March 25 marks the 54th anniversary of the launch of Operation Searchlight, a military operation by the Pakistan army in East Pakistan, triggering the nine-month-long Liberation War by ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan that culminated in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation in 1971. Operation Searchlight was not merely a military crackdown attempted to ‘safeguard national integrity’ and ‘restore order’, as claimed by Pakistan. Rather, it took the form of a genocide orchestrated by the Pakistan army against ethnic Bengalis, making it the biggest man-made catastrophe the region has ever faced.
The Seeds of Discontent
The Pakistan military’s atrocities against ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan during the 1971 Liberation War are no secret. However, it is important to understand the factors that gave birth to the sentiment of liberation in East Pakistan. Following the Partition of India in 1947, Pakistan emerged as an independent Muslim-majority nation, consisting of two wings—the West and the East, with India lying between the two. Pakistan believed that Islam would be the unifying factor between the two regions, given the geographical separation. Nevertheless, it could not overlook that both the West and East wings belonged to differing socio-cultural-linguistic identities, despite sharing the same religion. These differences soon translated into disparities at the political and economic levels.
Soon after 1947, the West Pakistani political elite’s attitude towards its East wing was one of bitterness and disdain, which seemed to reflect in the country’s administrative decisions. East Pakistan, comprised mostly of ethnic Bengalis who spoke ‘Bangla’, had cultural traditions that were strikingly different from their western counterparts, who began to perceive them as ‘negative’ and ‘inferior’. In the 1950s, West Pakistan, where the central administration was located, attempted to impose the Urdu language as the sole ‘national’ language of Pakistan. Notwithstanding the fact that 56 per cent of the population in East Pakistan spoke Bangla, the decision was justified on the grounds that Urdu was similar to Islamic languages like Arabic and Farsi, unlike Bangla, which is derived from Sanskrit and therefore considered to have an ‘un-Islamic’ root. This decision triggered the Language Movement in East Pakistan, where protestors demanded the recognition of Bangla as one of the official languages of Pakistan. Awami League, a Bengali nationalist political party formed in 1949 in East Pakistan in response to dissatisfaction with West Pakistan, played a central role in this protest. On 21 February 1952, student protestors were met with police brutality and were subsequently killed. This fateful day, now globally recognised as International Mother Language Day, sowed the seeds of political consciousness and Bengali nationalism in the East, which ultimately manifested in the Liberation War two decades later.
Economic Exploitation of East Pakistan
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s politico-economic reality reflected the political marginalisation and stark economic exploitation of the East wing at the hands of the West. Records reveal that East Pakistan was the recipient of only 25 per cent of the country's total investments and 30 per cent of its share of exports, despite contributing 59 per cent of total exports. On the other hand, West Pakistan, contributing only 25 per cent of total exports, enjoyed 70 per cent of the export share. Moreover, while East Pakistan received a meagre revenue share, its export earnings were used for development projects in West Pakistan, particularly in Punjab and Karachi. The concentration of political and military power in West Pakistan fostered disparities between the two wings, leading to increasing disillusionment in the East towards the central administration in the West. Thus, by the 1960s, East Pakistan witnessed Awami League pushing its demands for greater political and economic autonomy, the eventual end of West Pakistan’s dominance in national governance, and linguistic rights, which translated into Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Six-Point Movement (1966) in Lahore.
The final blow, however, came with the December 1970 general election, when Pakistan held its first democratic election, marking a landmark historical moment. The 300-seat National Assembly allocated 162 seats to East Pakistan and 138 seats to the West. The Awami League of East Pakistan, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory, securing 160 out of the 162 seats allocated to East Pakistan, while Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) won 81 out of the 138 seats allocated to the West. Thus, the Awami League not only emerged as the largest party in the East but also earned the mandate to govern the whole of Pakistan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s PPP, becoming the dominant party in the West, however, refused to accept this election result and transfer administrative power to the ‘inferior’ East, delaying negotiations for the National Assembly’s first meeting. In fact, Bhutto even threatened to ‘break the legs’ of his party members if they attended the assembly's inaugural session. He was backed by General Yahya Khan (who governed the central government) who then imposed martial law in East Pakistan, suspending the opening of the National Assembly and blocking the Awami League from forming a new government.
The Road to Liberation
The events that transpired after the 1970 election, therefore, escalated into a full-blown political crisis, only because West Pakistan’s political elites could not accept the mandate of a free and fair election. In reaction, the Awami League under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called for a ‘general strike’, bringing East Pakistan to a complete standstill. Rejecting General Yahya’s announcement of a meeting between political leaders, Sheikh Mujib delivered his historic public speech in Dacca on 7 March 1971, calling for civil disobedience and non-cooperation with the central government and informally calling for a ‘struggle for liberation’. Threatened by the peak of Bengali nationalist sentiments, General Yahya Khan hatched a sinister plan to throttle the demand for autonomy (which by now had transformed into a demand for complete liberation). Under the pretext of negotiation, he secretly moved soldiers into East Pakistan throughout March 1971. Then came the fateful March 25, when the Pakistan army launched a military operation known as Operation Searchlight in East Pakistan, as the ‘only solution’ to the political crisis.
Operation Searchlight claimed the lives of about 300,000 people in East Pakistan, besides causing mass exodus and internal displacement of innocent ethnic Bengali populations. The United Nations Resolution 1430, passed in 1971, acknowledged the incidents in East Pakistan in 1971 as ‘acts of genocide’. On the 54th anniversary of this bloody incident, let us remember the dehumanising treatment of West Pakistan’s administration and military towards its own counterpart in the East, which paved the way for Bangladesh’s Liberation War.
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