Book Review by Mani Shankar Aiyar: Major General K H Raja’s 'A Stranger in my own Country, East Pakistan, 1969-71'
Memoirs of a military man: Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s A Stranger in my own Country, East Pakistan, 1969-71 is a cry of despair from a distant time and even a distant land. For the Pakistan in which General Khadim Raja found himself a stranger no longer exists. Its pretensions were ended on 16 December 1971, when Governor Niazi signed the surrender documents proclaiming a new country, Bangladesh, out of the debris of the ill-conceived Pakistan artificially created a quarter century earlier “as a homeland for the Muslims of the sub-continent”, to quote General Raja in his final peroration, which it never was and could not have become.
Raja was witness to the last days of the Quaid’s Raj, a witness who had intimations of the coming catastrophe but was swept along to be part of the disaster by his duties as Deputy Martial Law Administrator in East Pakistan and commanding officer of the Division occupying Dhaka. His account, by no means in the league of Herb Feldman’s The End and the Beginning or even Raja’s contemporary, Brigadier Abdur Rahman Siddiqi’s Pakistan: The End Game, An Onlooker’s Journal, 1969-71, is valuable as a worm’s eye view of how Islamabad’s self-inflicted wounds turned gangrenous, leaving the limb with no alternative but to be cut off.
Raja arrived in Khulna towards the last quarter of 1969 to find himself “in an environment so strikingly unfriendly that I felt like a stranger in my own country, and totally unwelcome as a West Pakistani”. A more intelligent worm would have understood that this was because of fundamental flaws in the conception of a nation which was to be “the homeland” for “the Muslims of the sub-continent”, but that never crops up anywhere in this account. Instead the blame attaches to “the 20 per cent Hindu minority on Pakistani territory” providing “ideal conditions for infiltration, subversion and sabotage” and exposing the “big labour force in Khulna” to “bribes and subversion by a potent Hindu minority”. And as for “the massive crowds” attending Sheikh Mujib’s meetings, they all, says Raja, “fell prey to his propaganda, hook, line and sinker”.
It is this kind of misreading of the causes of seething discontent, more even than the “evident complacency” of Governor Abdul Monem Khan, that left the (West) Pakistani establishment stranded in the quicksands of Bangladesh’s assertion of its separate identity, an identity of language, culture, history and secularism far truer to the origins of the end of the beginning, and far more deep-rooted, than the bogus, uni-dimensional sectarian assertion of Pakistan as the “homeland of the Muslims of the sub-continent” on which Jinnah had founded his political ambitions. Indeed, it is instructive that General Raja mentions only in passing the Quaid-e-Azam’s folly in declaring Urdu the sole national language of a country in which no more than 4% people spoke Urdu as their mother tongue (see Farzana Shaikh’s Making Sense of Pakistan), a declaration made in Dhaka, with supreme lack of sensitivity or understanding, within months of Pakistan coming into being. That, much more than the follies of Yahya Khan, was what led to the historical inevitability of the birth of Bangladesh.
Instead, Raja recalls the delinquencies of the comical and cruel cast of characters assembled by Yahya Khan to deal with the crisis in Dhaka: Governor Niazi who asks General Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali “girl-friends” after having earlier proposed, apparently in all seriousness, the mass violation of Bengali women as the way to teach the Bongs a lesson; the “venality” of Tikka Khan, military chief of the Pakistan forces in East Pakistan; and Yahya himself cavorting in the Governor’s palace while keeping his principal aides in Dhaka at bay from arrival to departure. I had not realized till I read this slim memoir the extent to which the West Pakistani army officers regarded Dhaka as the Hira Mandi of the East.
No wonder then that Raja recalls a meeting soon after his arrival, chaired by the military commander the urbane and sophisticated General Sahibzada Yaqub Khan (later Foreign Minister of Pakistan), at which the former Chief Minister of East Pakistan, Ataur Rahman, gently enquires when the “West Pakistan Army of Occupation” will quit the East Wing. There was “pin-drop silence” in the hall; the statement “elicited not a single response.” Raja says, “Ataur Rahman’s statement came as a great shock and still rings in my ears. I will never forget the scene as long as I live. It clearly indicated the polarization that had taken place by then.”.. Read more:
http://www.theindependentbd.com/paper-edition/others/freeforall/120505-memoirs-of-a-military-man.html
Errata -Towards the end of this review its author says of General Raja: "Today, he has crossed 80 and belongs to the generation that is now being phased out..” General Raja passed away in 1999 aged 78. And he would have crossed 90, not 80, had he been alive
Read the review of the same book in The Daily Star, Dhaka:
Niazi planned ethnic cleansing
See also: The Blood Telegram
Pakistan's 1st Law & Labour Minister, Jogendra Mandal's Resignation Letter, October 1950
The raison d’être of Pakistan by Y.L. Hamdani
Raja was witness to the last days of the Quaid’s Raj, a witness who had intimations of the coming catastrophe but was swept along to be part of the disaster by his duties as Deputy Martial Law Administrator in East Pakistan and commanding officer of the Division occupying Dhaka. His account, by no means in the league of Herb Feldman’s The End and the Beginning or even Raja’s contemporary, Brigadier Abdur Rahman Siddiqi’s Pakistan: The End Game, An Onlooker’s Journal, 1969-71, is valuable as a worm’s eye view of how Islamabad’s self-inflicted wounds turned gangrenous, leaving the limb with no alternative but to be cut off.
Raja arrived in Khulna towards the last quarter of 1969 to find himself “in an environment so strikingly unfriendly that I felt like a stranger in my own country, and totally unwelcome as a West Pakistani”. A more intelligent worm would have understood that this was because of fundamental flaws in the conception of a nation which was to be “the homeland” for “the Muslims of the sub-continent”, but that never crops up anywhere in this account. Instead the blame attaches to “the 20 per cent Hindu minority on Pakistani territory” providing “ideal conditions for infiltration, subversion and sabotage” and exposing the “big labour force in Khulna” to “bribes and subversion by a potent Hindu minority”. And as for “the massive crowds” attending Sheikh Mujib’s meetings, they all, says Raja, “fell prey to his propaganda, hook, line and sinker”.
It is this kind of misreading of the causes of seething discontent, more even than the “evident complacency” of Governor Abdul Monem Khan, that left the (West) Pakistani establishment stranded in the quicksands of Bangladesh’s assertion of its separate identity, an identity of language, culture, history and secularism far truer to the origins of the end of the beginning, and far more deep-rooted, than the bogus, uni-dimensional sectarian assertion of Pakistan as the “homeland of the Muslims of the sub-continent” on which Jinnah had founded his political ambitions. Indeed, it is instructive that General Raja mentions only in passing the Quaid-e-Azam’s folly in declaring Urdu the sole national language of a country in which no more than 4% people spoke Urdu as their mother tongue (see Farzana Shaikh’s Making Sense of Pakistan), a declaration made in Dhaka, with supreme lack of sensitivity or understanding, within months of Pakistan coming into being. That, much more than the follies of Yahya Khan, was what led to the historical inevitability of the birth of Bangladesh.
Instead, Raja recalls the delinquencies of the comical and cruel cast of characters assembled by Yahya Khan to deal with the crisis in Dhaka: Governor Niazi who asks General Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali “girl-friends” after having earlier proposed, apparently in all seriousness, the mass violation of Bengali women as the way to teach the Bongs a lesson; the “venality” of Tikka Khan, military chief of the Pakistan forces in East Pakistan; and Yahya himself cavorting in the Governor’s palace while keeping his principal aides in Dhaka at bay from arrival to departure. I had not realized till I read this slim memoir the extent to which the West Pakistani army officers regarded Dhaka as the Hira Mandi of the East.
No wonder then that Raja recalls a meeting soon after his arrival, chaired by the military commander the urbane and sophisticated General Sahibzada Yaqub Khan (later Foreign Minister of Pakistan), at which the former Chief Minister of East Pakistan, Ataur Rahman, gently enquires when the “West Pakistan Army of Occupation” will quit the East Wing. There was “pin-drop silence” in the hall; the statement “elicited not a single response.” Raja says, “Ataur Rahman’s statement came as a great shock and still rings in my ears. I will never forget the scene as long as I live. It clearly indicated the polarization that had taken place by then.”.. Read more:
http://www.theindependentbd.com/paper-edition/others/freeforall/120505-memoirs-of-a-military-man.html
Errata -Towards the end of this review its author says of General Raja: "Today, he has crossed 80 and belongs to the generation that is now being phased out..” General Raja passed away in 1999 aged 78. And he would have crossed 90, not 80, had he been alive
Read the review of the same book in The Daily Star, Dhaka:
Niazi planned ethnic cleansing
See also: The Blood Telegram
Pakistan's 1st Law & Labour Minister, Jogendra Mandal's Resignation Letter, October 1950
The raison d’être of Pakistan by Y.L. Hamdani
