Imperial Benevolence of USA Towards India and Bangladesh: Chapter 8.
Pakistan was born in 1947 as a geographical absurdity. Its East wing separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, speaking different languages, eating different food, watching different sports, marrying different people, sharing nothing except a religion that proved, as Mascarenhas observed from inside Pakistan, to be poor binding without the resin of a common hatred.
West Pakistan was Punjabi and martial. East Bengal was Bengali and intellectual. West Pakistan looked toward the Middle East. East Bengal looked toward Southeast Asia. West Pakistan produced soldiers. East Bengal produced poets. Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, came from East Bengal.
War for Bangladesh
The Punjabi officer who stood in Comilla looking at the rich black earth spreading to the horizon said what his class had always believed: “My God, what couldn’t we do with such wonderful land.” Then he added as an afterthought, “But I suppose we would have become like them.” That contempt was the operating principle of Pakistan for twenty four years. It is pan-Arab contempt for non-Arabs that Pakistan shares.
East Bengal had 56 percent of the population and received 20 percent of development expenditure. The twenty two families that monopolised Pakistan’s wealth controlled the factories, tea gardens, jute presses, banks, and insurance companies of East Bengal from headquarters in Karachi. Bengali officers never rose above a certain rank. Bengali politicians were tolerated until they won elections by margins that could not be manipulated.
In December 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won 167 of 313 seats in Pakistan’s first free and fair election. An absolute majority. A democratic mandate so clear that Yahya Khan’s constitutional engineering had only one answer for it. That was the Pakistan Army.
The Night of 25 March, 1971
On the evening of 25 March 1971, President Yahya Khan boarded a plane for Karachi. He had spent weeks in Dacca pretending to negotiate a transfer of power with Sheikh Mujib. The negotiations were a military stratagem. PIA Boeings and Pakistan Air Force C-130s had been flying troops into Dacca round the clock under the cover of the talks.
The moment Yahya Khan’s plane cleared Pakistani airspace, the order went out. Operation Searchlight had begun.
Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani journalist invited by the Ministry of Information to report the return of normalcy, arrived in Dacca on 14 April. He found a city that told its own story. Deserted streets. Flattened areas bearing signs of fire. Shuttered shops. Shell holes and bullet marks. Spirals of smoke still rising in the humid air. His friends had vanished. The one he finally traced told him in a cold voice: “The Pakistan you and I knew has ceased to exist. Let’s keep it that way.” Then he turned around and closed the door.
What happened on the night of 25 March and in the weeks that followed was not a military operation. It was a pogrom. Mascarenhas witnessed it personally at the 16th Division Headquarters in Comilla. He watched a local martial law administrator pass death sentences with a flick of a pencil. Three Hindus and a Christian accused of theft were ordered brought for disposal that night. That evening, while Mascarenhas sat in his room, he heard screams and the sound of clubs beating on flesh and bone. Then silence. He wrote later that the silence became the loudest sound in all the world. It has echoed a million times and still blows my mind.
In the army mess at night he heard officers joking about the day’s kill, keeping score with friendly rivalry about who had the highest count. They had killed humanity. The world remained silent for pogrom on dark skinned people.
An officer at the 16th Division Headquarters told him directly, without embarrassment, without qualification: “We are determined to cleanse East Pakistan once and for all of the threat of secession, even if it means killing off two million people and ruling the province as a colony for 30 years.“
Mascarenhas had covered wars. He had read about Hitler. He wrote that what he saw in East Bengal was more outrageous than anything he had read about the inhuman acts of Hitler and the Nazis. He flew to London in May, walked into the Sunday Times office, and within forty minutes had told his story to editor Harold Evans and been accepted for publication. He knew he could never return to Pakistan. His family followed him into exile.
His article was published on 13 June 1971. It was the first eyewitness Western account of the genocide. It broke the news to the world.
Washington remained benevolent
Archer Blood was the United States Consul General in Dacca. He had joined the Foreign Service in 1947 and spent his career trying to become an ambassador. He was honest, meticulous, and politically inconvenient.
From the first night of the crackdown, Blood sent cables to Washington describing what he saw. An atmosphere of terror. Bodies being loaded onto trucks. The army going after Hindus with vengeance. Professors dragged from their homes. The Hindu dormitory at Dacca University, Jagannath Hall, surrounded and students killed at close quarters, buried in a hastily dug trench outside. Mascarenhas confirmed this from the ground. Eight thousand people killed in Shankaripatti when the army blocked both ends of the street and hunted them house by house.
Blood escalated his reporting. He sent a cable tagged Selective Genocide. Washington acknowledged receipt and continued its benevolence towards West Pakistan. The White one. Black life did not matter.
On 6 April 1971, Blood and almost his entire consulate sent a formal dissent cable through the State Department’s newly created dissent channel. Twenty American officials signing collectively. It declared that the United States government had evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy. It said the government had failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Failed to denounce atrocities. Failed to protect its own citizens. Failed to intervene even morally. It used the word genocide without apology.
Blood added his own postscript. Since the Bengali nationalists were pro-American and would almost certainly win their independence, it was foolish to alienate them with a rigid policy of one-sided support to the likely loser.
He was right on every count. He was punished for it.
Kissinger told Nixon that Blood was a maniac in Dacca who was in rebellion. In June 1971 Blood was recalled and reassigned to a minor desk job in Washington. His upward path was blocked for years. His colleagues who stayed silent and biddable moved up. George H.W. Bush who served as Nixon’s ambassador to United Nations, sailed through 1971 without a moment’s moral inconvenience and became President. Archer Blood went to Kabul for a late-career restart and could not even get a visa from the Afghan government.
Ambassador Kenneth Keating in Delhi backed Blood’s cable completely, fired off his own cable with the same subject line of Selective Genocide. He urged Washington to promptly, publicly, and prominently deplore the brutality. He also told Kissinger directly: your giving of arms to Pakistan will provoke a war.
Kissinger was not listening. He was thinking about China.
In the next chapter we shall discuss the historic surrender of a 93 thousand strong army before a platoon. That is how Bangladesh was born.
Bangladesh, an unwanted child who has grown up and is now being contested again by the same powers that produced it, still without acknowledging what they did in 1971.
References
Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013)
Anthony Mascarenhas, The Rape of Bangla Desh (Delhi: Vikas Publications, 1971)
Archer Blood and the Dissent Cable
Nixon White House Tapes on India-Pakistan
Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report