Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [36]
A series of moves and counter-moves took place in the following months, accompanied by increasingly violent mass protests and clashes with the military in East Pakistan. Then at midnight at the end of 25 March 1971, the military launched a savage campaign of repression in East Pakistan (Operation Searchlight). Thousands of students, professionals, Awami League leaders and activists and East Pakistani police were killed, amid dreadful scenes of carnage and rape.
This revolting campaign was the most terrible blot on the entire record of the Pakistani army, and was made possible by old and deepseated racial contempt by the Punjabi and Pathan soldiery for the Bengalis, whom they also regarded as not true Muslims but crypto-Hindus. It is worth noting that, despite recurrent episodes of military repression, nothing remotely as bad as this has ever happened in West Pakistan, where this racial and racist tension between army and people does not exist to anything like the same degree. Indeed, unwillingness to fire on their own people has been one factor in undermining the will of the soldiers to confront the Taleban.
Memory of the March 1971 massacres in East Pakistan has been largely suppressed in the Pakistan of today, since for obvious reasons neither the military nor the political parties (including the PPP, which after the death of Bhutto was headed for a while by General Tikka Khan, who as commander in East Pakistan launched the campaign of killing there) nor the newspapers, which justified or ignored the killings, have any desire to recall them.
The campaign led to the mutiny of East Pakistani troops (the Bengal Regiment) and a mass uprising in the countryside. Millions of refugees fled from East Pakistan to India with dreadful tales of the Pakistani army’s behaviour. Eight months later, with international opinion now ranged against Pakistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India ordered the Indian army to invade East Pakistan, and in two weeks 96,000 hopelessly outnumbered Pakistani troops there were forced to surrender. An attempt to save the situation by invading India from West Pakistan was beaten off with ease. East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh, and was recognized by the international community.
Because of the vision of Pakistan as both a united Muslim homeland and an ideal Muslim state, the loss of Bangladesh has been seen by most West Pakistanis as a catastrophe which called into question the ‘two nation theory’ of Muslims as a South Asian nation equal to ‘Hindu’ India, and therefore the very meaning of their country.
In actual fact, it was only the terrible circumstances of the end of united Pakistan that were a catastrophe. Separation itself was inevitable sooner or later, and left West Pakistan a geographically coherent state whose peoples were also much more closely linked by ethnicity and culture. Pakistan has indeed demonstrated this by surviving, despite so many predictions to the contrary, and by the fact that despite a variety of local uprisings, until the rise of the Taleban it has never faced a challenge remotely on the scale of East Bengali nationalism.
THE NEW PAKISTANI STATE
In West Pakistan, however, despite the cynicism instilled by the later decades of Pakistani history, the initial idealism of the Pakistan movement, and its real achievements, should not be underestimated. Without them, Pakistan might not have survived at all. In Pakistan’s first years, despite political turmoil, many Pakistanis displayed a level of energy and public service that they have never since recovered. These qualities were largely responsible for their country’s success in overcoming the quite appalling problems generated by partition, the disruption of trade and the transport network, millions of refugees and growing tension with India. As Ian Talbot writes:
[M]any of the refugees regarded