The 1971 Bangladesh War – Part 2: Bhutto’s Game

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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.

You are listening to Part 2 of a limited series on the 1971 Bangladesh War. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I’d definitely recommend you do that before starting this one. We introduced a lot of people, places and ideas last episode, and without that foundation, you might find yourself getting a bit lost. But that said, unlike President Yahya Khan, I am not a dictator. You can listen in whatever order you like.  

But before we jump into today’s episode, let’s take a few minutes to recap what we’ve covered thus far, so we can move into the next phase of our story with everything fresh in our minds.

Last time, in Part 1: Land of Broken Maps, we did a lot of table-setting. And at 4.4 million square miles, the Indian Subcontinent is a very big table. After a quick geography lesson on South Asia in general, and the Bengal Delta in particular, we hopped into our time machines and cranked the dial back a few centuries. After all, the 1971 Bangladesh War is one of those events that makes absolutely no sense unless you can locate the very first domino, the first tipping point that triggers the chain of cause-and-effect and leads all the way to present day.

And for our purposes, that first, all-important domino is the arrival of the British East India Company on the shores of the Bengal delta. Without the Company, there is no British Raj. Without the Raj, there is no Partition. Without Partition, there is no Pakistan. And without Pakistan, there is no Bangladesh War.

The British East India Company, wrote one historian, had a “destructive talent for getting embroiled in local politics”. That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it would be to say that the Company conquered India one small bite at a time. Through a series of battles, bribes, and betrayals, the British Empire unhinged its jaw and slowly, patiently, swallowed the subcontinent whole. By the late 19^th century, every man, woman and child from the Himalayas to Hyderabad owed their allegiance to a monarch that lived 4,500 miles away.

But over time, all empires eventually fade away and die. The British Empire suffered an especially slow and embarrassing demise. As its influence began to recede in the 20^th century, the far-flung parts and pieces needed to be amputated like necrotic digits. To save the body, the extremities had to be sawed off and sold off. The most traumatic of these amputations was India.

“The Indian subcontinent, once regarded by the British as their most valuable asset,” wrote one historian,” experienced a hurried departure of the colonizing forces and an even swifter transition into nationhood immediately following World War II.”

The truth was, the British just couldn’t afford to keep India under their thumb anymore. Like a gas-guzzling Hummer in the driveway, the subcontinent was more of a vanity piece than a valuable asset. And so, in August of 1947, they left.

But our concern is what they left behind.

In the years leading up to the British departure, the subcontinent had become polarized along religious lines. Hindus and Muslims, glaring at each other across an unbridgeable gulf, motivated by anxiety, self-interest, and enmity. As a minority, Muslims were naturally fearful that they would be subjugated and excluded from the political process in a post-Raj, Hindu-dominated India, and they demanded a state of their own. So, in 1947, the subcontinent was carved up – partitioned- into two new countries: Muslim-majority Pakistan, and Hindu-majority India.

“At first,” writes historian Willem van Schendel, “the vivisection of their social world seemed unreal and many thought that Pakistan and India would reunite after some time. As the irreversibility of Partition sank in, however, they had to come to terms with the fact that geography was destiny: they were now assigned the citizenship of one of a pair of distinct – and squabbling – states.”

Like a pair of conjoined twins clawing at each other’s throats, India and Pakistan bickered for the better part of two decades. But inside Pakistan, a second Partition was brewing. A division within a division.

The sad truth was, Pakistan had always been more of a slogan than a country. A marketer’s notion of a nation. “The name wasn’t some ancient tribal homage,” write Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, “it was simply an acronym for the country’s biggest provinces and ethnic groups, all located in the western part of British India: P for Punjab and Pashtuns, A for the Afghans, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh, and TAN for Baluchistan.”

And by design or happy accident, “Pakistan” also meant “land of the pure” in Urdu – a catchy tagline if ever there was one.

But as you’ve probably noticed, that nice, clean acronym was missing something. An extra letter that just didn’t seem to fit; didn’t seem to slide neatly into the naming structure. And that was the letter “B” for “Bengal”. In some ways there is no more perfect analogy for the Bengali position in Pakistani society than its absence from the acronym. Ignored, isolated, shoved aside.

Last episode, we spent a lot of time exploring the growing rift between the two wings of the country. West Pakistan and East Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles and linked only by a common religion. As historian Gary J. Bass writes: “People joked that only three things kept Pakistan united: Islam, the English language, and Pakistan International Airlines—and PIA was the strongest.”````

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By the late 1960s, the slender thread that tethered East and West together was unraveling at an alarming rate. Muslim Bengalis in East Pakistan constituted a clear majority of the population – about 55%. And yet, they were all but voiceless and powerless in the nation’s affairs. “Most Pakistanis at the time were Bengali,” wrote one historian, “But it didn’t take long for the Bengali majority to realize that it was actually a minority and that the “real” Pakistan lay towards the West.

The “little brown brothers” or “black Bengalis” as some bigoted West Pakistanis called them could never be good Muslims because of their cultural similarities to Hindu Bengalis. And so, East Pakistan was all but locked out of the halls of power. West Pakistan “treated it like a colony,” write Carney and Miklian, “shipping in thousands of police and administrators and shipping out literal boatloads of cash and goods like tea, jute, and oil.”

East Pakistan was underrepresented, underfunded, and underdeveloped. “The Eastern wing,” writes the academic Nitish Sengupta, “groaned under the weight of these disparities.”

But all these political abstractions don’t mean much to us if we can’t tie them to actual human beings – real people who represent the interests and grievances at the heart of this story. And that is why, last episode, we introduced two very important characters in our tale:

President Yahya Khan and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – or Mujib.

The first man, President Yahya Khan, is an almost comical figure; a sad clown in a dictator’s uniform – a praetorian Pagliacci. Perpetually drunk and occasionally engaged in his nation’s affairs, Yahya was no one’s idea of a visionary executive. And yet, in 1969, he surprised them all when he announced that he would be organizing the first national elections in the 23-year history of the country.

After a decade of military rule, this was a game-changer. For the first time in a very long time, ordinary Pakistanis, East and West alike, would be able to cast a vote and make their voices heard in a real representative democracy. For Bengalis, this was nothing short of a god-send; a once-in-a-generation opportunity to claw back some power from the West and stake their claim as the majority of the country.

But who would lead them? Who could speak loudly enough for a community so accustomed to silence and oppression? Well, that brings us to the second character we met last episode: The hypnotic, histrionic orator, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Mujib caught like a fever in the hearts and minds of East Pakistanis. His anger was their anger, his tragedy their tragedy, his wounds their wounds, and if they would only do their part, vote en masse for his political party, the Awami League, he would carry them all into a new era of prosperity and justice for East Pakistan, long denied by the aristocrats and jackboots in Punjab.

Elections, however, are fickle, unpredictable things. At the end of the day, it’s just you, and a booth, and a ballot. At the moment of truth, who knows what people will do. What hidden doubts and selfish desires leap from the back of the brain to the tip of the pen. And so, with National Elections just a few weeks away, Pakistanis held their breath in anticipation.

But then, a natural disaster struck.

“On the night of November 12,” writes historian Ayesha Jalal, “a massive cyclone accompanied by high tidal waves devastated the coastline of East Pakistan”

As van Schendel explains: “This was no run-of-the-mill cyclone but the most devastating one that had ever been registered in the region. According to official figures an unimaginable 500,000 people perished in the gale and tidal surges (other sources suggest at least 325,000).“

Number that big are truly unimaginable. Our brains can’t even really process the magnitude of death on that scale. Dry, impersonal metrics are ultimately irrelevant when measured against the toll of human suffering. And the Bhola Cyclone produced more than its fair share of that.

Last episode, we experienced the cyclone through the eyes of an 18-year-old Bengali boy, Muhammed Hai, who against all odds, clung to a palm tree for hours, while his entire family drowned in the house he’d grown up in. As Hai climbed down the next morning, with arms and legs lacerated by the bark, the immensity of the destruction began to sink in.

“It looked like the aftermath of a bomb blast,” write Carney & Miklian, “Bodies of animals and people lay everywhere, caked in mud. Almost everyone was dead. […] Horrific sights greeted him. A dead woman hung from a tree by her tangled hair, still holding her baby.”

“One U.S. colonel with four years of battle experience in Vietnam,” writes Gary J. Bass, “said that it was worse than anything he had seen there.”

But there was one person who was unmoved by the destruction, and that was the President of the nation himself, Yahya Khan. On a flight from Dacca to Islamabad, Yahya was reported to have peered down at the delta 3,000 feet below and commented that it “didn’t look so bad.”

Yahya’s apathy was infuriating, but not surprising to East Pakistanis. It was just more of the same. West Pakistan didn’t seem to care if they lived or died. According to van Schendel:

“Relief was slow and insufficient, and the Yahya regime’s utter incapacity to deal with the disaster stood exposed. Worse, the regime was widely seen as callously indifferent to the fate of the victims, causing extreme anger in East Pakistan.”

To the Bengalis, writes Faisal Khosa, it was “sufficient proof that their brethren in the western wing of the country cared little for their plight, let alone for their well-being. Bengali bitterness hence waxed into outspoken hatred.”

But despite all the death and destruction, the national elections on December 7^th, would still go forward. On that point, Yahya was adamant.

AUDIO:  Elections will take place. I have left this decision to the chief election commissioner, who’s a completely independent body. He has come out here to assess the situation of the cyclone-affected areas. But as far as the rest of the country’s concerned, elections will be held.”

And it was there, on the eve of this all-important election, that we ended things last episode.

This time, we’re going to focus on the results and the consequences of that election. As you can probably imagine, Pakistan does not peacefully and amicably transition into a shining new democratic era, where East and West, Bengali and Punjabi, live in perfect harmony. Things went very bad, very quickly. Less than 4 months after the elections, the country was embroiled in a murderous civil war. And in this episode, we’re going to try and understand how things fell apart so fast. Although for many, it had been a long time coming.

What’s about to happen is best understood as a triangular dynamic between three powerful politicians. We’ve already met two of them. President Yahya Khan and Mujib.

The third man, who we will get to know very well over the course of this episode, is named Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. That’s B-H-U-T-T-O, Bhutto. Now that name may not ring familiar to most Western ears, but in the subcontinent, the subject of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is, to put mildly, a lightning rod. He is long dead, but in a few short years he earned his place in history, and many have argued that his machinations helped bring about the crisis that’s about to sweep over the subcontinent.

And that is why today’s episode bears his name. In this next phase of our story, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto will emerge as the main rival to Mujib, and the choices these men make will transform the subcontinent forever.

So, with our recap done and our course plotted, we can jump right into the show.

Welcome to The 1971 Bangladesh War: Part 2: Bhutto’s Game.

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It’s the evening of December 7^th, 1970.

We’re in the city of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

Nestled deep in the heart of northern Punjab, lounging in the shadow of Himalayan foothills, Islamabad was, at this time, an infant city. Compared to ancient places like Delhi or Lahore, the paint was barely dry in Pakistan’s new capital.

In fact, twelve years earlier, Islamabad hadn’t even existed at all. Back in 1958, it wasn’t a city, a town, or even a glorified truck stop. Just a desolate stretch of unloved, unnamed, unremarkable shrubland. More of a hiking trail than political nexus.

But then, a small army of architects and diggers and day laborers had arrived, leaping out of trucks and buses with shovels in hand. This nameless stretch of nowhere had been chosen by God – or at least, his self-declared representatives on earth – to be the site of Pakistan’s new capital. It would be called “Islamabad”, they declared, which of course means “city of Islam” – a fitting moniker for a nation founded on the pretext of a shared faith.

But of course, faith was just a secondary consideration, overshadowed by the most important factor in any real estate deal…location, location, location. The site for Islamabad was primarily chosen for its proximity to Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi.

The former capital, Karachi, was deemed unsuitable for the military government’s needs. It was too far from Punjab, too vulnerable to attack, too saturated with foreigners and corporate interests. Now that the military was in charge, fresh off their successful coup in ‘58, a new capital city was in order. Why commute a hundred miles south to Karachi, the generals said, when we can have a nice new city in our own backyard? Just as the Prophet Muhammed had built a religion from nothing, they would transform a barren wilderness into what one writer called a “modern, urban administrative oasis.”

And so, timber by timber, brick by brick, Islamabad rose out of the earth. According to Carney and Miklian:

“Like other planned capitals—such as Washington, DC, and Canberra, Australia—[Islamabad was] filled with wide leafy boulevards and gleaming brick and stone buildings. There were no slums or signs of poverty as far as the eye could see.”

By 1967, it was complete – “ahead of schedule and underbudget”, according to one writer. Visitors to the “City of Islam” admired the mosques and movie theatres, the hotels, banks and universities. But one building in particular outshone them all; and that was the President’s House – the official residence of Pakistan’s chief executive.

And on December 7^th, 1970 – that house belongs to our old buddy Yahya Khan.

As the President of Pakistan, Yahya had many residences, scattered across the nation like so many jewels. He had one in Lahore, where he’d met with US President Richard Nixon in ‘69 to finalize their weapons deal. He had one in Karachi, where he entertained business contacts and minor diplomats. He even had one in Dacca, far away in East Pakistan – although he rarely darkened that particular doorway. Like many West Pakistanis, Yahya wouldn’t be caught dead in filthy Dacca unless profit or politics compelled him there.

But of all his mansions and manors, the residence in Islamabad felt most like home. Officially, Yahya’s pad was called the President’s House, but unofficially, it went by a different name. The local chief of police liked to refer to it as “Pimp House”.

“Yahya Khan had a penchant for cavorting with abandon,” writes historian Ayesha Jalal, “His nocturnal activities were the talk of the nation.”

That’s a gently way of saying that Yahya Khan liked to party.

Last episode, we talked at length about Yahya’s notorious love of the bottle, but he had other vices too – “infirmities” one writer called them. Like all bored tyrants, Pakistan’s dictator enjoyed ice-cold beer and smoking-hot women. And he made sure that neither his fridge or his bed was ever, ever empty.

On any given night, Yahya’s house looked more like a Bud Light commercial than an executive retreat. Residents of Islamabad could hear British rock ‘n roll blaring deep into the early hours of the morning, at which point a debaucherous procession of wasted officers, prostitutes and politicians would spill out onto the street, regurgitated from Pimp House like the contents of Yahya’s stomach.

Yahya’s wild parties were the center of gravity for Pakistan’s elite. Actresses and singers, shills and socialites – they all showed up to kiss the ring. And in some cases, kiss something else. Heads nodding or heads bobbing.

But tonight, on December 7^th, 1970 – all is calm at Pimp House. Yahya isn’t in his bed with a hooker, or in conversation with a sycophantic social climber. He’s in his favorite chair, with a glass of whiskey in one hand and a remote control in the other. Yahya’s bloodshot eyes are glued to the black-and-white screen of his television - to the live, 24-hour coverage of Pakistan’s first free-and-fair national election.

It was a truly momentous event.

Yahya’s predecessor and former boss, the ousted dictator Ayub Khan, had once remarked that “democratic methods are foreign to our people.” Well, in December of 1970, Pakistanis proved him wrong. This was, writes Gary J. Bass, a “tremendous experiment in democracy. This was the first direct election in Pakistan’s twenty-three years of independence, with all adults allowed to vote—including, for the first time, women.”

“Fifty million people were voting for the first time in their lives,” write Carney and Miklian, […]  “There were three hundred seats up for grabs in Pakistan’s National Assembly, a parliamentary body roughly similar to the US House of Representatives.”

And Pakistan had no shortage of ambitious and enterprising politicians who believed that they could do the job. “Twenty-five parties—seventeen from the East and eight from the West—eventually entered the national elections,” writes historian Srinath Raghavan, “in all, 1,570 candidates vied for the 300 seats.”

Across cities like Dacca and Lahore and Karachi, the mood was electric, effervescent with the thrill of new futures. But that excitement was somewhat tempered by feelings of cynicism and doubt. After all, military dictatorships don’t have a great track record for letting the will of the people take its natural course. “Yahya might have tried to rig the voting,” writes Gary J. Bass, “or used the cyclone as an excuse for an indefinite postponement of the elections.”

In East Pakistan especially, Bengali voters were anxious about their voices truly being heard. “They had no recourse if Yahya rigged it,” continue Carney and Miklian, “and in Pakistan, elections were always rigged.”

But Yahya, for all his faults and infirmities, kept his promise. According to Bass:

“When the big day came, U.S. officials in Dacca were pleasantly surprised: the voting was impressively legitimate, the best the country had ever seen. The soldiers and policemen at the polling stations were there only to keep the peace, and Blood saw no signs of voter intimidation. Everyone agreed that it had been free and fair. Women voted in droves. “The elections were remarkably free,” says Butcher. “It was fairly unique, turning a military government to civilian authority. It was a extraordinary thing.”

In polling stations around the nation, millions of people dipped their thumbs in black ink and pressed it next to the name of their chosen candidates. And then….they waited. After the giddy excitement of voting, came the long, stomach-churning uncertainty of the count. If you’ve ever been deeply invested in the outcome of a political election…you know what that can feel like. Amplify that many, many times over and you might approach some conception of what Pakistanis were feeling on Dec 7^th, 1970.

“At midnight,” write Carney and Miklian, ”PTV [Pakistan Television] started airing what it promised would be twenty-four nonstop hours of election coverage. This was an innovation in election entertainment. By contrast, NBC’s 1968 presidential election coverage in the United States lasted less than three hours. Dressed in black slacks, white starched shirts, and skinny black ties, half a dozen dashing PTV anchors posed in front of a huge display that looked like the Fenway Park scoreboard. Below it, piles of green-and-white wooden number squares were ready to slate into place as results rolled in.”

In the President’s House in Islamabad, President Yahya Khan sat in his big chair, bathed in the warm glow of his television set. With any luck, he’d be bathing in a glow of adoration this time tomorrow. He had kept his promise. It would’ve been so, so, easy to strategically stuff a few ballot boxes, or bribe election officials to tilt the results in the favor of his preferred candidates, but Yahya had opted for a hands-off approach. According to one historian:

“Yahya ordered the votes to be counted transparently and the results reported in real time. His own thumb still stained with black ink from when he voted yesterday, Yahya pulled off what no other Pakistani leader could in its quarter century of existence, shutting up the naysayers. Yahya was sure he would be remembered as a hero and a patriot—Pakistan’s father of democracy. He probably pictured his face on the hundred-rupee note.”

Yahya was very proud that he had resisted the temptation to put his ink-stained thumb on the scales. Not that he needed to, of course. Grateful for the gift of democracy, Pakistan’s people would make the right, responsible decision. They would choose the right candidates. But like an untended can of warm beer, Yahya’s enthusiasm started to go flat as the results rolled in.

“The results of the elections on 7 December 1970 were unanticipated by winners, losers, and government alike,” write historians Leo Rose and Richard Sisson.

On the morning of December 8^th, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – Mujib – woke up to the news that, in all likelihood, he would be the next Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Just a few weeks earlier, East Pakistan had been hammered by a once-in-a-lifetime cyclone, and the pain of that devastation unleashed a landslide. Enraged by the military government’s apathy in the aftermath of the Cyclone, embittered by two decades of racism and economic exploitation, Bengalis voted with their feet, muddy and lacerated though they were. As Ayesha Jalal explains:

“The main victims of government negligence in the face of a human calamity—the poverty-stricken peasantry in East Pakistan—voted en masse for the Awami League [That’s Mujib’s political party]. More than 50 percent of the total electorate in the eastern wing voted in the 1970 elections. Coming at the end of more than a decade of virtual political disenfranchisement, the first general elections on the basis of universal adult franchise in Pakistan were a remarkable demonstration of the voters’ maturity in using the secret ballot to decide their own future without the traditional influences of mullahs, landlords, or local leaders.

Three-quarters of the votes were cast for the Awami League, giving it all but two of the 162 seats from East Pakistan in a national assembly consisting of 300 elected and thirteen nonelected members.”

In other words, Bengalis now held an absolute majority in the nation’s representative body.

“Mujib’s party,” writes historian John Keay, “pulled off one of the most unexpected and comprehensive triumphs ever recorded in a genuinely free multi-party election.”

For Mujib and the Awami League, it was a victory they had worked very hard to achieve. According to Srinath Raghavan:

“Mujib’s campaign trail encompassed fifty-five cities, every district headquarters and subdivisional town, and nearly 400 thanas, or police administrative units. According to one estimate, “Sheikh Mujib addressed over 30,000,000 people … a figure representing almost half of the total population of East Bengal.”

But even for Mujib, the scale of the victory was shocking. He had expected support, but to have secured such a commanding majority over West Pakistan was beyond his wildest fantasies. As Mujib himself remarked to an aide on the morning the results were announced: ‘This is more than I had expected’.

American embassy workers in Dacca, on the other hand, who had lived and breathed the rapturous support for Mujib and the Awami League for years, seen the growing movement with an objective eye, weren’t shocked at all.

“I was not surprised that Mujibur Rahman won easily and tremendously in East Pakistan,” one [Eric Griffel] remembered, “There was tremendous Bengali pride in Mujibur.”

In Dacca, the mood was ecstatic. West Pakistan had never respected them, never cared about their suffering or struggles – well, now they would be forced to. Because Pakistan’s next Prime Minister would be a Bengali himself.

But 1,000 miles away, in the capital of Islamabad, President Yahya Khan’s pride in organizing a free & fair election was already curdling into a pall of unease. He didn’t think it would be this fair – didn’t think it would be this free. With Mujib in charge, everything would change. And certainly not in West Pakistan or the military’s favor. As Willem van Schendel writes:

“The Yahya regime was now confronted with an unanticipated situation. Miraculously, the nightmare of East Pakistani control of the state seemed within reach after all. Mujib confidently assumed that he would soon head an all-Awami League government of Pakistan and his party set about preparing a new, more democratic constitution for the country. Both the military – bureaucratic elite and the West Pakistan politicians, however, found this unpalatable.”

Mujib and his minions weren’t going to just swap out the stationary or change the drapes They were going to dismantle everything the West Pakistani elite had built over the last 23 years. This… self-righteous Sheikh would take his hammer and trash the country from the inside out.  For years, Mujib and his party had been saying what they wanted to do if they ever got into power. It was a program called the Six Points – a succinct distillation of their demands and a blueprint for the future, for an almost unrecognizable Pakistan.

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“The Six Points”, writes von Schendel, “demanded a confederation of two separate units. Only defense and foreign affairs would remain as subjects of the all-Pakistan government. East Pakistan would be in complete control of its own taxation, financial management, earnings from foreign trade, trade agreements with foreign countries and paramilitary forces. It could also have its own currency.”

From an East Pakistani perspective, it was simply a way of ensuring that Bengalis had a say in their own political destiny, and that each wing – East and West - could do what was best for its own people, while still remaining united - still remaining true to the original vision of Pakistan.

From a West Pakistani perspective, however, the six points concealed a more nefarious purpose. According to Gary J. Bass: “Yahya and many West Pakistani leaders suspected that Mujib’s Six Points would prove to be merely the first six steps toward outright secession.”

They suspected that “Prime Minister Mujib” would use his newfound authority and ironclad majority to slowly rip Pakistan apart – the Pakistan that millions of people had struggled, suffered and died for. The Pakistan that the Quaid-e-Azam – Muhammed Ali Jinnah himself – had toiled for. The Pakistan that had paid the horrible price of Partition to bring itself into existence. And these selfish, surreptitious Bengalis wanted to tear it all down. And for what? So they could see their own ugly language printed on a rupee note?

It was intolerable. Insulting. Unacceptable.

But as Yahya gripped his whiskey glass a little tighter, a flicker of optimism broke through the clouds. Mujib had won an election, yes. He had a majority, yes. But only in theory. In practice, the military government still held the reins of power, and they had formidable political allies of their own. The Awami League was ascendent….but only in the East. Mujib’s party had not won a single seat in West Pakistan. And that meant that the results of the election were not so done & dusted.

Perhaps, there was a way to preserve West Pakistani authority after all. One of Yahya’s generals spoke for many when he told his peers: “Don’t worry … we will not allow those black bastards to rule over us.”

Despite what the cheering crowds in Dacca might think, Mujib was not Prime Minister - Not yet.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman wasn’t the only rising star in Pakistani politics.

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It’s October 4^th, 1963.

7 years before the National Elections in Pakistan.

We, however, are a long way from South Asia – about 7,000 miles to be precise.

We’re in the capital of the United States – Washington D.C.

At the gates of a very different President’s house.

Dappled in dusky light, the executive residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue gleams over a fresh-cut green. And as tour groups scuttle down the corridors, ‘ooh’ing and ‘ahh’ing over its ivory columns and oil-paintings, they cannot help but feel the weight of history in this sacred place.

The one - the only – the White House.

But past the tour guides, past the charming anecdotes and power-washed mythology, is the real White House. The hive of hallways, crawling with anxious secretaries and overworked deputies. Generals and congressmen and lobbyists – all drawn like flies to the white-hot light of authority. In the course of a single day, many different people will come here for many different reasons. Some want money. Others want favors. A few just want to say they know what color the drapes are. But they all want something.

And amid all that hustle and bustle, a young Pakistani man is escorted into the building. An honored guest from very far away, he is taken deeper and deeper into the nerve center of American democracy – and after a short wait – he arrives at the doors of the Oval Office.

The President’s office.

The door swings open, and President John F. Kennedy (JFK) rises from his desk to greet his guest. At 46 years old, he is the youngest man to ever hold the office – a child by today’s geriatric standards. But despite his modest experience, Kennedy has already been severely tested on the world stage. Just a year earlier, in the fall of 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis had dragged the Cold War superpowers as close as they’d ever been to mutually assured destruction. But Kennedy, green as he was, had guided his nation through the eye of the nuclear needle, and now with the immediate threat of Armageddon averted, he could turn his attention other things.

Things like… the rapidly escalating situation in Vietnam. Or the upcoming (and likely uneventful) trip to Dallas, TX in November. But right now, Kennedy’s full attention is focused on the man standing in front of him. A man who has traveled 7,000 miles to be here today. Kennedy extends his arm, and shakes the hand of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the 35-year-old Foreign Minister of Pakistan. That’s Zulfikar, Z-U-L-I-F-I-K-A-R, Bhutto, B-H-U-T-T-O.

Now, most men in Bhutto’s position would’ve been intimidated standing in the Oval Office, shaking the hand of President Kennedy. But Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was not most men. The two hit it off immediately. After several long discussions, Kennedy was so impressed by the young Bhutto’s intelligence, so enamored with his effortless charisma, that the President is reported to have said: “Mr Bhutto, if you were an American you would be in my cabinet.’

Bhutto’s reply tells you everything you need to know about him: ‘Mr Kennedy, if I were an American, you would be in mine.’

Alongside Mujib and Yahya Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is yet another pivotal character in our story. He forms the crucial third point of the political triangle that’s going to influence what happens next in our story. And to be perfectly transparent, I struggled for a long time trying to find a way to introduce him properly. But I think this infamous exchange with JFK perfectly encapsulates Bhutto’s personality: Affable, arrogant, and ambitious to a fault.

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Sadly, Kennedy and Bhutto’s blossoming friendship was not long for this world. A month after they shook hands in the Oval Office, the President was bleeding out on an operating table in Dallas, shot dead by …a person with a gun – and we’ll just leave it that. And although Kennedy’s life was cut tragically short, Bhutto’s star was only beginning to rise. As one close acquaintance recalled:

“This guy was going places. He had no blood in his veins, only politics.”

In 1963, when people looked at Zulfikar Bhutto, they saw a lot of different things. A shameless playboy, a pinstriped populist, a visionary wunderkind - but most people saw a handsome, latte-skinned, clean-shaven man with a hairline in full retreat and a career in full bloom.

Born in 1928 to an aristocratic family of Muslim landowners, Bhutto grew up with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. As Faisal Khosa writes:

Bhutto was a member of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Sindh, that held strong ties with similar, influential families of Karachi in Pakistan as well as the Middle East. Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci compared Bhutto’s background to that of former US president John F. Kennedy, saying, ‘[He] reminds you of John Kennedy. Like Kennedy, “[Bhutto] grew up in the kind of wealth for which nothing is impossible, not even the conquest of political power, cost what it may. Like Kennedy, he had a comfortable, happy, privileged childhood. Like Kennedy, he began his rise to power very early.”

At some point, the silver spoon became a silver tongue. Even at an early age, Bhutto was notorious for his command of rhetoric. In the classroom, there was no debate he could not win; no argument he could not unravel. As a childhood friend remembered: “he was wonderful at twisting and turning the opposition’. His teachers were less enthused; one exasperated schoolmaster is said to have told young Bhutto:

‘Enough of your flowery language. I know you can make a stone water but you cannot make me water.”

But as Bhutto grew into a gangly, hot-headed teenager, he was less and less interested in sparring with schoolmates or humiliating his tutors. Outside the window of his family’s estate, the world was changing – and the Indian subcontinent seemed to be at the center of it. The adults were talking about independence. Huge crowds were marching in the street, chanting and cheering and waving signs. But above all the shouting and sloganeering, one word caught Bhutto’s ear – one word rose above the clamor and set his imagination ablaze:

“Pakistan”.

Land of the pure.

Like many South Asians who grew up in the turbulent times before Partition, Bhutto became obsessed with the idea of Pakistan. He idolized the heroes of the independence movement, particularly the Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammed Ali Jinnah. As one historian wrote:

“In 1945, at the age of seventeen, Zulfikar wrote to Jinnah saying that the time would come when he would sacrifice his life for Pakistan. ‘The Musalmans should realize that the Hindus can never unite, will never unite with us, they are the deadliest enemies of our Kuran and our Prophet. We should realize that you are our Leader. You, Sir, have brought us under one platform and one flag and the cry of every Musalman should be “onward to Pakistan”. Our destiny is Pakistan, our aim is Pakistan.’

In short, young Zulfikar Bhutto was a true believer, and when the dream of Pakistan became reality in 1947, he wanted nothing more than to apply his considerable talents to its success. So, he spent the next several years incubating his intellect in some of the world’s most esteemed universities. First Berkeley in the US. Then Oxford in England. When one professor scoffed that it would be impossible for Bhutto to finish his Master’s degree in two years, a feat that “even the best brains of our own boys would not be able to do”, Bhutto did just that. No pale English prig was going to tell him what he could and could not do.

And so, with law degree in-hand, Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1953. He used his family connections, his God-given charm and his shiny new education to kickstart a career that one historian described as “meteoric”. 

As the son of a rich, land-owning family, Bhutto was no stranger to power and influence. But that kind of power, he felt, was small and superficial. It was local power, local influence. Where people’s respect was bought or inherited, not earned. Well Bhutto wanted to earn it. He wanted to move people, just like Muhammed Ali Jinnah had done. He wanted to look out on a crowd of millions and see the tears in their eyes, hear the ecstasy in their voices. He wanted to lead. Or to be more accurate… he wanted to be followed.

As Bhutto began his career as a hotshot lawyer in Karachi, he looked every inch the rising star. Like some kind of Pakistani Patrick Bateman. As one colleague described him in those early years:

“Duck cotton trousers. Royal blue blazer with brushed brass buttons. Oxford University necktie. A key chain with outer end clung to the trousers loop and the other running down and disappearing in the trousers pocket. All this sat pretty on his solid sporty frame of approximately 5’ 10”. His classic features were dominated by his broad forehead. Jet black hair meticulously brushed back caused symmetrical waves which naturally delineated his forehead so neatly that it suggested of hairdresser’s charisma.”

He was a handsome young man, and he had a handsome young man’s appetites. As one woman remembered:

“Bhutto as I knew him was the feudal landlord with princely pleasures: drinks, shikar (hunting) and a new girl every night.’

But Bhutto conducted his social life in the service of business as well as pleasure. According to historian Owen Bennet-Jones:

“The Bhutto family had some of the best hunting grounds in the country, and Pakistan’s leading politicians, civil servants and military officers often accepted invitations. His guest list included Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, who shot no fewer than 143 ducks in 5 hours. While Zulfikar’s British royal visitors must have made other Sindhi feudals envious, the most important guest in terms of his political career was Pakistan’s president, Iskander Mirza, who shot at Larkana every year from 1954 to 1958.”

Greased with duck fat, the doors to political power swung wide open for Bhutto. In 1958, at the astonishing age of 30, he was given a plum gig in the newly-minted Military government’s Cabinet. By the age of 35, he’d become Pakistan’s foreign minister, taking trips to Washington and telling President John F. Kennedy to his face that if he were American, he’d be his boss.  

In the early 1960s, Bhutto’s star burned very bright indeed.

He flew all over the world, advocating for a stronger, more independent Pakistan. In 1962, in what one historian called a “stroke of genius”, he negotiated a landmark treaty with the People’s Republic of China, which increased Pakistan’s territory and secured much-needed economic and military support. With each success, Bhutto was proving that he possessed that most dangerous combination of qualities in a politician: ambition and efficacy.

But you don’t climb that high, that fast, without making a few enemies. Bhutto could charm and flatter and persuade better than anyone, but not everyone in his orbit was so easily dazzled. Among the international community, Bhutto developed a reputation as a man who would do and say anything to get what he wanted. Truthfulness seemed to be a temporary condition for Bhutto; A passing phenomenon – like a thunderstorm or a stomach ache.

As one British official wrote in 1965: “Bhutto’s declared opinions seldom reveal his inner thoughts. Trained as an advocate, he plays with words and attitudes, taking pleasure in being all things to all men. In this he expresses his basic lack of principles: he probably adheres to nothing except self-interest.

The British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, described Bhutto as a “thoroughly untrustworthy person. He has considerable ability, is amusing and cultivated, but he uses these advantages without compunction in order to deceive, and he is skillful at adapting his attitudes to the audience of the moment . . . he is in fact, a self-seeking intriguer.”

Bhutto’s reputation didn’t fare much better across the pond. US President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s gruff & beleaguered successor, called Bhutto “damn dangerous”. National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy described him as ‘the biggest four letter word in international politics’. 

Even the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, never one to blanche at deception, was unnerved by Bhutto’s cutthroat style, remarking in 1964:

“Tell me Mr. Bhutto, it is so difficult to understand. Will you tell me something? You are such a fine young man, handsome, well educated, intelligent, clever and competent; but may I ask, with all this, why do you take such dirty decisions?”

Privately, Bhutto probably would’ve taken all these tirades as a compliment.

“I have learnt,” Bhutto once said, “that if one is to become a successful politician, one has to live by a profitable absence of scruples. We have to do what others do to us, but we must do it before the others have the opportunity.”

“A politician should be mobile. He should sway now to right and now to left; he should come up with contradictions, doubts. He should change continually, test things, attack from every side so as to single out his opponent’s weak point and strike at it. Woe to him if he focuses immediately on his basic concept, woe if he reveals and crystallizes it. Woe if he blocks the maneuver by which to throw his opponent on the carpet. Apparent inconsistency is the prime virtue of the intelligent man and the astute politician.”

Unprincipled. Unpredictable. Untroubled by trivialities like ethics or honesty, Bhutto was single-minded in his pursuit of power. After all, he might have assured himself, had the Quaid-e-Azam himself not had to fight dirty for the creation of Pakistan? Had his hero, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, not used every trick in his considerable repertoire in service of a greater goodl? Do the ends not always, always justify the means?

“Bhutto treated politics like war,” write Scott Carney and Jason Miklian.

But like so many ambitious young politicians, Bhutto eventually flew too close the sun. In 1965, after advocating for a brief but humiliating war with India over the contested region of Kashmir, Bhutto ran afoul of the Military Regime. His silver tongue became a lead weight; and just as fast as he had risen, he plummeted to earth, exiled from the government and condemned to the humdrum comforts of a country lord. Yes, the Generals said, the only thing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto would ever lead again was a duck hunt, or a drunken toast.  

But Bhutto’s hunger was insatiable. If he could not take power from within, he would do so from without.

->>

I AM THE PPP

“On December 1, 1967,” writes Ayesha Jalal, “Bhutto launched the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) […] Vowing Islam as its faith, democracy as its politics, and socialism as its economy, the PPP promised all power to the people and adopted the populist slogan: “Food, clothing and housing is everyone’s demand.”

After a decade living under military dictatorship, ordinary Pakistanis were deeply frustrated. We’ve already covered the discontent in East Pakistan and its catalyzation around Sheikh Mujibur Rahman…but many people in the West were hungry for change too. No one, East or West, enjoyed living with the Junta’s boot on their neck. Somehow, some way, some day - the military regime had to go.

Well, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto saw that rising wave; and at the perfect moment, he fashioned himself a surf board. The Pakistan People’s Party - or the PPP - became a vehicle for Bhutto’s personal aspirations and a vessel for West Pakistani grievances. In both wings of the country, populist movements were gaining ground, each led by a fiery, charismatic demagogue. As Mujib was ascending in the East, Bhutto was ascending in the West. Like a pair of twin suns, locked in oppositional orbits.

There were some of course, who raised their eyebrows at Bhutto and his ‘power-to-the-people’ schtick. How does a well-to-do aristocrat with a Rolls Royce in the driveway and a tailor on speed-dial become the leader of a working-class populist movement? It was like a cat being named King of the dogs. “Bhutto was handsome, sardonic, urbane, and rich” writes Gary J. Bass ”—an unlikely background for such a volatile populist”. Bhutto swatted these contradictions aside like so many insects. Here’s the man himself in a March 1969 interview with a British journalist.

AUDIO Q: This is hardly the background of a militant social reformer. Q: Bhutto talks about long history of land-owning gentry allying with populist causes – French Rev, Russian Rev. [I believe the cause of the people, the cause of the country, is more important than vested interests.

The fact was, Bhutto had the support of huge numbers in West Pakistan. Diplomats from Washington to Moscow thought he was a scorpion in cufflinks, but to normal West Pakistanis, Bhutto was a hero. *Their* hero.

AUDIO Supporters: Yes we support Bhutto. We want socialism”

“Some of the footage of him from this period shows crowds of tens of thousands,” writes Owen Bennet-Jones, “He shed his Western suit, donned Pakistani clothes and performed on stage with ever more extravagant gestures, sometimes speaking with such passion that he knocked over the microphones in front of him. [….] When asked how he, a major landowner, could promise land reform if he was not prepared to give up his own land straight away, he took off his jacket and threw it to the crowd. As people fought to grab it, the jacket was torn to shreds. Then Bhutto spoke: if he gave away his land straight away, that is what would happen and no one would get any. But when there were laws and systems in place, he would happily give up his land for redistribution.”

“Bhutto waxed eloquent on the virtues of democracy,” writes Ayesha Jalal, “More than a feeling, democracy was about “fundamental rights, adult franchise, the secrecy of ballot, freedom of the press and association, independence of the judiciary, supremacy of the legislature, controls on the executive—in short, everything that was sorely missing under the current regime.”

In Bhutto’s words, democracy was “like a breath of fresh air, like the fragrance of a spring flower. It is a melody of liberty, richer in sensation than tangible touch.”

Still, not everyone in West Pakistan was entranced by Bhutto. In a nation dominated by conservative Islamic morals, Bhutto seemed a little too cavalier, a little too debauched.

AUDIO [Q: Could Mr Bhutto come to power? A: There are very few chances. The majority people think he’s not serious enough, or a good enough Muslim in his personal life to become the President of Pakistan.

But there was no critique Bhutto could not parry, no attack he could not pirouette past.

“Famously when accused of liking wine and women,” writes Owen Bennett-Jones, “he replied that yes, he was fond of women: as men were supposed to be. And as regards drinking, well, he may drink alcohol but at least he did not drink the blood of the poor, and anyway, he drank less Yahya Khan.”

And when President Yahya Khan announced that National Elections would be taking place in December of 1970, Zulfikar Bhutto saw the path to power lit up like runway. All he had to do was walk through the door. This is what he had been working for since before Pakistan even existed. Every class debate, every overseas strip, every stump speech – it had all been leading to this. It was time to take what was rightfully his – the power owed to him by merit of blood and birth and many years of faithful service to the nation.

And as the election results began to roll in, things were looking very good for Bhutto. In West Pakistan, the PPP all but swept the board. As Leo Rose and Richard Sisson describe: “The People’s Party, within three years of its founding and with a loosely contrived organizational structure, won 83 of the 138 seats for the National Assembly in the western provinces.”

But as new numbers started going up on the board, Bhutto’s smile went limp.

The PPP had done well, true, but their big win in the West was entirely eclipsed by the landslide in East Pakistan. Mujib and his party, the Awami League, had secured almost double the amount of seats. By all accounts, Mujib, with his thundering voice and Coke Bottle glasses, was going to be the next Prime Minister of Pakistan. The math was clear as day; and for the ruling elite in West Pakistan, the implications were black as night.

Yet again, Bhutto had been thwarted. So close to the big chair, and yet so far away.

The morning after the election, Bhutto’s phone rang. The voice on the other end belonged to President Yahya Khan. The President was calling to congratulate Zulfikar and the PPP on their very impressive showing in the election. It had been a blowout in East Pakistan, sure, but the People’s Party had done very well. Whatever form the government took, Bhutto was likely to have a substantial role in it.

Bhutto’s reply hit Yahya in the gut like cannonball.

Bhutto’s reply deflated Yahya like a balloon.

“You idiot. Now the bastards will think they deserve to rule this country.”

The bastards in question, of course, were the Bengalis. Like any good West Pakistani, Bhutto despised his cousins in the East. The thought of having to take orders from one made him physically ill. Yahya, grasping for some kind of silver lining, countered:

“I don’t see what all the fuss is about, Bhutto. You’ve won the minority party convincingly. You can sit in the minority and still be a very powerful man.”

Bhutto’s demeanor, always so smooth and calm and measured, broke under the strain of anger and stress. He sneered: “You are nothing but a Queen Elizabeth. A useless figurehead. A woman”

Did Yahya not see what was happening? Did he not understand what a Pakistan run by Bengalis would bring? Think about it for two seconds, he implored. The Bengalis are friendly with India, they’re weak and cowardly and basically Hindus themselves. Every year, every moment under Bengali leadership would bring us closer to being absorbed back into India. Relegated to second-class citizens under Hindu hegemony. OR maybe Mujib will choose to break up the country– to split off from Pakistan entirely and form a brand-new Bengali nation. It would be a second Partition – even worse than before. And then there goes our jute! There goes our foreign export money. We’ll be paupered overnight.

Either way, it was catastrophic. Either way, the dream of Pakistan – Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s dream – was in serious danger.

Yahya, proud man that he was, didn’t like being insulted. In later recollections, he would refer to Bhutto as a “venomous toad”; but he had to admit, Zulfikar was right. Mujib was a loose cannon, and he needed to be strapped to the deck before he took the whole ship down with him.

Bhutto and Yahya were not natural allies, of course. But the results of the 1970 election brought them into common cause. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“While Yahya and Bhutto were cutthroat rivals—a conservative, pro-American military man pitted against a leftist, anti-American firebrand—they were driven together in the panicky days after the election by a shared hostility toward India and a fear of losing East Pakistan.”

And so, these two men – Yahya and Bhutto – the soldier and the spider, the idiot and the ideologue, decided that they would have to work together very closely in the months ahead. They needed to salvage somethingfrom this democratic debacle. They needed to “save Pakistan from itself”, in the words of one historian.

But most of all, Yahya needed a drink.

One way or another, they would have to deal with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

---- MUSIC BREAK -----

It’s 1936.

35 years before the Pakistani National Elections. 11 years before Partition. An eon ago in the hearts and minds of the subcontinent.

We’re in the city of Calcutta, in the surgery wing of the Medical College Hospital. It’s about nine o’clock in the morning, and already the waiting rooms are filled with people. Doctors and nurses and orderlies. Patients and parents and families. In a city as large and impoverished as Calcutta, there is no shortage of sick people who desperately need help. The vast majority of them, however, do not have the money or connections or providence to receive attention from the Hospital’s overworked medical staff, but the ones that do are very, very grateful.

One of those lucky patients in the waiting room this morning is a 16-year-old boy.

Even though he knows how lucky he is to be receiving treatment, the boy is absolutely terrified. At first glance, he was a normal, healthy kid– no issues, no ailments. He was strong and energetic, he enjoyed playing sports like football and hockey. But recently, the boy had been noticing problems. He couldn’t see the ball clearly anymore – couldn’t discern his parents’ facial features from a distance. Even the pages in his school books were suddenly blurry. Held an inch away from his eyes, the words were almost indecipherable.

A visit to a doctor confirmed that the boy had a rapidly advancing case of glaucoma. If it wasn’t treated immediately, there was very high risk that the boy would be blind before his 18^th birthday. And so, his nervous parents rushed him to the Calcutta Medical College Hospital for a risky and invasive surgery.

As he sat in the chair, waiting for the nurse to call him back, the boy was absolutely terrified. As he told an interviewer later in life:

“I was scheduled for surgery at 9 am. I was so scared that I tried to run away but did not succeed. I was taken to the operating theatre for surgery on one eye. Within 10 days there was another surgery on the other eye. I eventually recovered but had to wear glasses from then on. That is why I have had glasses since 1936.”

And 35 years later, in January of 1971, as he rode in the backseat of a car through the streets of Dacca, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was thankful for all the sights the city had to offer. The colors, the shapes, the textures. Each one was a gift, and he never forgot that long, agonizing wait in the surgery wing in Calcutta.

And although many things had changed, and he wasn’t a scared teenager anymore, Mujib would nevertheless be waiting again today. Waiting for a big man in a big house to give him what he had rightfully earned. And as his car pulled up to the Presidential Residence to meet with Yahya Khan, Mujib could not help but think how very, very tired of waiting he was.

On January 12^th, 1971, Prime Minister Elect Mujib arrived at the gates of the Presidential Residence, one Yahya Khan’s many houses across Pakistan. This one, in Dacca, was arguably the most neglected, coated in dust and attended by a skeleton crew of servants. But today, the Presidential pad is abuzz with activity. Yahya Khan has flown all the way from the Pimp House in Islamabad to meet with Mujib.

After the Awami League’s staggering electoral victory, the two men had many things to discuss.  Already there had been… misunderstandings between Pakistan’s incoming majority and its outgoing military regime. As Faisal Khosa writes:

As soon as the results of the elections were announced, Yahya sent compliments to Mujib and Bhutto. He was eager to begin talks with them and invited them both to Islamabad. Mujib, however, declined to discuss or negotiate the post-election scenario with Yahya in the capital city in West Pakistan. This significant move was interpreted in some quarters as Mujib’s lack of interest in becoming the prime minister of a united Pakistan; a more realistic interpretation was that Mujib wanted to assert that going forward, all crucial decisions were to be made in Dhaka (East Pakistan) and not in Islamabad (West Pakistan).

Chafed by Mujib’s power move, Yahya responded with a clumsy display of passive aggression. According to Ayesha Jalal:

“Yahya delayed announcing a date for the meeting of the national assembly, which was to function as both the legislature and the constitution-making body. This aroused Bengali suspicions.”

Yahya summed up the fragile predicament with a blunt reminder to Mujib: “You have the votes, but I have the power.” In other words, you are not Prime Minister until I allow you to be Prime Minister.

Eventually though, five weeks after the National Election, Yahya and Mujib finally organized a sit-down in Dacca. It was in this charged atmosphere that the two men intended to align on the details of Pakistan’s future.

With medals jingling and chins wagging, Yahya spread his arms and welcomed Mujib to the Presidential Residence. And although their respective entourages were wincing in anticipation of nasty argument/fireworks show, the talks went surprisingly well. Over a series of three meetings, Yahya and Mujib cleared the air and tried to set aside some of the distrust between them.

Mujib outlined his Six-Point plan for Pakistan, through which the East would be given more autonomy, more influence, and old wounds would be redressed. New laws, new leaf. That said, Mujib emphasized that his Six Points were flexible: “They’re not the Qur’an or the Bible.” He was willing to bend so that Pakistan would not break.

“Mujib also indicated,” according to Leo Rose and Richard Sisson, “that he would accommodate the corporate interests of the Pakistani army as well as the personal political interests of President Yahya. He would not reduce the size of the army; and he assured Yahya that no one from West Pakistan would be dismissed from either the military or civil services.”

Substantively, it was all perfectly reasonable, Yahya conceded, and he had no major issues with the core tenets of Mujib’s agenda. He did, however, have two conditions. As Carney and Miklian write: “that Pakistan stay unified and Yahya continue on as president.”

Mujib said that all seemed fair enough. But then Yahya unveiled a third condition.

Oh, and one other thing:  Mujib would also need to secure the cooperation of the Pakistan People’s Party and its firebrand figurehead, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The PPP had garnered too large of a following to be ignored. The East held an absolute majority, yes, but Mujib couldn’t just steamroll the nation’s bureaucratic heartland. He would need to win Bhutto over.

It was a precondition that Bhutto had made abundantly clear in a December 24^th speech, saying that the PPP was “the sole representative of the people of West Pakistan like the Awami League in East Pakistan, and therefore it cannot be deprived of sharing power in the government.”

Mujib replied that he was up to the challenge and embraced that responsibility: “I am a democrat and the majority leader of all Pakistan. I cannot ignore the interests of West Pakistan. I am not only responsible to the people of East and West Pakistan but also to world opinion. I shall do everything on democratic principles.”

Both men left the talks more-or-less satisfied and cautiously optimistic about the future. Yahya even went so far as to call Mujib “Pakistan’s next Prime Minister”; Afterwards, he told a close advisor: “It’s going to be Mujib’s government soon.”

Now, if Yahya is starting sound a bit inconsistent at this point – it’s because he is. We all know a person like Yahya Khan; a person whose opinions tend to echo the most recent person they spoke to that day. Zigging one minute, zagging the next, morning’s convictions forgotten by lunch. That’s the uncharitable explanation. The charitable one is that, by this point, there was a serious divergence between Yahya’s public statements and private thoughts. But whatever was going on in windy canyon between Yahya’s ears, the true turning point in our story happens three days later.



In the final moments of their talks in Dacca, Mujib asked if Yahya was going to consult with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on what they had discussed. Yahya response was coy:

“I am going for shooting of birds in Sind [sic] which is Bhutto’s area. If he is there I will meet him also.”

Well, a few days later, Bhutto and Yahya were trudging through a lakeside marsh, shotguns in-hand and ducks in their sights. Both men relished the simplicity of an old-fashioned bird hunt. No talking, no negotiating, just point-and-shoot. Ducks, unlike Bengalis, could not talk back.

“It was at this stage,” writes Owen Bennett-Jones, “that Zulfikar Bhutto played a significant role in the unfolding events. At a duck shoot in Larkana [that’s Bhutto’s family estate/ ranch, more or less], Zulfikar complained to Yahya that he had named Mujib as prime minister without first consulting him. Yahya not unreasonably replied that Mujib would be prime minister not because Yahya had named him but because so many people had voted for the Awami League. But Zulfikar insisted on a share of power, saying the PPP was ‘not prepared to occupy the opposition benches in the Assembly’.

Yahya could only shrug and reply…well, you’ll have to hash that out with Mujib. I talked to him; and he’s being pretty reasonable. He won the election fair and square. What do you want me to do?

It was in this moment, that Bhutto went to work on Yahya.

Mujib certainly had a way with words, but Zulfikar Bhutto had his way with words. Bhutto had a tongue that could slice you from navel to nostril; and then, in the same breath, he would stitch you up and stroke your check and tell you everything was going to be alright.

“Bhutto plied Yahya with food and drink,” write Carney and Milkian ,“reminding him night after night that Mujib would never settle for being just prime minister; he would surely betray them all. Bhutto forgave Yahya for being taken in by that silver-tongued politician. The devious and charismatic Bengali could be intoxicating, Bhutto said. That’s what Bengalis were best at. He reminded Yahya of their postelection talk—of the importance of securing their country’s legacy—and warned him again that having a Bengali leader would surely lead to Pakistan’s dissolution. Bhutto saved his coup de grâce for the final night. “Yahya, what if we made me prime minister? We would finally be the team we always dreamed of being. We would be unstoppable.”

“You will be remembered as Pakistan’s greatest leader,” Bhutto continued, ”I am sure of it. But only if we handle this Bengal issue once and for all. […]“What should we do, Yahya? You’re the military mind. How should we solve it?”

Dusty, rusty gears began to turn and creak in Yahya’s brain. Old instincts in an old soldier.

Yahya admitted that, well, there was….something. A plan that had been recently drawn up. A secret contingency, known only to the highest echelons of the Pakistani military command. It was, basically, an insurance policy in case the Bengalis ever flirted with a full-on insurrection.  The planners called it Operation Searchlight, and it called for the complete annihilation of the Awami League, the purging of Bengali separatism, and the liquidation of undesirable elements in the government. Torn out, root and stem.

But, Yahya noted, snapping out of a red haze, it was just a last resort. At this point, the Bengalis haven’t done anything except win an election. If we initiate a crackdown prematurely, we’d be crucified on the world stage, lambasted in the United Nations. No way - we cannot use it. At least not right now.

Well, Bhutto suggested, what if we make the Bengalis make us use it?

What if we postpone the National Assembly, postpone the transition of power. It’ll be a sort of loyalty test for Mujib, Bhutto explained: “If there is no reaction then Mujib is loyal, but if he disobeys and starts an agitation, then he is disloyal.”

Yahya rubbed his chins and sipped his drink and paddled in the shallow pool of his own intellect. Yet again, Yahya thought, Zulfikar was making sense. If we did it right… this could actually work. Maybe we don’t have to hand power over to East Pakistan at all. As Carney and Miklian write:

“Yahya needed a good reason to strip Mujib of his victory—a reason that even foreign powers, like the United States, would support. Yahya knew that stonewalling Mujib would eventually force the Bengali to call for independence. Yahya was buying time so that when Mujib’s rhetoric finally did tilt over into revolution, the military response could be justified, decisive, and permanent.”

->

When Yahya left Bhutto’s estate on January 18th, a two-pronged plan had taken shape. The contours were still in flux, but the ultimate goal was clear: significantly weaken or outright disempower Mujib and the Awami League. Each man had their part to play. Bhutto would go to Dacca, meet with Mujib and continue negotiations between their two parties. He would obstruct and obfuscate and agitate – but most importantly…delay, delay, delay. He would give Mujib enough rope to hang himself. Meanwhile, Yahya Khan would prepare the military for an eventual crackdown on East Pakistan.

There was, of course, the remote possibility that Mujib might be browbeaten into surrendering a share of the power he had rightfully won; that he might be intimidated into neutering his famous Six-Point Plan. After all, he had told Yahya just a few days earlier that it wasn’t gospel. It wasn’t the Q’uran or the Bible; it was flexible.

Well, Bhutto suspected otherwise. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a proud and angry leader of a proud and angry people. Even if he wanted to, Mujib would be unable to step back from the most aggressive interpretation of his agenda. His legions of supporters and the Awami League would never allow it. He had promised too much, rabble-roused for too long. He was, in the words of one contemporary “a prisoner of his own support.”

Bhutto knew better than anyone that a politician’s chief virtue is not integrity or honesty – but flexibility. And poor Mujib, righteous, beloved, messianic Mujib, had given himself so very little of that.

Back in Dacca, as Mujib and the Awami League drew up their plans for a new government, 50,000 troops from West Pakistan were being secretly flown into the Bengal delta. Tanks and APCs, flamethrowers and mortars – all of them wielded by soldiers who had nothing but the deepest contempt for East Pakistan and its people.

Operation Searchlight was moving into place.

=== MUSIC BREAK ======

It’s March 3^rd, 1971.

About six weeks after Bhutto and Yahya’s fateful duck hunt.

We’re on the tiny island of Manpura, at the southern tip of the Bengal Delta.

Now if that name sounds familiar– Manpura – it’s because we’ve been here before. Manpura was ground zero for the deadly Bhola Cyclone, and last episode, we witnessed the storm’s ferocity through the eyes of an 18-year-old boy named Muhammed Hai.

In less than 12 hours, Muhammed Hai endured more loss and trauma than most people experience in a lifetime. When the sun went down on November 12^th, 1970, Hai was a bright student with his whole life ahead of him and a family to cheer him on. When it came up the next morning, 19 of his relatives, including his brother and mother, were dead, drowned by the 20-foot storm surge. Hai only managed to survive by clinging onto the palm tree next to their tin-roofed house.

In the morning, the palm tree was still standing, and Hai was still breathing – but not much else was. As one volunteer worker named Cornelia Rodhe commented later: “What was not destroyed by the cyclone perished in the slower drowning of a huge man-and-god-made inland sea.”

Half a  million people – gone in a blink.

After burying his 19 family members, Hai buried his neighbors, then their neighbors, then their neighbors. “By noon,” write Carney and Miklian, “Hai buried a hundred and eighty people in his front yard.”

The weeks that followed passed in a kind of blur for Muhammed Hai. Helicopters and aid trucks swept into the delta, carrying altruistic foreigners with bleeding hearts and tearful consciences. They brought water and bandages and bags of rice – but no matter how much they brought, or how many survivors they fed, it was never enough. Most people in the delta had to eat tree bark or dead dogs to survive. And although food was scarce, two things were never in short supply: mosquitos and rats. As Carney and Miklian write:

“With the island stripped of natural predators and rotting carcasses piled up everywhere, Manpura was a garden of Eden for vermin. The rat population grew to tens of thousands in weeks. [Once] they’d eaten the last of the island’s lifeless remains […] they turned on the living in packs, infesting every house in search of a meal.”

Before long, the rat plague became such an impediment to basic relief operations that aid organizations were paying bounties for the rodents. As one volunteer recalled: “Every day boys would bring in head baskets full of dead rats.”

And at night, when all the rice bags were empty, and the water tanks were dry, and the islands were swallowed up in curtain/veil of darkness, the survivors looked up into the sky and wondered why this was happening to them. One volunteer remembered that the islands were so dark at night that he could see huge ribbons of stars twinkling up above. But it brought little comfort, as he remembered:

“I slipped back into the wall of blackness, lay on my back looking at the riotous heavens above with the Milky Way coursing down the center, and wept.”

But despite the misery and the deprivation, the survivors of the Bhola Cyclone had one thing to look forward to. One thing to keep them going. And that was December 7^th, 1970.

Election Day.

President Yahya Khan had graciously extended the voting deadline by 10 days in cyclone-affected areas, but most people in East Pakistan voted on December 7^th, and on Manpura, Muhammed Hai sat glued to the radio, waiting for the results. Like most East Pakistanis, he was ecstatic when the news of Mujib’s landslide victory came in. Finally, Bengalis would have a say in the running of their own country. In a matter of months, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would be Prime Minister of Pakistan.

But in the coming weeks, the news broadcasts that crackled over Hai’s shortwave radio were not so hopeful. The transition of power didn’t seem to be going well at all. Apparently, a man named Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had won big in the West, and he was insisting on a share of the power. The negotiations between his party, the Pakistan People’s Party, and the Awami League went from bad to worse to irreconcilable. As Sisson and Rose write:

“Because of the emergence of a two-party system in which the parties were divided by strong ideologies and personalities, were regionally based, and were fearful of each other’s designs, party solidarity was emphasized, which inhibited efforts at compromise. After the elections, as time went on, mutual suspicion and distrust intensified, and the demands of each side became more rigid. Party headquarters ultimately resembled fortresses preparing for siege more than brokerage houses preparing to make deals.”

Muhammed Hai was only getting parts and pieces of the story, but from what he could tell, the West Pakistanis were trying sabotage Mujib’s majority before it even got off the ground. The calling of the National Assembly, the representative body that would draft Pakistan’s constitution and usher in Mujib’s new government, was postponed, and then postponed again, and then postponed again. Even on isolated Manpura, the signs were troubling. The Pakistani Army – Yahya’s Army – marched in. Ostensibly, they were there to distribute food, but the only thing that seemed to change on the island was a series of eerie disappearances. Local Awami League representatives vanished overnight.

Lost in a whirlwind of hearsay and rumor, Hai tuned into his radio as often as he could, hoping for news of what was going on in faraway Dacca. In early March, his patience was rewarded. A broadcast came over the radio waves. As Carney and Miklian write:

“Mujib told everyone in East Pakistan to tune in on March 7 for what he promised would be the most important speech of his life.”

->

That day, Hai and his surviving neighbors crowded around the radio, beneath the same palm tree that had kept him alive through the cyclone… and listened. Over the radio, they heard Mujib’s voice coming through loud and clear, and beneath it, the roars and cheers of an immense crowd.

140 miles to the north, in Dacca, one million Bengalis (literally one million people) converged on the Ramna Race Course – the site of Mujib’s big speech. A crowd the size of the population of the state of Delaware, pressed and crushed and cohered towards the nucleus of their hopes and dreams. Towards the stage, where Sheikh Mujibur Rahman gripped a podium with white knuckles.

Six weeks earlier, Mujib had left his meeting with President Yahya Khan convinced that he had made huge progress with the military regime. Yahya had nodded and smiled and called him “the next prime minister of Pakistan”. And then….the President went duck hunting. Whatever Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said to Yahya in between pulls of whiskey and fresh cartridge shells, it had not been good. As one historian wrote:

“From Mujib’s point of view, the Larkana meeting reinforced his feeling that he was up against a hostile West Pakistani elite hobnobbing with each other and determined to deny him his victory. And there was a sense in which, for all his self-interested scheming, Zulfikar was speaking for the West Pakistan establishment as a whole: as the situation deteriorated, Zulfikar seemed to get closer to the army.”

Mujib had long been suspicious of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He even had reason to be afraid. As one historian wrote:

“Bhutto had the majority vote of West Pakistan, home of the Armed Forces, and had been a minister in the military government for eight years. He enjoyed close friendships with the generals. By contrast, Mujib had no friends in the Army and the generals viewed him with suspicion because he opposed the military’s role in politics and advocated decentralizing power.”

After the elections, Bhutto had done very little to allay those concerns. From the very beginning, before the last ballots were even counted, the PPP had been rattling its saber against the Awami League. As Sisson and Rose write:

“The People’s Party decided to challenge the Awami League publicly by raising doubts about the six points, by questioning the right of a party from one region to speak for the entirety of a territorially and culturally plural Pakistan, and by insisting that the PPP have a place in the government. Despite its minority position within the National Assembly, the PPP launched a campaign to establish itself as one of two “majority parties” in Pakistan, attempted to deny the Awami League coalitions with parties in the west, and endeavored to discredit the Awami League’s constitutional principles and its commitment to the integrity of Pakistan. “

From Karachi to Lahore, PPP reps lambasted the Awami League, but whatever their rhetoric, whatever their flourishes, they were all speaking with Bhutto’s silver tongue. Not a syllable left their mouths without his say-so. As Bhutto himself boasted:

“I am the PPP”

In late January, about a week after the big duck hunt, Bhutto and his People’s posse arrived in Dacca to negotiate with the Awami League. Predictably, the talks went absolutely nowhere. The point of contention was actually six points of contention – the PPP could not abide the Awami League’s plans for a radical increase in East Pakistani autonomy. As far as the PPP was concerned, the Six Point plan as written was DOA. A non-starter.

But Bhutto went a step further, insisting that in order to make a deal, he had to be guaranteed a spot in Mujib’s cabinet, whatever form it took. As the leader of the second-most important political party in Pakistan, he was entitled to a key role in the new government. Anything less would be an insult to his West Pakistani constituency. Bhutto expressed his discontent as only an Oxford man could. In his words, a new constitution written without the PPP’s express consent would be: “like staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.”

Furthermore, Bhutto said, his participation in the new government would ensure that Mujib could not simply secede from Pakistan altogether, and establish a new nation – a land of the Bengalis – a “Bangladesh.” When confronted with accusations that his true aim was to split off from the nation, Mujib countered:

‘Why would East Pakistan, having a majority of the country’s population want to secede? Let them (West Pakistani’s) secede if they want to.”

It was an effective clap-back, but the bitter truth was: neither the PPP nor the Awami League spoke for all Pakistanis. As Sisson and Rose write:

“It is ironic that although Bhutto claimed to represent a single wing of the country, but possessed a national program, Mujib claimed to represent a national majority, but had a program that emphasized the grievances and demands of a single region.”

But, polarization or not, the East had won a clear majority in a fair and free election, and as the weeks went on without any sign of a firm transition date from Yahya, tempers flared and anxieties multiplied. Of course the military regime in West Pakistan would drag its feet, the Bengalis thought. Of course they would delay for as long as possible. Yet another insult. Yet another indignity. As Srinath Raghavan writes:

“By this time, the situation in the East was almost on the boil. The delay in summoning the Assembly was generating immense impatience among the Bengalis. As one observer noted, “public meetings, processions, rallies, began taking place day and night in Dhaka and most major towns.” Consequently, Yahya announced on 13 February that the National Assembly would convene in Dhaka on 3 March 1971.”

Okay, East Pakistanis thought. At least now we have a date. At least we have a firm timeline we can hold them to. There is a light at the end of this tunnel.

“But then,” writes Owen Bennet-Jones, “Zulfikar Bhutto made his most significant contribution to the dismemberment of Pakistan. Frustrated that the Awami League was offering him no guarantees about his future role and fearing that Mujib might be able to split the PPP, he told a mass rally in Lahore that the party would not attend the National Assembly’s opening session.”



As Ayesha Jalal explains further:

“Bhutto demanded a postponement of the national assembly or an extension of the 120-day period for the formulation of the constitution. Getting carried away by the force of his own words, he threatened to break the legs of anyone, whether from the PPP or any other West Pakistani party, who attended the national assembly session in Dhaka. This was provocative in the extreme. The die had been cast; the Awami League leadership’s distrust of Bhutto was complete. Egged on by the intelligence agencies, most political parties in West Pakistan refused to attend the assembly session.

On March 1 Yahya used the excuse to postpone the national assembly and aggravated matters by not announcing an alternative date for its meeting.”

It was an indefinite postponement, and Yahya only inflamed Bengali tempers with his jargon-heavy justification:

‘For a healthy and viable constitution, it is necessary that both East and West Pakistan have an adequate sense of participation in the process of constitution making.”

For East Pakistanis, this was the last straw. As Gary J. Bass writes:

“To the Bengalis who had decisively voted for the Awami League, this looked like outright electoral theft.”

“Minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets and public spaces of Dhaka,” writes Srinath Raghavan.

“The postponement changed the context radically,” write Rose and Sisson, “Central authority in East Pakistan collapsed completely. Government offices ceased to function, and the authority of the martial law administrator, in the words of one senior army officer, “extended no further than his Headquarters.” Regulations imposing stricter censorship went unheeded, and curfews were purposefully violated, resulting in shootings by the army and police.”

As a US consulate worker in Dacca reported on March 2^nd:

‘It would be impossible to over-estimate sense of anger, shock and frustration which has gripped people of east wing. They cannot but interpret postponement as act of collusion between Yahya and Bhutto to deny fruit of electoral victory to Bengali majority.’

In this moment of crisis, all eyes in East Pakistan looked to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Mujib, when confronted with this terrible dilemma, this unthinkable impasse, did not hesitate for a second. If Bhutto could poison the well, if Yahya could grind things to a halt, he could play that game too. As Mujib said:

“When you play with gentlemen, you play like a gentleman. But when you play with bastards, make sure you play like a bigger bastard. Otherwise you will lose.”

On March 3^rd, Mujib called for an immediate, province-wide hartal – or a nonviolent, civil disobedience movement. Essentially a strike – at all levels of society.. As Sisson and Rose write:

“All governmental and commercial activities were to cease from early morning until mid afternoon. The hartal was to affect all government offices; the courts; semi- governmental and autonomous corporations; the airlines, railways, and other public and private transport; communication services; and mills, factories, and all other industrial and commercial establishments.”

The hartal was successful beyond expectation. East Pakistan was cut off from the world.”

[…] The Awami League assumed authority, although by default rather than by design, and after a period of uncertainty the party proceeded to effectively exercise the powers of a legitimate government.”

AUDIO:

“As the foreigners left Bengalis flocked to mass rallies where the dominant cry for independence, not negotiations. Whatever the mood of their leaders, the crowds gave no impression they’d be satisfied with a compromise. [cheering, chants]

The international community could only look on in mute distress. This was the nightmare. The schism everyone had feared for 23 years. As one US diplomat in Dacca told the State Department in a cable back to Washington:

“I’ve seen the beginning of the breakup of Pakistan.”

As ports closed and food prices skyrocketed, some journalists fretted about the strike’s effect on the regional economy. In interviews, Mujib had little patience for their hand-wringing. East Pakistan was no stranger to suffering – what was a little more in service of a righteous cause?

[AUDIO] Q: Some businessmen tell me there are people who won’t get paid (b/c of hartal). Will they blame you? Mujib. The problem is NOT CREATED BY me… No my people love me and I love them. I have no self interest, they know it. Q: We now here that Yahya Khan is coming here. A: That’s fine!...I don’t know when he’s coming”

On March 7^th, four days after the beginning of the hartal, Mujib got in front of a crowd of one million anguished Bengalis and condensed 23 years of frustration into 17 minutes of oratory.

[AUDIO]

“In a philippic against the military-Bhutto axis,” writes Srinath Raghavan, “he asserted that “it is a minority group of Western Wing which has obstructed and is continuing to obstruct the transfer of power.” He announced that the Awami League would not attend the National Assembly unless its four core demands were met: revocation of martial law, return of troops to the barracks, inquiry into the recent incidents of firing, and immediate transfer of power to elected representatives.”

And if the Army didn’t go home, then Bengalis would have to be prepare to defend theirs. According to Ayesha Jalal:

“He called for every Bengali home to be turned into a fortress. As blood had already been shed, he was prepared to offer more blood to free the people of his country. “The struggle this time is a struggle for freedom. The struggle this time is a struggle for independence,” he proclaimed passionately, before concluding with the slogan “Jai Bangla” (Victory to Bengal). A virtual declaration of independence. Mujib’s March 7 speech did not, however, completely shut the door on further talks.”

Back in Manpura, Muhammed Hai and his neighbors heard the voice on the radio, and their shouts of “Joi Bangla” echoed across the marsh. But what Hai couldn’t see, was the flag snapping in the wind over Ramna Race Course. It was a red circle sitting on a field of green. It was the symbol of a new idea, a new nation. The red circle signified the blood of all the Bengalis who had died asserting their rights over the years – and the green field symbolized the verdant delta that was their home.

It was the flag of the Bengal Nation. A place called Bangladesh.

And on March 16^th, one week after that momentous speech at Ramna Race Course, a car carried Mujib to his final one-on-one meeting with President Yahya. It was the Ides of March, and on all sides, daggers were being unsheathed.

Yahya Khan, understandably, had not taken the hartal – the ongoing strike – in East Pakistan well at all. As he said in a radio address:

“Let me make it absolutely clear that no matter what happens, as long as I am in command of the Pakistan Armed Forces and Head of the State, I will ensure complete and absolute integrity of Pakistan. Let there be no doubt or mistake on this point. I have a duty towards millions of people of East and West Pakistan to preserve this country. They expect this from me and I shall not fail them.”

When Yahya’s plane touched down at Dacca airport on March 15th, crowds of angry protesters greeted him and his entourage with shouts of “Go back to West Pakistan, Army Dogs”.

“There were no bouquets of flowers, no civil officials, no rows of “city elite,” no hustling of journalists, and no clicking of cameras,” write Rose and Sisson, “Even the official photographer was not admitted. It was a strange eerie atmosphere charged with a deadly stillness.”

As his Mercedes-Benz weaved through the city streets, Yahya noticed that almost every house was flying a green flag with a red circle. It was an entire city, an entire province, living in open rebellion.

So, Yahya thought, these acts of defiance were the wages of his enlightened charity. After all he had done for them, after he had chosen to given them this precious gift of democracy, the first chance to vote ever in their miserable lives, the Bengalis could not help but dig their hands into the bowl and grab as much power as they could. He could have rigged the whole thing; Maybe he should have. Maybe representative democracy was just a wild, dangerous animal after all. It needed to be broken and caged and contained; allowed to exist within acceptable limits.

->

When Yahya Khan arrived at his Presidential Residence in Dacca, he learned that even his own home had not been spared from Bengali insolence. As one historian wrote: “The supply of water to the President’s House, the symbol of central authority in East Pakistan, was cut off, not to be restored until Yahya arrived.”

But the ultimate provocation was printed in black and white on the front page of the local paper. A soundbite from Mujib himself:

“YAHYA IS WELCOME AS A GUEST OF BANGLA DESH.”

When Mujib stopped by for talks the next morning, Yahya would’ve rather strangled him than shake his hand. But Yahya Khan was a soldier. And soldiers have discipline. And sometimes discipline means being patient, even when you’d like to beat the other man’s face into a red paste. Mujib was here to talk; so.. they would talk. But God help him if Yahya didn’t like what he heard.

Some people in Yahya’s orbit were even less optimistic. As one minister remembered years later, “it was like giving oxygen to a dying patient when the doctors have declared him a lost case.”

Well, as often happens in these situations, Yahya and Mujib talked at each other – instead of with each other. Yahya wanted the hartal to end immediately. Mujib wanted the national assembly called immediately. And their cringing advisors wanted to leave the room immediately.  “The meeting,” writes Srinath Raghavan, “ended inconclusively. The next day, the negotiations remained mired in the same questions.”

But it wasn’t the last appointment Yahya Khan had on his agenda that day.

Later that evening, Yahya’s motorcade arrived at Army Headquarters in Dacca. It was the last place in the city that seemed to be under Federal control. A tiny slice of West Pakistan, surrounded by Bengali anarchy. Leaving his political advisors behind, Yahya walked into a room and closed the door behind him. Arrayed before him, were hand-picked group of his most trusted military commanders. For Yahya, this was his element. A soldier among soldiers.

He addressed the room sharply: “The bastard is not behaving.”

He meant Mujib, of course. But Yahya’s commanders already knew that, and they had been expecting it. Since late February, in fact, they had been preparing for this eventuality. And the fruits of their labor were plastered all over the walls. Maps and diagrams, troop numbers and operational estimates. The contingency plan that Yahya had told Bhutto about at the duck hunt, Operation Searchlight, was almost ready.

The operation’s commander, an old war buddy of Yahya’s named Tikka Khan, gave the lay of the land. According to Carney and Miklian:

“He drew a map of Dacca on a big chalkboard and outlined platoon movements and unit responsibilities. He pinpointed every target group in the city. Using intel gathered from his spies, he described the whereabouts, proclivities, and favorite haunts of every person on his exceedingly long list of enemies. Tikka circled Mujib’s house on the board. He circled the entrance to Dacca University, as well as the Iqbal Hall dormitory, which he called the Awami League’s youth headquarters. He circled dozens more locations with the white chalk. He circled neighborhoods of the politicians, of the poor, of the foreign journalists, and of the Hindus.”

Satisfied, Yahya nodded and told the room: “Get ready.”

The military option was primed and set, but there was still one lever he had not pulled. One variable he had not introduced into this equation. As itchy as his trigger finger was, maybe he didn’t need to pull it. Maybe a different kind of pressure would force Mujib to relent. So, the next day, Yahya sent a message halfway across the subcontinent, all the way back to West Pakistan. It was short, and sweet, and personally addressed to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto:

“The talks are on,” Yahya said, “You can now come to Dhaka with your party men.”

Bhutto’s reception in Dacca was even chillier than Yahya’s. When he arrived in the city on March 21st, he did so in the company of six armed guards brandishing black knives and Kalashnikovs. Bhutto’s security team had foiled assassination attempts before back home in West Pakistan, but Dacca was truly enemy territory. When Bhutto checked into the Intercontinental Hotel that day, Rose and Sisson write, they “were greeted by silence within and shouting without. Workers refused them service of any kind.”

To Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, their message was clear: he was not welcome in East Pakistan.

Or should he say “Bangla Desh”?  What a bunch of nonsense, Bhutto thought. If the Awami League wanted to rule over this fetid, stinking delta, they were welcome to it. But he would not allow them to break up Pakistan in the process.

By this point, Bhutto had resigned himself to - at best - a ‘live and let live” arrangement with the Awami League. As he’d proposed in early 1971: “You rule in the East, we will rule in the West.” (Udhar Tum, Idhar Hum). But if Mujib and the Awami League tried to secede, to destroy the united Pakistan that so many had fought and died for…well, Yahya’s goons would give them a well-deserved whiff of grapeshot. Maybe a good cleansing was exactly what the Bengalis needed. Bhutto had suggested as much in the summer of 1970, when he reportedly told Yahya:

“Yahya the soldier and Bhutto the politician will make a very good team and can together run the country. East Pakistan is no problem. We will have to kill some 20,000 people there and all will be well.”

Violent solutions seemed to be on Bhutto’s mind when, at the hotel, he mused to a journalist:

“The cyclone may not have taken its full toll yet.”  

But whatever was going to happen, it all hinged on this next – and final – meeting between the three principal players: Yahya, Mujib and Bhutto. Despite all the dramatic dialogue and heated negotiations of the past several months, all three leaders had never actually met face-to-face together. Well, on March 22^nd, 1971, they all sat down in a room at Yahya’s house in Dacca, while three cups of chai went cold on the table.

The March 22^nd sit-down between Mujib, Yahya, and Bhutto is very, very interesting – and honestly, a little confusing. In the historiography, no two versions or accounts of this meeting are exactly the same. Some historians describe a tense but sober confrontation between three individuals desperately seeking a compromise. Others writers describe a dramatic ambush that reads like a climax of a Hollywood film, where Bhutto and Yahya turn on Mujib and give him an unacceptable ultimatum.

But there are certain constants - certain facts - that all the different accounts share.

One thing we know for sure, is that by this time, the relationship between Mujib and Bhutto had degraded to such a degree that they would not even look at each other. Like two feuding teenagers, they sat 6 feet apart and communicated through Yahya. “You can tell Mujib that I think this.” “Well, you can tell Bhutto that I thinkthat.” That kinda thing.

Another detail we know for sure, is that Yahya did not like this arrangement at all. He said something to the effect that they were acting like “shy newlyweds”. And he tried to facilitate some kind of meaningful dialogue, which didn’t happen.

And the third thing we know for sure, is that during a brief intermission in the official talks, Bhutto and Mujib go outside on the balcony and have a private conversation.

This is one of those frustrating moments in history that’s clearly very important, but we just don’t have all the information. It’s not a movie, it’s not a TV show. There are no microphones or cameras, there’s no swish pan or dramatic closeup. It’s just two guys talking in a blind corner of history.

Some accounts say that Bhutto used the moment of privacy to warn Mujib not to trust the military, and that he was a fool for thinking Yahya would ever hand over power to a Bengali. In other words, “Just back down, man; this is pointless. You’re never gonna win this fight’. Other accounts say that it was Mujib who warned Bhutto not to trust the military, insisting that Yahya would never give up power to anyone – East or West; Once the military was done defanging the Awami League, they would come for the PPP next.

But the soap bubble of solidarity popped as quickly as it had formed. Yahya, drink in hand, barged out onto the balcony, interrupting their moment of solitude. He told the “honeymooners” to come back inside and continue negotiations.

The truth is, we don’t really know exactly what Bhutto and Mujib said to each other out on that balcony. And in a way, it doesn’t really matter. Because whatever words passed between them, they were not enough to stop what happened next.

When Mujib and Bhutto left Yahya’s Residence, the political stalemate had not been solved. The Awami League and the PPP were still deadlocked, and the Army was getting very, very impatient. It was at this moment, that Yahya decided to cut the Gordian Knot with his sharpest bayonet. It was becoming a Pakistani tradition, he supposed - when the politicians couldn’t solve a problem, the men in Khaki had to solve it for them.

On March 25^th, 1971 – a few  days after the fruitless tripartite talks, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was at his home in Dacca. It had been a long day – but then again, all the days were long lately. From every side, he was facing unimaginable pressure. The Army wanted him to call off the strike. Bhutto wanted to run half the country. And the Awami League wanted him to openly declare independence and secede from Pakistan. None of those options seemed good.

And yet, Mujib still held out hope. As night fell over Dacca, he stared at the black rotary phone by his desk, willing it, begging it to ring. Because if it rang, it might be Bhutto on the other end, willing to make a deal. Or it might be Yahya, saying he had convinced Bhutto to mediate his demands. And yet, the phone did not ring. It didn’t ring when Mujib ate dinner, it didn’t ring when he kissed his children goodnight, and it didn’t ring when he slipped out of his white suit and into his pajamas. Maybe it would ring tomorrow; Maybe the talks with Yahya could continue and this whole nasty crisis could be solved.

But then, right as Mujib began to escape into the pages of a book, the phone did ring.

It wasn’t Yahya, and it wasn’t Bhutto. It was an informant from the Awami League, and he had some very, very disturbing news. According to this well-placed spy, President Yahya had left the city. No message, no goodbye, just gone. Hours earlier, the President had abruptly driven to Dacca airport and secretly boarded a plane bound for West Pakistan.

This development told Mujib three very important things. 1) Yahya considered the negotiations over. 2) He did not want to be in East Pakistan for what came next, and 3) He did not want Mujib to know that he had left.

Mujib dropped the receiver, leapt from his armchair, and told his children to hide under the bed. As Carney and Miklian write:

He ordered his staff to assemble his old radio transmitter before it was too late. He ordered his family to hide under the beds when they heard sirens in the distance and tanks rumbling in their direction. Mujib knew he only had a few minutes. He switched on the reel-to-reel recording equipment just after midnight and gave a short, frenzied address to the nation:”

And then this is Mujib speaking:

‘This may be my last message. From today Bangladesh is independent. I call upon the people of Bangladesh, wherever you might be and with whatever you have to resist the army of occupation to the last, your fight must go on until the last soldier of the Pakistan occupation army is expelled from the soil of Bangladesh. Final victory is ours. In the name of the almighty Allah we must liberate our motherland and fight till the last drop of blood. God bless you. Jai Bangla’.

Outside Mujib’s house, Yahya’s soldiers were already forming a perimeter.

Miles away, halfway across the city, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was looking out the window of his hotel room at the Intercontinental. Outside the door, six men with submachine guns guarded him from any crazed Bengali assassins who might want to simplify Pakistan’s constitutional crisis.

“Zulfikar” (Z-U-L-F-I-K-A-R) is a very old, very traditional name in the Islamic world. It comes from the name of a semi-mythical sword, a curved saber, supposedly given by the Prophet Muhammed to his son-in-law Ali in the early 7^th century. The sword was famous for its distinctive shape, a blade which ended in a forked tip, diverging into two sharp points. Supposedly, this unique design gave the sword its name: “the Splitter” or the “Cleaver.” So, in a way, the name Zulfikar means “the one who splits” or “the one who cleaves”.

Well, in the months since the election in December 1970, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had certainly done his fair share of splitting. With every speech, every provocation, every obstruction – he had hacked through the fragile threads that kept East and West together. But on March 25^th, 1971, the last swing of the sword was committed by Yahya Khan’s army.

That evening, shortly before midnight, Bhutto’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a muffled boom outside. He walked to the window of his hotel room and peered across the city of Dacca. It was blazing with flashes of orange and red and blinding white. Tracer rounds stitched through the dark. Explosions bloomed in the distance and rattled the glass.

He could see Army tanks lumbering through the streets and helicopters swarming through the skies. In the distance, soldiers stormed Dacca University and Awami League headquarters. They surrounded Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s house and kicked down the doors.

All over Dacca, machine gun fire filled the midnight air.  

Operation Searchlight had begun.

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Well folks, that is all the time we have for today.

Next time, in Part 3, we will move into a much more violent phase of our story. With political negotiations at an end, Yahya Khan and his military regime will perpetrate one of the most vicious campaigns of domestic repression in modern history. And that violence will not go unnoticed by the global community. As the situation in Pakistan spirals out of control, regional powers will be sucked into the vortex.

Alarmed by the violence just beyond its borders, the nation of India will enter the diplomatic fray, followed swiftly by the Superpowers. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China will all find themselves ensnared in what Gary J. Bass called “one of the worst atrocities of the Cold War”

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

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

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