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Revisiting 1971: Fear, fury force & Bengali pride

THE areas that constituted Pakistan in 1947 were ruled by the British under different arrangements.

Revisiting 1971: Fear, fury force & Bengali pride

Joy of freedom: Bangladeshi citizens take part in a parade to mark the country''s 45th Victory Day in Dhaka on December 16, 2016.



Tahir Mehdi

THE areas that constituted Pakistan in 1947 were ruled by the British under different arrangements. Bengal, Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then 'NWFP') were provinces with elected assemblies. Balochistan was governed by an appointed Commissioner; tribal areas by Political Agents; and a number of so-called princely states by Rajas under the paramountcy of the British Crown. 

***

The people who were handed over the reigns of the new country on August 14 were tasked with working out a system which allowed all the above-mentioned entities to coexist peacefully and prosper together. But when they sat down to figure out this formula for an equal distribution of power, every option they considered led to the same concern: the Bengalis were more in number than all the rest put together, and under a democracy, nothing could bar them from getting a majority share in the new state. Now that did not sit well at all with the infant country's larger, grander designs of spearheading a new Islamic renaissance and hoisting its flag on every other building in South Asia. 

The dark-skinned Bengalis, who shared their language and culture with their Hindu compatriots did not cut a figure to fit the coveted slot. This glorious feat could only be performed by the blue-blooded Muslim elite that had migrated from India, with a few others playing second fiddle and the rest serving as foot soldiers. So, that was the first crossroad that our nation found itself at; that if the simple democratic path was to be taken, we would miss the golden opportunity to revive all of our lost glories (by losing the government to a Bengali majority). And if we stuck to this cherished goal, we would need to get around democracy and find some undemocratic solution to 'the Bengal problem'. At the end, it didn't turn out to be very difficult. Bengalis held faith in democracy and lost in Pakistan.

***

East Pakistan was deadly against separate electorate while the central and Punjab Muslim Leagues were its biggest supporters. Almost a quarter of East Pakistan was Hindu and/or Scheduled Caste while non-Muslims in western provinces made less than five per cent of population. In present- day Punjab, non-Muslims (mainly, Christians) are barely two-and-a-half per cent of the population. So the province that had a miniscule population of non-Muslims advocated separate electorate while the one with a sizeable and significant one wanted Muslims and Hindus to vote jointly!

There was an ideological dimension to the issue as well. Those who wanted to make Pakistan an Islamic state considered it important to not let the votes of non-Muslims mix up with those of the chosen faithful so that the sacred state's mandate is not “polluted”. For others, the non-Muslims started symbolising all of their identity markers other than Islam — like language and culture — which they shared with them and did not want to abandon while building the new state. But I think more important than the ideological exegeses were the hard political facts, the hardest being that there were more Bengalis than all the rest put together. This was worsened by the fact that “the rest” were divided into too many smaller units. So under a democracy, Bengalis would always win. And Bengalis ruling Pakistan was somehow against the blueprint of Islamic republic as laid down by its self-appointed architects. It had to be ruled by the rent-seeking jagirdars of Punjab and khandani bureaucrats hailing from northern India. They had no respect for the Bengali political leadership comprising mainly of middle class persons who were politically conscious, articulate and quite active.

They fretted at the prospects of numerically dominant Bengali Muslims ruling over them. They fumed at the tenets of democracy and geared up to fix it. They engineered a two-pronged strategy: One, was to “unite” all except East Bengal into one state entity, called One-Unit scheme resulting in what was named the West Pakistan province. But even that was not enough to counter-weigh Bengalis who were a whopping 54 per cent of population. The second part of the strategy thus was to divide East Bengal into smaller units. And Muslim League had the experience of only one kind of division, that is, along religious lines. So if Bengali voters were separated on the basis of religion, the Bengali Muslim representatives will fall fewer than the elected members of West Pakistan. 

***

It was embarrassing for many in the government to be unable to agree upon one system of elections in a country that wanted to take pride in its Muslim unity. The Act was soon amended to provide for the same joint system for both the wings. However, no elections could be held under this law, as General Ayub took over and abrogated the nascent constitution. When the general was tailoring a constitutional dress for his brazen military rule, he too was advised to separate electors but he didn't. Nor did General Yahya dare to do that while drafting his Legal Framework Order that provided the basis for the first general elections in the country held in 1970. 

***

The Constituent Assembly found itself in a perpetual logjam. Bengalis were not asking all else to bow before them. They simply demanded their democratic rights — their language, culture shall be respected; their resources shall belong to them; they should get from the federal pool a share proportionate to their population. The blue-blooded Muslim League thought that it could continue to gamble on the back of the wild card of religion. So if you demanded rights for your homeland, you were accused of narrow provincialism that was against the lofty pan-Islamist ideals, if you dared to ask for your share in resources, you were blamed for obstructing the renaissance of Islam and if you wanted respect for your language, you were definitely a traitor and an Indian stooge. 

***

Bengalis were not afraid of their fellow Hindu citizens and the ruling elite of Pakistan could not instill this fear into them either. Or maybe the Bengalis had started fearing their fellow Muslim overlords more and the state of Pakistan failed to divert their fear towards Hindus. Whatever the case, the Bengali refusal to reject Hindus as integral part of their polity actually made our elite dread Bengalis even more, or perhaps their fear of Hindu and Bengali dominating them got mixed with each other. Blocked effectively on the premise of democracy, they did what people who feed on fear do. They inflicted the worst possible fury on Bengalis to stir fear in their hearts and yet, the lean, placid Bengalis smiled, refusing to be afraid of their freedom. 

That's how Bangladesh was born.

The writer works with Punjab Lok Sujag, a research and advocacy group in Pakistan. By arrangement with the Dawn

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