UL Baruah’s 1971 Radio Dispatches: Impactful use of AIR’s soft power

Maj Gen Raj Mehta (Retd)

“Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake — the fatal mistake — of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.”

This is how a path-breaking article by Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas titled ‘Genocide’ began. It appeared on June 13, 1971 in UK’s influential Sunday Times and changed publication history. Editor Harold Evans remembers that in their first meeting, Mascarenhas told him he was eyewitness to a huge, systematic Pakistani killing spree, and had heard Pakistani army officers describe the killings as the “final solution”.

The slim 148-page book under review, ‘A Bangladesh War Commentary: 1971 Radio Dispatches’, by the then Director, External Services, All India Radio, and later DG, UL Baruah, focuses subtly and tellingly on this genocide.

The finely honed dispatches, in fact, serve a larger (strategic) purpose not just as the “first draft of history”, but indicate that the Indian government was, de facto, carrying out a skilled, protracted Kautilyan “war on the minds” radio campaign on its listeners — primarily the Pakistani establishment and its West Asian supporters — by ingeniously using AIR’s extensive External Services Division (ESD). The aim was to zero in on the minds of the Pakistani people, politicians including dissenters, its military, and deprived and marginalised “aazadi parast” (freedom seeking) Pakhtoon, Balochi and Sindhi communities in West Pakistan with “words, images and ideas” that impacted listener perceptions, besides narrating the truth about events that Pakistani censorship withheld from its citizens.

This well-thought-through psychological warfare was also directed at the oppressed Bangla people of Pakistan’s eastern wing. The people of Bangladesh, he opined, fought a war to save democracy — to defend the vote they had cast. The hard-hitting dispatches also leave founder MA Jinnah’s idea of Pakistan — his much vaunted two-nation theory based on religious identity — in tatters.

Baruah’s variegated collection of commentaries thus isn’t “history in a hurry” as good journalists self-deprecatingly often joke about their works. On the contrary, realising their stellar historical value, his journalist son, Amit Baruah, rescued the neatly typed essays from yellowing oblivion and handed them over to the Indian Council of World Affairs for editing.

Assamese-Muslim Ubeidul Latif Baruah was a handsome, erudite, deeply secular man of rare courage and conviction who married his subordinate at AIR Delhi, the beautiful actress/radio presenter Sharda, who came from an orthodox Hindu family. They married with parental consent.

Unsurprisingly, the 40 commentaries are a treasure trove that relentlessly hammer in the reality of Pakistan and dismantle its pretensions, deceit and lies about the genocide. The four chapters trace the reporting of the genocide; opinions expressed in West Pakistan about it; the post-Bangladesh creation debate in Pakistan and, lastly, the emergence of Bangladesh. One, however, wishes that in this otherwise well edited book, interchanging the sequencing of the last two chapters would have aided the reader’s understanding by sticking to the timeline in which the events occurred.

A pleasant surprise is the establishment of the context of the commentaries by Amit Baruah. He lucidly brings out his father’s vast sweep over history, highlighting the synergy between the combined forces of the Mukti Bahini and India’s armed forces which ultimately created a brave new nation. He reproduces excerpts from the commentaries bringing out the exploitive relationship of West Pakistan over its resource-rich yet underprivileged and reviled Eastern Wing, and the inherent bias, alienation and contempt.

The essays quote Mascarenhas extensively; also rare dissenting voices/editorials in the Pakistani media, world and Indian experts on disparate East Wing issues from geo-politics and geo-strategic opinions supporting the Indian viewpoint; biased Pakistani political gamesmanship and disastrous economic practices favouring the West Wing. They explain how American President Nixon and realpolitik-driven adviser Kissinger were both complicit in the massacre of the Bengalis.

The dispatches were incisive, focused hard talk delivered softly and with tremendous projection ability and skill in a wide array of languages for broadcast worldwide, besides internal listenership: Urdu, Bengali, Pushto, Dari, Sindhi, Punjabi, Saraiki, Persian, Mandarin, Tibetan, Nepali, Sinhala, Thai, Swahili, Russian and English.

Implied in the book is the fact that the Baruah dispatches by the ESD were a legitimate instrument of state policy and a key “soft power” component of its multi-pronged warfighting strategy against Pakistan. The book does not reveal how well received in targeted countries its broadcasts were, though one can presume from comments by 93,000 Pakistani prisoners polled during their imprisonment in India and regular contact with Bangladeshis that the Urdu and Bengali dispatches were indeed very popular despite the severe penalty Pakistan had attached to listening to Indian broadcasts.

In all, a well-written book which lay readers as well as professionals and military establishments will find relevant and an excellent example of synergised warfighting using soft power through radio.