Syed Badrul Ahsan - Pakistan’s unabashed Nizami tears
The Islamic Republic of
Pakistan has surprised us once more. It has deigned to inform us, here in
Bangladesh, that back in the days when its soldiers remained busy committing
genocide in occupied Bangladesh, it had a constitution and it had laws. And it
was that constitution and those laws which Motiur Rahman Nizami so courageously
upheld even as his Jamaat-e-Islami goon squads cheerfully assisted the Pakistan
army in abducting, killing and raping Bengalis in their own land. Nizami’s sin,
laments Pakistan, was in upholding that constitution and those laws in 1971.
Observe once more the
untruths Pakistan, through its successive governments since the collapse of its
war machine in Bangladesh, has been peddling without end and with hardly anyone
taking cognizance in the world beyond its shrunken frontiers. Its revelation
that in 1971 there was a constitution and there were laws somehow tends to take
the form of bizarre humour. It stretches the imagination to the point of
disbelief.
So what was the reality in 1971 Pakistan? The Yahya Khan junta, in
cahoots with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party, brazenly
repudiated the results of the election of December 1970, a democratic exercise
that would have led to the framing of a constitution for the country. By going
for a brutal suppression of Bengalis on the night of 25 March 1971, the state
of Pakistan informed the world of its refusal to go for any constitutional
framework on which it could base itself.
Read the world-famous article by Anthony Mascarenhas, former Assistant Editor, Morning News, Karachi: GENOCIDE: Why the Refugees Fled (Sunday Times, London, June 13, 1971)
Communist Party of India's resolution on Pakistan and National Unity, September 1942
An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971
An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971
So there was no
constitution. And the law was martial law, the law of the jungle. And Nizami
was defending the constitution in 1971. Pakistan’s politicians, who have shed
copious tears every time a notorious war criminal has mounted the gallows in
Bangladesh, delude themselves into believing that Motiur Rahman Nizami was upholding
laws in the nine months of Bangladesh’s liberation war. That is a joke, for
Nizami, like the soldiers and his fellow collaborators, were lawless, murderous
brigands in 1971. He and all the other collaborationist elements of his kind
went out of their way, all through the war, to reinforce the idea that in
Pakistan the law did not matter, that it was the divinely ordained right of
Pakistan’s soldiers to kill, rape and burn. Who was it that once said, in the
days following General Ayub Khan’s seizure of the state in October 1958, that
the Pakistan army had done a most wonderful of occupying its own country? In
1971, that army was in violent occupation of our land, plain and simple.
Wasn’t it AAK Niazi
who through his womanizing and killing spoke openly of his soldiers producing a
new generation of Pakistan-minded people in Bangladesh through a systematic
raping of Bengali women? ‘Hum un ki nasl badal denge (we will change their
generation)’, he boasted. Proof what he and his soldiers meant to do comes through
the hundreds of war babies now grown into adulthood, most of them settled in
the West through the kindness of good men and women there. And the women the
soldiers raped, Nizami’s men molested?
They are yet around, growing old and
unable to forget the animal instincts of the soldiers.
Pakistan and its
soldiers and its uncouth loyalists in Bangladesh picked up Bengalis —
academics, civil servants, police officers, writers, musicians, poets,
students, political workers — and then picked them off. That was the law which
Nizami and his kind enforced.
It was in line with the arrogance of the young
Punjabi army officer who, in Comilla, vowed in a conversation with Anthony
Mascarenhas to keep the Bengalis in slavery for thirty years. That was the law,
which other officers, Rao Farman Ali Khan for instance, did all they could to
impose on a subjugated nation. Rao Farman noted in his diary that the land of
Bengal, not its people, mattered for Pakistan.
And so the people were
being done away with, Hindus and Muslims alike. Ten million were compelled to
find refuge in India. In an occupied land, Ghulam Azam and Nizami went around
spewing nonsense about saving a Pakistani ideology, about crushing India and
eliminating ‘miscreants’. They did not see the writing on the wall. They
needed to save Pakistan through a systematic murder of Bengalis. Remember
Bhutto at Karachi airport on his return from Dhaka? Having watched from his
hotel suite Dhaka burn, having seen the soldiers fan out in search of Bengalis
to kill, he cheerfully told waiting newsmen, ‘Thank God, Pakistan has been
saved.’ He had no idea that God was about to turn His face away from Pakistan.
It was a strange,
fearsome Pakistan which eerily took shape between March and December 1971. On
the morning of 26 March, a highly enthused Roedad Khan told a bunch of generals
— Tikka Khan, Khadem Hossain Raja and others — at Dhaka cantonment even as
their soldiers went around shooting Bengalis like birds, ‘Yaar, imaan taaza ho
gya (faith has been revived, friends)’. Faith and the law had curiously come to
be symbolized by the firepower of the army. It was this recipe for murder which
Nizami and the other war criminals were to try out in cooking a new political
dish for Pakistan over the subsequent nine months. Today’s Pakistan is angry
that the recipe did not work all the way, that the ‘law’ was not allowed to
take permanent hold in Bangladesh by its people.
Pakistan’s anger comes
mixed with its misplaced tears. It has been a historically indignant state with
deep roots in murder and mayhem (revisit the Great Calcutta Killings of August
1946 and the death of two million Muslims and Hindus in the aftermath of
Partition). Its ruling classes have felt no qualms about meddling in the
affairs of other nations, Afghanistan and India for instance. Its army has for
decades abducted and killed tens of thousands of people in Balochistan.
Every
military conflict Pakistan has been in was planned and put into action by its
leaders down the years. Jinnah oversaw the dispatch of Pakistan’s soldiers into
Kashmir in the guise of tribals driven by thoughts of independence; Ayub Khan
in 1965 went into the Rann of Kutch and months later pushed Pakistan into a new
war with India, losing both times; Yahya Khan went to war against his own eastern
province and then against India, getting thoroughly humiliated in the process.
Suddenly he was president of half a country.
Someone quipped once,
‘Every country needs an army; the Pakistan army needs a country.’ In 1971, the
army needed a country, ours. Enthusiastic second-rate Pakistanis like Nizami
went around fulfilling the wishes of the master. They were upholding the law,
and that was martial law. Through employing that ‘law’, they left millions of
Bengalis dead. The soldiers and their Nizamis turned Bangladesh into a huge
burial ground.
Pakistan speaks of the
future, without owning up to its sordid past. Its children do not know why East
Pakistan vanished into thin air twenty four years after their country came into
being. They have never been told why their army, which they love to bits, had
93,000 of its soldiers surrender in Bangladesh, soldiers who then spent three
years in India as prisoners of war. Two generations of Pakistanis born after
the war have not been educated on the elections of 1970 and the ugly manner in
which the results of the vote were subverted. They do not know that, like the
Nazis in Germany, the Pakistan army mutated into a band of murderers in
Bangladesh. They have never been told that, like the Hitler collaborationists
in Europe who helped the Nazis on their killing missions, the Jamaat-e-Islami
in Bangladesh assisted Pakistan’s soldiers in refining and expanding the reach
of genocide in Bangladesh.
Elderly Pakistanis
have gone quiet about the calamity their country went through in 1971. Younger
Pakistanis do not know or their history textbooks do not tell them that in
December 1970, it was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League who won the
general election and were legally entitled to assume power in Pakistan. They
have been kept from knowing of the conspiracy the generals and Z.A. Bhutto,
their first elected leader by default, engaged in to repudiate the results of
the election.
Pakistan mourns Nizami
and his adherence to the constitution and the law in 1971. It does not explain
what constitution was there forty five years ago. It will not tell us under
what law its soldiers and their quislings went into a long dance of death in
the hamlets and towns of Bangladesh and brought about their own doom.
And here is the final
point: Pakistan remains the only instance of a modern state where a majority of
its people waged war against it, leaving it truncated and defeated. Americans
in the south of the United States between the early and mid 1860s lost their
battle to be independent. Biafra collapsed three years into its freedom, in
1970, and was pulled back into Nigeria. Ian Smith was compelled to eat humble
pie despite his Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) for Rhodesia in
1965.
Bangladesh won its war
against Pakistan. And Pakistan, proud of its questionable Islamic identity,
arrogant about its army, remains bitter at memories of 1971. The bitterness
rolls over into love for ageing murderers once on its payroll.
We are not surprised.
But we are surprised that Pakistan’s leaders have never learned the lessons of
history. Germans have gone around saying sorry for the sins of the Nazis.
Japanese politicians have with folded hands asked for forgiveness of nations
persecuted by Hideki Tojo and his militarists in imperial Japan. Pakistan has remained
fixated on 1971. It has not felt sorry, has never acknowledged the criminality
of its army, has never spotted the difference between good and evil, which is a
pity.
http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2016/05/12/pakistans-unabashed-nizami-tears/
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