was the founder and midwife of Pakistan himself, the aforementioned Muhammed Ali Jinnah. The Quaid-e-Azam, or “Great Leader” as he was called, claimed that God was the glue that would keep the two halves together:

“Yes, West Pakistan is separated from East Pakistan by about a thousand miles of the territory of India. The first question a student from abroad should ask himself is – how can this be? How can there be unity of government between areas so widely separated? I can answer this question in one word. It is “faith”: faith in Almighty God, in ourselves and in our destiny.”

He had no idea how wrong he was.

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It’s August 1^st, 1969.

22 years after Partition.

We’re in the city of Lahore, in West Pakistan.

Lahore (that’s L-A-H-O-R-E) is not the largest or most important metropolis in the subcontinent; it’s not the oldest or the most culturally significant, but today, in the summer of ’69, it is the center of the universe. Today its residents are preparing to receive a very, very important guest. Across the city, the atmosphere is tense. The roads are blocked, the cops are out in force, and the pulse of urban activity is more than a little elevated.

And if you were to trace all this activity like a thread, if you were to follow the sirens and traffic and men with guns, you would arrive at the gates of the Lahore airport. Normally, it looks like any other airport. Planes landing and departing, people coming and going. But today, the airport is a fortress. The tarmac has been cleared, the terminals emptied.

Only one plane matters today.

Arrayed on the tarmac, awaiting the arrival of this very important plane, is all the pomp and pageantry the Pakistani army can muster. A bagpipe orchestra has been arranged, silk carpets have been unfurled, and at the head of the procession, standing in full regalia, President Yahya Khan cannot help but look at his watch. This show, this spectacle, is his responsibility – and he intends for it to go off without a hitch or glitch. And any moment, any second now, the plane he’s waiting for (carrying his guest) will touch down.

Yahya Khan is the first of many important characters in this story. So, I want you to take a second to commit his name to memory. That’s Y-A-H-Y-A (Yahya), K-H-A-N (Khan).

In 1969, Yahya Khan is the leader and President of Pakistan. Although ‘President’ is a somewhat charitable descriptor. “Military Dictator” would be a more accurate term. In the twenty or so years since Partition, Pakistan’s experiments with representative democracy had not gone well.

There is a common misconception that democracies blink into existence fully-formed. That it arrives on the doorstep of new nations pre-assembled and ready to use. In reality, democracies are more like an IKEA table from hell. There are so many parts and pieces, some of them missing from the box entirely. The instruction manual was written long ago by people very far away. It has to be built, step-by-tedious-step. And in all probability, it’s going to start a fight. Some nations manage to power through and assemble the IKEA table of democracy, wobbly though it may be. Pakistan, unfortunately, never got past the cover page. 

In the hangover after Partition, Pakistan found itself at a terrible disadvantage compared to its estranged twin, India. It was smaller, it was poorer, and it was all but bereft of resources. The truth was, Pakistan got a raw deal in the divorce, inheriting only fragments and table scraps of the Raj’s treasury, infrastructure and civil service. Hindustan, muttered the Pakistanis, had received the lion’s share. It was an opinion that was not in dispute, least of all to the architect of Partition himself, the last British Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who admitted at the time:

“Administratively it is the difference between putting up a permanent building, or a tent. As far as Pakistan is concerned, we are putting up a tent. We can do no more.”

Initially, Pakistan’s leaders promised to build a democracy for their people. National elections would be held, representatives would be chosen, and a Parliament in the British style would be assembled. But it never happened. 

Pakistan was afflicted with what one writer called “post-natal blues”.

The country’s founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, died of tuberculosis in 1948. The Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951. Like a sprinter who trips right out of the gate, Pakistan just couldn’t ever seem to find its footing/feet. Political uncertainty became political chaos. Protests became riots. And after ten years of assassinations, half-baked Constitutions and postponed elections, the Men in Khaki decided they had to step in.

In 1958, the Pakistani Army pulled a coup and declared martial law.

Enough pretending, they said. This representative democracy thing is (a nice idea, but) clearly not working out. Maybe someday, if you’ve all been good boys and girls, we can try it again. Once we’re secure, and stable and back on our feet. But for now, just a for a little while, the men with guns need to be in charge. Besides, who else can protect you? Who else can keep you safe? Not only from yourselves, but from those bloodthirsty Hindus across the border? You need us. You will always need us.

There were millions of Pakistanis who were less than thrilled about having their lives dictated from a military base, but counter-arguments tend to fall apart when someone shoves a gun in your mouth. And so, the die was cast. In the two decades after Partition, Pakistan was quickly transformed into what historian Ayesha Jalal called a “sprawling military barrack”.

->

“The coup leaders were confident that the army was the only institution in the country that could provide the firm hand that Pakistan needed to put it on the right track,” writes Willem van Schendel, “To this end they abolished parliamentary democracy, locked up troublesome politicians, curtailed the judiciary, muzzled the press, suspended citizen’s rights and introduced martial law. Now army men took control of the civil service, and the executive branch of the state became all-powerful.”

And in the summer of 1969, the apex of that all-powerful executive branch was our new friend, President Yahya Khan.

“Yahya was not just Pakistan’s president,” writes journalist Gary J. Bass, “but also its foreign minister, defense minister, and chief martial law administrator”. In other words, Yahya Khan was the face of the entire military regime.

And what a face it was.

Carved in a stone tablet somewhere, there’s a rule that all dictators must have some iconic piece of facial hair. And Yahya Khan was no exception. The 52-year-old President was very proud of his “impossibly bushy eyebrows, which curled skyward above the sides of his eyes,” according to writers Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, “Yahya loved his eyebrows. He felt they were the true source of his strength, just like Samson’s hair. So he twisted the center of each brow up to a point, thinking it gave him a distinguished air.”

Yes, Yahya was, in the words of Gary J. Bass, a “beefy man, with amazing spiky black eyebrows and slicked-back gray hair cut with a white streak.”

Once upon a waistline, Yahya had been a slim, trim soldier. As a young officer in World War 2, he’d driven tanks for the British and killed Nazis in North Africa. After the war and Partition, he rose through the ranks, paid his dues, and got in good with the junta. Like so many strongmen before him, Yahya failed upward with astonishing velocity, and by 1969, he looked around and found himself at the top of the mountain. It was his turn to be President, and he relished the privileges that came along with it.

Time and vice take their toll on us all, and they exacted a heavy price from Yahya. The svelte soldier had become a middle-aged man with a bad memory and a beer gut. Pakistan’s President was, in the words of Ayesha Jalal, a “determined drunkard”, who loved cheap scotch and cold beer. And when the cold beer ran out, room temp would do just fine.

The sad truth was, Yahya’s mental faculties didn’t need any additional dulling. The open secret of the military regime was that the man in charge wasn’t the brightest bayonet in the armory. He was, according to one historian, “equipped with an uncluttered—some would say vacant—mind.” “His powers of understanding and of taking imaginative decisions,” remembered one close advisor, “were extremely limited.” US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would later refer to Yahya as a “big, honorable, stupid man.”

Indeed, it is an old truism of statecraft, that sometimes the man at the top doesn’t have to be a genius or a visionary. He just needs to stand up straight, smile for the cameras, and keep the right people rich. Yahya Khan – simple, drunk, dutiful Yahya Khan – would never mess up a good thing.

But history had other plans.

Yahya knew that people called him stupid. He heard the whispers, the little jokes at his expense. He saw the way foreign dignitaries smirked at him; noticed how journalists simplified their questions for him. For a proud soldier like Yahya, it was a sting that no amount of scotch could numb. But someday soon, he promised himself, he would prove them all wrong.

Because Yahya Khan was a man with IDEAS.

And he had big ideas for Pakistan.

His predecessors in the junta had been content to prolong the military’s unquestioned stewardship over Pakistan’s government. But Yahya, writes van Schendel, “chose a different path.”

No leader in Pakistan’s history had ever been able to bring democracy – real democracy – to its people. Not even Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the beloved Quaid-e-Azam. Yahya Khan decided he would be the one to succeed where they had all failed. He would ease his benevolent boot from the nation’s neck and organize the first free and fair elections in Pakistan’s history. He could practically see it written in the textbooks. Yahya Khan, the great liberator. The People’s General. It would be his legacy. No one would dare call him stupid then.

And so, in March of 1969, Yahya got in front of a microphone and made a promise to 125 million people:

“I promise to bring representative, full, free and impartial democracy and that is all. Once that is done, I will go.”

After many long years of avoidance and false starts, it was time to bite the ballot. National elections, Yahya declared, would be held in 18 months. From Lahore to Dacca, Baluchistan to Bengal, tens of millions of Pakistanis would go to the polls and elect their representatives for a national Parliament. Once convened, that Parliament would draft a constitution, which would serve as the blueprint for a democratic Pakistan. It was a long process, with many, many steps, but Yahya had taken the first and arguably most difficult one.

“It would make Yahya something akin to George Washington,” write Carney and Miklian, “who famously gave up the presidency at the end of his second term in order to enshrine the peaceful transition of power into the lifeblood of the United States.”

Pakistan’s military, of course, would remain as a protector of the new government and help usher in the transition. But the day-to-day running of the country would fall to politicians, not soldiers. Yahya explained his intentions to a Western journalist in the following exchange.

AUDIO:  

“Q: After these elections, is it your intention to remain as President? Or will you, as you have said many times, go back to being an Army man?” A: “Well my intention of remaining President has nothing to do with me. The process of democracy, the government, will elect their President. And unless I offer myself for that election, I can’t remain a President. And I’m not offering myself to be President. Q: You will not? A: No, I’m not offering myself to be President. My temperament is not that way, my makeup is not that way. I joined the Army as a professional soldier, I remain so. My biggest aim is to go back to my Army. I have three years left of service before I retire. In the process, if I happen to be [in charge], I can take pride in having done a service to my country in restoring democracy. As a soldier.”… “Im hoping this will go through. Does that answer your question?”

And now, five months after his historic announcement, President Yahya Khan is at the Lahore airport, waiting on windy tarmac for a very important guest.

As he stands at attention, glancing at his watch, Yahya’s bushy eyebrows are twisted into perfect points. He’s even less hungover than usual. Needless to say, he wants to look his best for this occasion. After all, it’s not every day you receive a personal visit from the most powerful man in the world.

Suddenly, Yahya hears the squawk of a radio and the roar of jet engines overheard. The plane he has been waiting for all morning is making its approach. Air Force One, personal aircraft of the President of the United States, has arrived.

With a bump and a hiss, the gangway scrapes against the asphalt. Secret Service agents swarm like baby spiders from the hatch of the plane. And a few minutes later, the guest of honor struts out onto the tarmac.

US President Richard Nixon, “Tricky Dick” himself, is finally here.

In the cutthroat, unsentimental world of international politics, it’s not easy to make friends.

There are alliances and agreements and partnerships of convenience, but very rarely do heads of state truly click. Well, Richard Nixon and Yahya Khan most definitely clicked. To paraphrase writer Gary J. Bass: “Nixon liked very few people, but he did like Yahya Khan’.

“It doesn’t come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy”, Nixon once admitted. But it did come natural with Yahya. Nixon liked the ruddy, rotund General for the same reasons he liked most Pakistanis: They were strong, straightforward, and best of all – they were not Indian. Nixon did not like Indians at all. He felt that they were arrogant, duplicitous, and no friends of the United States. “Pakistan, on the other hand, “is a country I would like to do everything for,” Nixon once said, ”The people have less complexes than the Indians. The Pakistanis are completely frank, even when it hurts.”

Yahya Khan liked Nixon for reasons that were more…tangible. In 1969, the United States was, in the words of one historian, “the planet’s biggest weapons manufacturer.”

Yahya Khan was certainly no political savant, but he had a soldier’s intuition. He was well aware, that by holding national elections and extending universal suffrage to 125 million people overnight, he was pushing his country out on a very wobbly limb. If something went wrong, if things went bad, if civic duty became civil unrest, he wanted his boys in Khaki strapped with all the best American toys. Ammunition, artillery, bombs and planes. The very same hardware that was pulping villagers in Vietnam and manning the checkpoints in West Germany. Pakistan’s people had never had democracy before – who knows what they might try and do with it. Maybe, yet again, the firm hand of the military would be regrettably required.

So, with guns glittering behind his eyes, President Yahya Khan rolled out the red carpet for President Richard Nixon. Gifts were exchanged, martinis were drained, and after a brief, obligatory tour around Lahore, the two heads of state retired to Yahya’s personal office.

Like a vanishing sunset, Nixon’s trademark rictus grin faded and an expression of grave seriousness crept upon his face. He ordered his Secret Service detail to leave the room immediately and close the door. He wanted to speak to Yahya, his friend, alone. The agents obeyed without a word, and left Yahya and Nixon in solitude. The security detail stood outside the heavy wooden door for about an hour, thinking about…. whatever Secret Service agents think about.

Well eventually, that door opened back up again; and when it did, Yahya had his guns. President Nixon had agreed to sell Pakistan a new batch of American-made weapons, including B-57 bombers and armored personnel carriers.

But nothing in politics is free, even among friends. Nixon had also gotten something out of the deal. Something very near and dear to his heart. A state secret that he could only trust with a handful of people. But the answer to that particular question mark will have to wait until later in this series.

For now, all that matters is that Yahya Khan had gotten what he’d wanted. And that night, as he sank into a warm bath of boozy tranquility, Pakistan’s president could not help but admire his own ingenuity. In the space of six months, he had secured a democratic future for his country and a weapons deal to protect it.

Yes, Yahya Khan was feeling very, very content.

But 1000 miles away from Lahore, in the *other* half of Pakistan – EAST PAKISTAN – things were not so sanguine.

---- -MUSIC BREAK ----

It’s the summer of 1970.

One year after Richard Nixon’s big visit to West Pakistan.

We, however, are in East Pakistan. A thousand miles away from the smoke-filled rooms in Lahore. We’re in Dacca, the largest city and de facto capital of Pakistan’s eastern wing. That’s D-A-C-C-A (Dacca), although sometimes you’ll see it spelled D-H-A-K-A.

In 1947, when independence from the British had been achieved after many long years of struggle, Dacca was a beacon of optimism. Where hopes for a brighter future outweighed the humiliations of the past.

“Euphoric crowds in Dacca had gathered to celebrate with abandon the first Independence Day, wrote one historian, “Visible is a sea of green-colored Pakistani flags with crescent and star. Festivities included march-pasts and gun salutes. They show desperately poor people hugging each other, wiping tears from their eyes.”

At the time of independence, Pakistan was more than a new nation – it was a promise. After all the trauma Bengalis had suffered under British rule – the bigotry, the exploitation, the famines and the poverty– things were going to change. Now that they ruled over themselves, the bad old days were behind them.

But that is not what happened.

Two decades after Independence, in 1970, the crowds are anything but euphoric. No one is waving green flags anymore – not In Bengal. For them, the star & crescent is nothing but an empty, broken promise. A lie, 23 years in the telling.

The voice you heard a moment ago is the voice of a man named Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Although from this point forward, we’ll refer to him as Mujib; That’s M-U-J-I-B. Like Yahya Khan, Mujib is another very important character in our story. He is the loudest, angriest voice in a place full of loud, angry voices. He is the leader of a new and rapidly growing political movement in East Pakistan.

[MUJIB RALLY AUDIO]

^ See above. Just a sample to re-establish.

Among Bengalis, Mujib is a giant - literally. Standing a full foot taller than the average Bengali, Mujib looms over the podium. He dresses all in white, except a black vest, and a black mustache, and a pair of black glasses with lenses a quarter-inch thick. As a teenager, Mujib had almost lost his sight to glaucoma; but a risky surgery had been able to save his eyes. And now, at the age of 51, those eyes are wide open to the inequities he sees every day in Pakistan’s long-neglected Eastern wing.

Like most people in East Pakistan, Mujib is pissed off.

And he has a lot to be pissed off about.

To understand the root of the unrest in East Pakistan, we have to once again consider the bizarre geography of the country, circa 1970. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“Pakistan was in those days a country divided. The British, leaving India, had decided to create a single Muslim state in the subcontinent. To do so, they had to lump together Punjabis, Pashtuns, Baluchis, and Sindhis in the northwest with Bengalis far away in the east. Out of the bloody chaos of Partition, Pakistan was born as a cartographic oddity: a unitary state whose two territories did not connect.”

The country was, as the novelist Salman Rushdie put it:

“A fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God.”

But “Islam”, writes historian Ayesha Jalal, “proved to be dubious cement.” It was the design flaw in the nation’s architecture. The defect that doomed Pakistan from its inception.

“From the very beginning, writes the academic Nitish Sengupta, “the people of East Bengal found themselves in a dilemma. They had become part of Pakistan by giving primacy to their Muslim identity. But culturally they were very different from the people of what came to be known as ‘West Pakistan’”

Geographically, East and West Pakistan were as far from each other as Berlin and Moscow, or New York City and Tampa, Florida. But culturally, the gulf was even wider. As a contemporary journalist from the New York Times commented:

“It is hard to imagine two races or regions any more different. They speak different languages—Urdu in the West, Bengali in the East—eat different foods—meat and grain in the West, fish and rice in the East—and have almost contradictory cultures, for the Bengalis are volatile and love politics and literature while the Punjabis are more stolid and prefer governing and soldiering.”

Granted, those are sweeping, simplistic generalizations from a foreigner, but the differences were indeed stark. West Pakistanis and East Pakistanis looked different, talked different, even worshipped different. It was as if these two incompatible populations had been stuffed into a single t-shirt by a strict mother and told to ‘get along’.

Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had assured his anxious followers that these sharp differences – what he euphemistically called “angularities” - would eventually smooth themselves out. Jinnah thought that the “humps and bumps of religion, language, and culture,” as one historian put it, “would simply disappear as Pakistan consolidated itself.”

“In the course of time,” Jinnah prophesized, “all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, […] will vanish.”

But those angularities only cut deeper with every passing year. The truth was, West Pakistanis tended to look down on their countrymen in East Pakistan. As a historian from West Pakistan named Pervez Hoodbhoy remembered shamefully:

Even as a school child in Karachi of the 1950s, my friends and I somewhat resented calling East Pakistan and West Pakistan by one name, Pakistan. As a thoughtless young boy, I had felt quite embarrassed about the few short and dark Bengali boys among my schoolmates. “Hey, hey, son of a rickshaw puller”, we would taunt one boy, until he burst into tears and then we’d all run away laughing. We well “knew” that all good Muslims and Pakistanis are tall, fair, and speak chaste Urdu. Though I am Sindhi by ethnicity, my value system was thoroughly that of Urdu-speaking West Pakistanis. Bengalis were stereotyped as fish-eaters, which is a somewhat strange kind of slur because we Sindhis are also notoriously fond of fish. My friends and I would double up in laughter at the strange sounding Bangla news broadcasts from Radio Pakistan. In our macho world of 14-year-olds, they sounded so terribly feminine.”

To West Pakistanis, Bengalis were not only weak and cowardly, they were Muslims in name only. Their Islam was not real Islam; it was fake, corrupted, tainted in some way. As Willem von Schendel writes:

“There was a widespread perception in West Pakistan that Bengali Muslims were not only socially inferior but also lesser Muslims because they did not adhere to many of the cultural practices that northern Indians considered properly Islamic. The message from West Pakistan was that however passionately Bengalis might think of themselves as Muslims, they fell short of the mark and they could not be fully fledged Pakistanis unless they shed much of their Bengaliness.”

But what exactly made “Bengali-ness” so offensive to the West Pakistanis? What was the actual issue? What was the problem? Well, in the words of one historian, Muslim Bengalis had “cultural, linguistic, and social affiliations with Hindu Bengalis, and [there was] a perception that their Islam was ‘contaminated’ by its long coexistence with Hindu cultural and social practices.”

Hindu India, of course, was the great enemy; the arch-nemesis of Pakistan. The twin that had tried to strangle it in the womb, and almost succeeded. In the eyes of West Pakistanis, their cousins in the East were little more than Hindus themselves. A fifth column or a Trojan Horse that could be used and manipulated to undermine the nation.

“There was a racial prejudice between Punjabis and Bengalis,” remembered one American Consulate officer in Dhaka, “You’d hear snide remarks that these people are less religious, our little brown brothers.’

But what West Pakistanis hated about Bengalis most of all…were their large numbers.

In 1947, at the moment of independence, 6-out-of-10 people in Pakistan were Bengali. And they were all concentrated in the Eastern wing of the country. About 75 million people in a country of 125 million. That meant that East Pakistan had a clear-cut, unassailable majority, capable of asserting its political will and shaping the nation as it saw fit.

Think of Pakistan as two rooms. A very large room and a very small room, far apart but connected by a thin hallway. The large room is West Pakistan; and the small room is East Pakistan. If there are 10 people between these rooms, 4 of them live in the big, spacious room, and 6 live in the tiny cramped room. In a representative democracy, the 6 people in that tiny room can band together and use their vote to affect change.

So when the issue of deciding what Pakistan’s national language should be came up on the to-do list, East Pakistanis assumed that it would be the language spoken by most people *in* Pakistan: Bengali. At the time, 56% of Pakistan’s population spoke Bengali.

But that was unacceptable to the elites and power brokers in West Pakistan. Pakistan was a Muslim country – a true Muslim country – and Bengali, in their estimation, was not a true Muslim language. Millions of Hindus spoke Bengali; therefore it could never be the mother tongue of Pakistan – Ever.  

“Since Bengali is derived from Sanskrit and written in a similar script, it was considered a ‘Hindu’ language, equated with ‘Hindu culture’”, writes historian Anam Zakaria.

It was an unpopular decision that Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam himself, delivered to an angry crowd in Dacca in 1948:

“Let me make it clear to you that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the state language is concerned, Pakistan’s language shall be Urdu.”

Jinnah’s case for Urdu seemed shaky at best and insulting at worst. “Pakistanis spoke dozens of languages,”writes van Schendel, “and Urdu was spoken by only 3 per cent of them”

But Urdu had closer ties to the Arabic and Persian roots of Islam, therefore it was considered a more valid choice for the state language. OF course it also didn’t hurt that it was the preferred language of the Punjabi establishment. The nation’s Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, reiterated Jinnah’s proclamation, if in a more mediated tone:

We do recognize the importance of Bengalee. There is no intention to oust Bengalee altogether from Bengal. As a matter of fact, it would be wrong for anyone to thrust any other language on the people of a province which is not their mother tongue, but, at the same time, we must have a state language—the language which would be used between the different parts of Pakistan for inter-provincial communications . . . Urdu can be the only language which can keep the people of East Bengal or Eastern Zone and the people of Western Zone jointed together. It is necessary for a nation to have one language and that language can only be Urdu and no other language.”

Less than four years later, both Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan were dead; One from tuberculosis, the other from a bullet. But the anger their decision had unleashed was very much alive and well. The ‘language issue’, writes Nitish Sengupta, became a “festering wound”. For Bengalis, this was about more than cultural pride. This was about daily life. As a Bengali politician explained in 1948:

“Say… A poor cultivator, who has got his son as a student in Dacca University and who wants to send money to him, goes to a village post office and asks for a money order form, then finds that the money order form is printed in Urdu language. He cannot send the money order but shall have to rush to a distant town and have this money order form translated for him and then the money order that is necessary for his boy can be sent. The poor cultivator sells a certain plot of land or a poor cultivator purchases a plot of land and goes to the stamp vendor and pays him money but cannot say whether he has received the value of the money . . . the value of the stamp is written not in Bengalee but . . . in Urdu and English . . . These are the difficulties experienced by the common man of our State. The language of the State should be such which can be understood by the common man of the State.”

Well, in February of 1952, only five years after Partition and the nation’s founding, it all came to a head. Thousands of angry protesters poured into the streets of Dacca, enraged at the rejection of their language, their majority, their culture, their very identity. It was is if the central government far away in West Pakistan did not even consider them Pakistanis at all. With tempers running hot, violence seemed inevitable.

But luckily, the West Pakistani troops and police sent in to contain the protests kept their cool, held their fire, and de-escalated the situation. Oh wait – sorry – no they didn’t. They actually fired into the crowd. There was blood and screaming and begging, and when the smoke cleared, four college kids were dead. Now back in West Pakistan, four dead students was nothing; a rounding error in the daily briefing; but when those four hearts stopped, millions of Bengali hearts turned against their government forever.

It was, writes van Schendel, a “defining moment that marked a sharp psychological rupture. For many in the Bengal delta, it signified the shattering of the dream of Pakistan.”

When a dog barks, you throw some scraps to shut it up. At least, that was the philosophy in West Pakistan, when in 1956, two national languages were finally enshrined. Both Urdu and Bengali, they grudgingly agreed, would be the lingua francae of the land. No poor, confused farmers would have to send money orders in a language they didn’t understand. Surely that would satiate the ‘little brown brothers’ in Bengal.

And it might have. But in the years to come, the dream of Pakistan only became more nightmarish. When it came to Bengal, West Pakistan could not help but squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.

It’s a known fact that all infant nations need one thing to survive: income. And after Partition, Pakistan had precious few sources of that. Gutted in the subcontinental divorce, they’d lost all the mills, factories and refineries that could support a healthy economy. But Pakistan did have one last marketable resource, one thing that the world wanted. And it just happened to grow in abundance in the swampy Bengal delta.

Jute audio newsreel  

“Jute is the most important non-food crop, the principal source of financial income to East Pakistan. Called the ‘golden fiber’ of Pakistan, jute is used for sacking, and in carpets and linoleum and upholstery. More than ¾ of the world’s supply of jute is raised in East Pakistan. Because the nation was left without a jute mill when British India was partitioned, the fiber could not be processed in Pakistan. Pending the construction of mills, Pakistan exports the raw fibers.”

Jute – that’ J-U-T-E, jute – was the one & only cash crop of Pakistan. But that cash seemed to go to one & only part of Pakistan. And I’ll give you a hint, it was not the half that grew it. As Nitish Sengupta writes:

“East Bengal became poorer, West Pakistan richer. East Bengal earned much more foreign exchange through its jute, and yet most of it was spent for the western wing’s development. Of the total foreign aid received by Pakistan, 80 per cent was spent in West Pakistan.”

“The Government of Pakistan built considerable infrastructure in West Pakistan,” wrote another historian, “including roads, schools, universities and hospitals, while the East remained vastly underdeveloped.”

A Pakistani man named Asif, who was a teenager at the time, told a journalist:

“The East Pakistanis wondered why all that money wasn’t being invested in their cities, which had poor infrastructure . . . bad roads, waterways, airports. They would ask, “Why are we treated like stepchildren?”’

That financial disparity was most cruelly expressed in one mundane, but evocative little metric. According to a prominent Bengali politician, West Pakistan had 36,200 hospital beds for its people. In the East, there were only 6,900.

To add insult to injury, unemployment in East Pakistan seemed to climb higher and higher every year, thanks in no small part to West Pakistani business owners’ preference for hiring workers that looked and acted like them.

->

One young man remembered the bigotry he saw in his own family’s business:

“There was immense unemployment, and this was mostly because the Bengalis were being discriminated against. In my own company (name omitted to protect identity), I found that more than 80 per cent of the people employed were West Pakistanis. My family preferred taking people from here . . . and I’m not only talking about highly skilled professionals like engineers or doctors but also carpenters, blacksmiths, labourers, plasterers, tile makers.”

All this…racism, for lack of a better word, took its toll. By the late 1960s, per capita income in the West was almost 40% higher than in the East. “Between 1950 and 1970, West Pakistan accounted for 77 per cent of private sector development expenditure,” according to Nitish Sengupta.

“A feeling is growing,” growled one contemporary Bengali politician, “that Eastern Pakistan is being neglected and treated as a “colony” of West Pakistan.”

I mean, the Bengalis were looking around thinking: “Hmm, okay - so we’re being ruled by a central government very far away, that doesn’t seem to like or respect us very much. They exploit our resources, take away our jobs, and funnel the profits to finance their own development. This feels a little familiar. Did we just trade one colonizer for another?” The British were bad, sure, but being part of Pakistan doesn’t feel all that different. Is this what self-determination is supposed to look like? Is exploitation by more familiar hands supposed to feel better?

‘When I spoke to Bengali contractors,” one Pakistani man remembered, “they would say, “You know when the British were here, every decision was taken in London. They had one puppet sitting here—the viceroy—who would rule the whole subcontinent sitting in Delhi. After Partition, not much has changed. All decisions are made in Rawalpindi or Islamabad.”

“The problem started in 1947 when our language was attacked, our culture was attacked,” another Bengali man told a journalist, “We realized it was another colonial system after the British. Our money from jute exports was spent in West Pakistan, to develop Islamabad . . . Islamabad should be called Jutabad! It was built from the hard work of Bengalis.’

By the late 1960s, Bengalis had had enough: According to Nitish Sengupta:

“Slowly but surely, a distinct national identity was evolving among the Bengalee Muslims based on their own language and their feeling of being discriminated against by West Pakistan. For most of the people of East Bengal there was no true freedom; only a change of rulers, from the white men to the rich families and landed aristocracy of West Pakistan, especially of Punjab. The Bengalee Muslims, who, in their frenzy for a Muslim homeland, had struggled hard, did not take long to realize that they had only second-class status in Pakistan and that the West Pakistanis gave scant regard for Islam as a binding force between the two wings. A growing disillusionment soon set in among the people. It grew stronger and stronger every passing year. This disillusionment soon turned the people to avowed fighters for their right to self-determination.”

East Pakistanis didn’t just want equality, they wanted autonomy. No more taking orders from military dictators in Islamabad. No more working for pennies and begging for scraps. For twenty long years, they had been trapped in the tiny room, deferring to a handful of people in the big room. And now they wanted to spruce things up a bit. To paint the walls, hang some drapes, and crack a window for a little fresh, clean air. And they wanted to do it without asking for permission. They wanted to rule themselves for once in 300 years.

And this burning, irrepressible need for self-determination coalesced around a single personality in East Pakistan: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; the bespectacled political revolutionary we met about 10 minutes ago. Known to his millions of supporters as Mujib.

AUDIO: [

“Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is the spokesman for East Pakistan. Divided from the West by 1000 miles of India, held by the East only by a common faith. He has come to the talks this week to gain at least a large measure of home-rule for the East. If it is not granted he threatens complete withdrawal from the union. No West Pakistani politician can rule without his support. Sheikh Rahman was imprisoned by the President, so were these members of his party; now they represent a powerful force. He is a right-winger who believes in a measure of socialism. Above all, his passion is a fair deal for East Pakistan.”

The English author Alan Moore has famously described the act of writing – say, a speech, or an essay, or a political poem - as virtually indistinguishable from magic. It is a method of combining words and symbols, sounds and meaning into precise sequences of conceptual force that can literally change the brainwaves of an audience. Spells, in other words. Chains of rhetoric that alter reality, sharpen perceptions. Heal or hurt; calm or enrage.

And if words are magic, Mujib was a wizard.

“Mujib’s great strength—and success—lay in an elemental ability to fathom the full measure of his people’s emotions and to arouse and articulate them with resounding eloquence,” wrote a contemporary Pakistani journalist named Anthony Mascarenhas, “He had the fantastic ability to relate to crowds. Because of this, his opponents derided him as a rabble-rouser. However that may be, time and circumstance put a high premium on his talent and at a crucial moment he became the symbol and supreme spokesman of a gigantic human upsurge against discrimination and tyranny.”

The US consul general in Pakistan, Archer Blood, agreed with that assessment, saying:

“In private meetings, he is charming, calm and confident… On the rostrum, he is a fiery orator who can mesmerise hundreds of thousands in pouring rain. As a party leader, he is tough and authoritative, often arrogant. Mujib has something of a messianic complex, which has been reinforced by the heady experience of mass adulation. He talks of my people, my lands, my forests, my river. It seems clear that he views himself as the personification of Bengali aspiration.”

To Bengalis, Mujib was more than a politician; he was a savior. A great and eloquent avatar for all the pain and anger and grievance and rage they were feeling. Here’s Mujib himself making the case for East Pakistani autonomy in an emotional interview:

AUDIO:

“Naturally - For these 23 years we have seen, East Pakistan has been nothing but a colony and market. You have to give Bengal their right to live, master of their resources. Long long 23 years. Cannot be tolerated anymore.

“No man in the entire history of the modern world, except Mao, for different reasons, has hypnotized his people as Mujib did,” wrote one historian.

So when Pakistan’s military dictator and would-be father of democracy, our old, bushy-eyebrowed friend Yahya Khan, sat down in front of a microphone and announced that he was organizing national elections…most Bengalis knew exactly who they would be voting for.

Election Day was set for December 7^th, 1970.

On that day, 56,400,000 registered voters – men & women - would go to the polls; and over 31 million of them were in East Pakistan.

Mujib and his party – the Awami League – that’s A-W-A-M-I, were the number one choice for a many of those voters. And the possibilities of a big Awami League win were dizzying. If Mujib’s party got enough seats in the National Assembly, they could use their coalition to right the wrongs of the last 20 years. They could force new spending priorities, new infrastructure projects, new worker protections and anti-discrimination laws. They could make life better in East Pakistan.

As Election Day got closer and closer, Bengalis dared to hope that maybe, just maybe, the winds were shifting in their favor.

Unfortunately, the winds were indeed shifting.

Out in the Bay of Bengal, hot air was rushing over open ocean. It evaporated water, pulling currents of vapor high into the atmosphere. Air pressure dropped like a rock, sucking in cold air, feeding on an endless and inexhaustible supply of water. While campaign flyers were being painted in Dacca, a massive, once-in-a-century storm was forming; a churning wheel of black clouds and crackling lightning, hundreds of miles wide. As Scott Carney and Jason Miklian write:

“The vortex cast a wide disk of clouds spanning almost the entirety of the Bay of Bengal, an expanse of water about the same size as Texas. The swirling storm gathered strength from warm waters and conjured winds that screamed across the sea at a hundred and forty miles an hour. The system whirled around a perfectly still eye. Clouds spun like the hands of a clock turning backward, yet inside the eye, the winds fell to a whisper. Here, an impenetrable cloud wall touched the sky as it rotated slowly. This gyre fed on the power of the earth itself, dragging the ocean along its rotation so that the sea formed a gigantic whirlpool, pulling everything toward one ultimate point.”

Right at the moment when the future seemed brightest for East Pakistan, the Bengal delta was hit by the deadliest cyclone in modern history.

---- MUSIC BREAK ----   

It’s November 11^th, 1970.

We’re in the Bengal delta, on a tiny island called Manpura.

“Manpura,” write Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, was “just one of hundreds of islands clinging to the southern third of East Pakistan. The very last spit of land before the open water of the Bay of Bengal, Manpura was a pencil-shaped splotch of snake-filled mangrove swamps that maxed out at four miles wide and five feet above sea level.”

Despite its small size, 50,000 people live on this remote island. Most of them make a living as fishermen, pulling catfish or eel up from the coffee-colored water. It’s a difficult occupation, although not a lucrative one. Most people on Manpura are not even dirt-poor (To be dirt-poor, you have to actually have dirt.) But despite the mud and river sludge, Manpura has its charms.

In the fall, you could see huge flocks of migratory birds taking a brief rest in the delta before flying on to China or Nepal. If only it were that easy, some in Manpura thought. If only I could just flap my wings and get the hell out of this boring backwater. That was certainly what 18-year-old Mohammad Hai was thinking as a red sun dipped beneath the waves on the evening of November 11^th.

Like most teenagers, Hai (that’s H-A-I, Hai) wanted to be anywhere but here. Born and raised on Manpura, Hai spent the long, languid days playing soccer with his friends, fishing with his uncles, or cramming for exams at Manpura high school. The latter occupied most of his time. Hai’s mom, an official on the local school board, had stressed to him over and over again how important his education was. “Use your brain,” she told him, “It’s the only way out of here.”

Well, Hai certainly had no intention of wasting his life away on a fishing boat in Manpura. His real passion was politics. Far away in the regional capital of Dacca, crowds were marching and protests were raging. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the man they called Mujib, was the angry spear tip of a movement that could change everything in East Pakistan. And 18-year-old Hai desperately wanted to be a part of it. As he listened to fuzzy speeches on the family’s shortwave radio, Hai imagined himself marching alongside Mujib himself, casting a vote for the Awami League in the upcoming election, and prying power from the snobs in Punjab.

If he studied hard enough, got good enough grades, he could enroll at Dacca University and be at the beating heart of the movement. Like a Bengali Luke Skywalker, Hai wanted to leave the homestead behind, travel to the center of the universe, and fight the good fight. But until then, he’d have to settle for the thrill of catching carp in a pontoon boat under a clear blue sky.

But today, the sky wasn’t blue at all.

It was a nauseous shade of green, as if the clouds were about to retch something down on them. When Hai tied up the boat and returned to his family’s house that evening, the ominous signs continued to mount. As he walked through the yard, he noticed the ground itself was spongy and saturated; muddy water bubbled up between his toes. But most unnerving of all, the neighborhood dogs would not stop barking. They were whining and whimpering and howling at the sickly sky.

Hai and the other 50,000 residents of Manpura could do the math. All these signs could only mean one thing: A cyclone was on its way. A big one, by the looks of it.

“Hai had lived through cyclones before, of course,” write Carney and Miklian, “One came nearly every year of his life. Usually, they made a mess of things, but it wasn’t anything a hard day’s work couldn’t fix.”

For the Delta islanders, there was only one thing to do when a cyclone came. Huddle up, hunker down, and ride it out. So Hai tied up the family animals, the cows, the dogs, the goats – and helped his Mom make room for the relatives that would be coming over soon. Their two-story, three-bedroom house was one of the larger homes in the area, and it wasn’t long before 19 people – uncles, aunts, siblings, cousin - were crammed into the living room, seeking safety from the storm.

By 10 o’clock that night, it has become clear that this is not a normal cyclone.

Water droplets are ricocheting off the tin roof like bullets. The wind is so loud, no one can hear themselves pray or cry or think. Salt water is seeping – flowing - under the door, submerging toes, then ankles, then calves, then thighs. In a matter of minutes, it’s chest-high, and the ocean is pouring in through the downstairs windows. Hai’s uncles put the children on their shoulders and everyone claws their way up the staircase to the second floor.

“Outside,” write Carney and Miklian, “the ropes around the cow’s necks became nooses. The wind blew so strong that it dragged the cows sideways until they strangled to death. The waves then pushed the silent floating beasts against the house with sickening thuds.”

At this point, the electricity is gone. All the lights are out. No one can see anything in the blackness, but they can feel water rising up, inch-by-inch. They can feel panicked fingers grasping for stability or comfort or both. Downstairs, the family Quran is bobbing on the waves like a little wet raft, following them up, up the stairs as the water gets higher and higher.

At some point, Hai realizes that the high ground is not high enough. 20 feet of water has completely submerged the first floor and second floor, leaving only three feet below the ceiling for them to breathe. If they don’t figure something out and fast, everyone in this house is going to die. As Carney and Miklian write:

Grasping at whatever ideas his mind could conjure, Hai had a eureka moment. The tallest thing around was their old coconut palm tree, a fifty-foot giant that had weathered dozens of cyclones. It was tall and sturdy enough to save everyone, if they could get to it. Hai yelled his frenzied strategy to the room: He’d climb back up to the roof and jump onto the tree, which was just a couple of feet from the house. It was an easy feat under clear skies. From there, he could help the rest of his family follow.”

Hai scrambles up to the roof, takes a deep breath, and - trying not to imagine what will happen if he falls - flings himself across empty air towards the palm tree. His body slams into the trunk and he wraps his arms around it.

“I made it!” Hai yells back at the roof. He can’t see anything, can’t hear anything, but he knows that one-by-one, his 19 family members will be making the short jump to safety. His mom, his brother, his uncles, his little cousins; They’re all going to be safe.

“For the next hour,” write Carnet and Miklian, “Hai held on to the violently swaying palm, grinding his forearm flesh into the bark. He held on while the winds tattered and then ripped the clothes off his body. He held on, bleeding from his arms and legs, though his exhausted muscles begged to give up. He held on through the howling darkness.”

After what seemed like hours, days, weeks, years….the storm finally dies down. The wind subsides and the air is still. Through the muscle spasms and a haze of adrenaline, Hai looks down.

He is all alone on the palm tree.

When he paddles back to the roof of his house, Hai discovers the awful truth. All 19 of his family members are gone. No one made it out of the house. Not his Mom, not his brother, not his cousins, or aunts. They’re all just…floating, clumped together is a silent, grey pile. Like human driftwood.

Stripped naked by the storm, exhausted, physically and emotionally numb, Hai does the only the only thing he can think to do. He starts digging in the mud with his hands, until he’s made a large, shallow hole. One down, 18 to go.

Hai’s story – horrific as it is – was only a fragment of the devastation inflicted on East Pakistan on the night of November 12^th, 1970. One little dot of tragedy in a pointillist nightmare. The Great Bhola Cyclone, as it was called, came and went in a matter of hours. Deprived of its main source of energy: warm ocean water, the storm disintegrated over the delta.

“By daybreak, the water retreated into the sea like someone had pulled a plug out of a giant bathtub,” write Carney and Miklian.

But the pain it left behind was not so easily forgotten.



Bengal had weathered many cyclones in its long, meteorologically unfortunate history, but the storm of 1970 was the worst in living memory. Possibly the worst in historical memory.

It was as if the cyclone had been designed in a lab to maximize its destructive effect. All the wrong things happened at exactly the right time. As Carney and Miklian write:

“Bhola made landfall at high tide, during a full moon—two events that dragged water upward and inward to land. This amplified the storm surge.”

“A tidal wave over 30 feet high lashed by cyclonic winds of 120 miles per hour wrecked five of East Pakistan’s coastal districts,” explains writer Faisal Khosa, “It was called the worst natural catastrophe in modern history. Casualties were estimated to be between 200,000 and 500,000.”

AUDIO: h

“More pictures from the ravaged areas of East Pakistan. Pictures that bring home to us all the extent of this overwhelming tragic. The wonder is that anything survived a flood of such biblical proportions. Areas as big as Scotland have become vast graveyards. Day by day the stench, disease, and the contamination increase.”

As foreign relief workers ventured into the area to assess the damage, what they found shocked many into silence. As one volunteer remembered:

“The smell came first, then the tops of coconut palms, floating on tiny stalks above the placid bay — at last the low mud bank with its horrendous burden of decaying bodies. I had to run the dinghy down the coast for over a mile before I could find a spot to land without stepping on one of the luckless victims of the cyclone. I scrambled up the slippery bank, nearly retching, and stood on a dirt mound that only last week had been a home. There before me was a beautiful, golden, flattened and utterly desolate land. Silence. No crows cackle, no cows rumble, no palm leaves rustle. It is as if all life has been snuffed out.”

Those people who had survived, like Muhammed Hai, were in very bad shape. As one volunteer physician remembered:

“The major problem we faced was “palm tree syndrome,” the severe maceration of flesh on the chest, inner arms and thighs from clinging to the coarse tops of palms through hours of battering by the voracious sea. There were amazingly few health problems in the survivors, for the young and old, the weak and infirm were washed away first ... Sinewy men sobbed as they recounted the loss of entire families, one by one picked off the tree tops and swallowed in the maelstrom.”

For many survivors, the worst wounds were invisible. As a man named Abdul told a journalist:

“I am the only one left. The world was black and the wind was wild; so wild that everything flew around us. I clung to the trunk as tightly as I could. My arms ached terribly. I could hardly feel them because the rain was cold and stung me. I tried to hold my son against my chest with my arm around him, but the wind became so fierce I couldn’t hang on to him anymore and he slipped out of my grip. I could still see my wife and baby on the tree next to me, but the water kept rising around us. It grew higher than the palm tree she was clinging to. It crashed over the tree with dreadful force. She swept right past me. I could hear her shrieking and I could do nothing.”

The international community was quick to respond to the immensity of the tragedy. Supply trucks from India, British soldiers from Singapore, American expats from Dacca – a small army of bleeding hearts marched into the delta to distribute food, water and basic necessities. But there was one source of help of that was conspicuously absent from the parade of altruism:

The Pakistani government itself.

AUDIO:

“Pakistan’s president Yahya Khan has rejected criticism that West Pakistan didn’t do enough, soon enough. Aid has been pouring in from all over the world, but there are still many places, where none has yet arrived. Survivors were lighting bonfires to signal their desperate needs.”

“After the natural disaster,” writes Gary J. Bass, “came the man-made disaster.”

Help from the Pakistani government was slow to arrive in East Pakistan. As New York Times journalist Sydney Schanburg reported at the time:

“[Survivors] lived through that grim first week, drinking polluted water, clawing rice out of the mud, finding an occasional coconut, whose milk and white meat they carefully divided, and sometimes—when their bellies were so empty they were in pain— eating the roots of banana trees […] No national mobilization was visible and there was no Government commitment on the scale that was necessary. Even for an undeveloped country with limited human and technical resources, the effort seemed deficient”

It was yet another infuriating example of how deeply the government far away in West Pakistan had failed them. How little they cared.

Of course, President Yahya Khan resented the insinuation that his government was not doing enough to help the little brown brothers in East Pakistan. As he explained in a press conference two weeks after the cyclone.

AUDIO:  “The resources that my country has….Everything possible has been done, is being done and will be done. It’s not ideal! But I’d like to know a country which can achieve an ideal.”

A government can do a lot of things, Yahya was saying, but it cannot stop an act of God. Yes, it was very sad. Yes, his heart wept for the poor unfortunate people in Bengal. But life goes on, okay. Cut me some slack.

AUDIO: [ “People died. Not my fault. My fault would begin to take shape, when I did nothing for the survivors. And I and my government have done my damndest to see that the survivors survive.”

Back in East Pakistan, Yahya’s performative pity fell flat. When it did come, relief from the Pakistani government tended to cause more chaos than it solved. Military helicopters delivered supplies to the survivors with all the compassion of a zookeeper tossing meat into a cage. As Carney and Miklian write in this anecdote about a supply drop:

“The [helicopter] crew pushed out three tiny specks and zipped away. Everyone tried to figure out which speck they could be closest to when it landed. The crowd dispersed into three groups and the specks got bigger. Slowly, then quickly. The fifty-pound rice bags slammed into the earth at terminal velocity, 120 miles per hour—two landed on hungry men, killing both instantly. The helicopter was long gone. The police rushed in. Ignoring the bodies, they commandeered the bag that didn’t kill anyone, saying it was official government property.”

Yahya did eventually make it out to East Pakistan for a photo op, but it rang false and insincere. As Sydney Schanburg remembered:

There were still bodies floating in inland rivers, mass graves being dug with backhoes, everyone wearing masks because of the smell, throwing lime on it. And he was walking through with polished boots and a walking stick with a gold knob. These people didn’t have any gold anything. We asked a couple questions, and he brushed us off with blah-blah, then went home.”

To add insult to injury, Yahya spoke to the despondent crowds in Urdu – a language which most of them did not even speak. For the people of East Pakistan, it was all too little, too late.

“The army does not care for us,” one farmer said. “Where were they in our time of need? Now they come—after 21 days”.

Even American diplomats in Dacca noted the tepid response from West Pakistan: “It was almost as if they just didn’t care,” remembered one.

In the weeks following the cyclone, the misery in East Pakistan calcified into a raw, red anger that could not be assuaged by blankets and bags of rice. “Dying from an act of God was one thing,” write Carney and Miklian, “Death from a government’s callous and willful incompetence was something different.”

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – Mujib – could barely contain his incandescence at the scale of West Pakistan’s failure. The depth of their apathy went beyond insult. It was all but a war on East Pakistan’s people. A bureaucratic offensive of inaction and casual contempt, what Mujib called “criminal negligence.”

”The rift between the two wings had grown so great,” remembered on American diplomat, “that any display of real empathy between East and West Pakistan was no longer a possibility”

The two ears of the elephant had grown deaf to one another.

In Mujib’s words, the response to the cyclone had revealed “the basic truth that every Bengali has felt in his bones, that we have been treated so long as a colony and a market. We must attain full regional autonomy.”

But how? How could East Pakistan possibly hope to assert itself with the deck so stacked against it? Half a million people were dead, and millions more were starving. The storm had taken everything from them – their homes, their families, their livelihoods. But they did have one thing left. One last precious possession that not even a cyclone could rip away:

Their vote.

The big national election – the political contest that would decide the future of Pakistan – was only a few weeks away. On December 7^th, 1970,  50 million people would go to the polls and vent 23 years of pent-up frustration and rage.

“The fate of the State of Pakistan depended entirely upon the upcoming general elections,” writes Faisal Khosa, “where it would be decided, at last, exactly what the position of Bengalis was in Pakistani society.”

=====OUTRO=====

Well, folks; that’s all we have time for today.

Normally, I try to keep the first episode in a new series relatively short, but there was so much ground to cover, and so much political nuance to parse through, that this one had to be a little bit longer. So thanks for sticking with me.

Next time, in Part 2, we’ll see what happens on Pakistan’s big election day, and how the drama it sparked would eventually culminate in a full-blown civil war. We’ll also expand our cast a bit and meet some new faces who will have a big impact on the events to come.

So, as always, thanks for spending your valuable time with me. And I hope you have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see ya next time.

===== =END =====