India After Gandhi (78 page)

The statistics of the fifth general election were printed in loving detail in the report of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC). The size of the electorate was 275 million, a 100 million up from the first edition in 1952. Yet no Indian had to walk more than two kilometres to exercise his or her franchise. There were now 342,944 polling stations, up 100,000 from 1962; each station was supplied with forty-three different items ranging from ballot papers and boxes to indelible ink and sealing wax; 282 million ballot papers were printed, 7 million more than the number of eligible voters (to allow for accidents and errors); 1,769,802 Indians were on polling duty – for the most part, these were officials of the state and central governments.

The CEC then turned, with less pleasure, to electoral malpractices. A study of the 1967 elections had found 375 cases of electoral violence of all kinds; of these, 98 were in Bihar.
⁹
In 1971 the Election Commission reported 66 instances of ‘booth-capturing’, where ballot boxes were
seized by force and stuffed with ballots in favour of one candidate. In Anantnag in the Kashmir Valley a woman took away a ballot box under her
burqa
before returning it, now heavier by several hundred ballots. Again, the most violations were in Bihar – the state accounted for 52 of 66 booths captured by hooligans hired by leaders of caste factions. The CEC believed this was ‘perhaps the most caste-ridden State in the whole [of] India and this bane of excessive casteism vitiates in no mean degree the political atmosphere’.

These disfigurements notwithstanding, the holding of its fifth general election was a matter on which the country could congratulate itself. So wrote the CEC, in a preface whose lyricism sat oddly with the hard nosed numerical analysis that followed. For in between the last poll and this one, ‘India was in the middle of the deepest and darkest woods and was groping for a way out’. Factionalism was rife; SVD governments came and went, and the president of the republic died, making ‘the already dark political situation . . . darker’. Then the mighty Congress Party split; this, in the CEC’s view, was comparable only to ‘the Great Schism in the Whig Party in Great Britain in the year 1796’. In this ‘state of tension, stress, confusion and flux, the prophets of doom, both inside and outside the country, started expressing serious misgivings and doubts as to the very survival of democracy in this Great Land’.

These doomsayers, said the chief election commissioner, had not reckoned with Bharata Bhagya Vidhata (The Supreme Dispenser of India’s Destiny), which from ‘ancient times’ had thwarted ‘adverse and hostile circumstances’, by blowing ‘into the soul of India that elixir-giving inspiration which imparted rejuvenated vigour to her vital, moral and spiritual forces’. Others might have disagreed, seeing the holding of this election not as a victory for Indian spiritualism but as a vindication of that very modern political form, electoral democracy.
¹⁰

Three months before India held its fifth general election, Pakistan held its first ever election based on adult franchise. The poll had been called by General Yahya Khan, Ayub Khan’s successor as president and chief martial law administrator.

Two parties dominated the campaign; Zulfiqar Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party in West Pakistan, and the National Awami League of
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (‘Mujib’) in East Pakistan. The son of a large landowner, educated at Oxford and Berkeley, Bhutto sought to declass himself, at least rhetorically, by promising every Pakistani
roti, kapda aur makaan
(food, clothing and a roof over your heads). Mujib’s campaign was based on East Pakistan’s sense of victimhood, its anger at the suppression of the Bengali language and the exploitation of its rich natural resources by the military rulers of the western half of the country.
¹¹

Yahya Khan appears to have called for elections in the hope that Bhutto’s PPP would win, and allow him to continue as president. The polls were held in the third week of December 1970. The PPP won 88 out of the 144 seats in West Pakistan, whereas the Awami League swept the more populous East, winning 167 of its 169 seats. These results surprised Mujibur Rahman, and shocked Yahya Khan. For the president had intended that the newly elected assembly would frame a democratic constitution; the worry now was that the Awami League, with its majority, would insist on a federation where the eastern wing would manage its own affairs, leaving only defence and foreign policy to the central government. Mujib had already indicated that he would like East Pakistan to have control over the foreign exchange its products generated, and perhaps issue its own currency as well.

Yahya’s reservations were reinforced by the ambitions of Bhutto. For the relationship between Pakistan’s two wings had always been a colonial one, with West dominating East militarily, economically and even culturally. For both general and patrician, the prospect of having a Bengali decide their destinies was too horrible to contemplate. For the Bengali Muslim was regarded by his West Pakistani counterpart as effete and effeminate, and too easily corrupted by proximity to Hindus (over 10 million of whom still lived within their midst). Among these Hindus were many professionals – lawyers, doctors, university professors. The fear of the West Pakistani elite was that, if Mujib’s Awami League came to form the government, ‘the constitution to be adopted by them will have Hindu iron hand in it’.
¹²

On the other side, the East Pakistani Muslims looked upon their West Pakistani counterparts as ‘the ruling classes, as foreign ruling classes and as predatory foreign ruling classes’. They resented the rulers’ dismissal of their language, Bengali; they complained that their agricultural wealth was being drained away to feed the western sector; and they noted that Bengalis were very poorly represented in the upper
echelons of the Pakistani bureaucracy, judiciary and, not least, army. The feeling of being discriminated against had been growing over the years. By the time of the elections of 1970, ‘the politically minded’ East Bengali had become ‘allergic to a central authority located a thousand miles away’.
¹³

In January 1971 Yahya Khan and Bhutto travelled separately to the East Pakistani capital, Dacca. They held talks with Mujib, but found him firm on the question of a federal constitution. The president then postponed the convening of the National Assembly. The Awami League answered by calling an indefinite general strike. Throughout East Pakistan shops and offices putdown their shutters; even railways and airports closed down. Clashes between police and demonstrators became a daily occurrence.

The military decided to quell these protests by force. Troop reinforcements were flown in or sent by ship to the principal eastern port, Chittagong. On the night of 25/26 March, the army launched a major attack on the university, whose students were among the Awami League’s strongest supporters. A parade of tanks rolled into the campus, firing on the dormitories. Students were rounded up, shot and pushed into graves hastily dug and bulldozed over by tanks. There were troop detachments at work in other parts of the city, targeting Bengali newspaper offices and homes of local politicians. That same night Mujibur Rahman was arrested at his home and flown off to a secret location in West Pakistan.
¹⁴

The Pakistan army fanned out into the countryside, seeking to stamp out any sign of rebellion. East Bengali troops mutinied in several places, including Chittagong, where one major captured a radio station and announced the establishment of the Independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
¹⁵
To combat the guerrillas the army raised bands of local loyalists, called Razakars, who put the claims of religion – and hence of a united Pakistan – above those of language. Villages and small towns, even the odd airport, fell into rebel hands, then were recaptured. The reprisals grew progressively more brutal. As an American consular official reported, ‘Army officials and soldiers give every sign of believing that they are now embarked on a Jehad against Hindu-corrupted Bengalis.’
¹⁶

One soldier later wrote a vivid recollection of the counter-insurgency operations, of the ‘reassertion of state power’ and the capture of those ‘places [which] had been occupied by anti-state elements’. As he remembered, ‘there was more resistance offered by the terrain than by the
miscreants. Extensive damage to land communications and free intermingling of hostiles with the general populace made progress tedious.’
¹⁷

After the first swoop, foreign correspondents were asked to leave East Pakistan, but later in the summer some were allowed to return. A German journalist saw signs of the civil war everywhere: in bazaars burnt in the cities and homesteads razed in the villages. There was ‘a ghostly emptiness in settlements once bubbling with life and energy’. An American reporter found Dacca ‘a city under the occupation of a military force that rules by strength, intimidation and terror’. The army was harassing the Hindu minority in particular; the authorities were ‘demolishing Hindu temples, regardless of whether there are any Hindus to use them’. A World Bank team visiting East Pakistan found a ‘general destruction of property in cities, towns, and villages’, leading to an ‘all-pervasive fear’ among the population.
¹⁸

The army action in Dacca sparked a panic flight out of the city. The repression in the hinterland magnified this flight, directing it across the border into India. By the end of April 1971 there were half a million East Pakistan refugees in India; by the end of May, three and a half million; by the end of August, in excess of 8 million. Most (though by no means all) were Hindus.
¹⁹
Refugee camps were strung out along the border, in the states of West Bengal, Tripura and Meghalaya. To distribute the burden, camps were also opened in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. The refugees were housed in huts made of bamboo and polythene; the luckier ones in the verandahs of schools and colleges. The food came from Indian warehouses – not as bare as they would have been before the Green Revolution – and from supplies provided by Western aid agencies.
²⁰

From the beginning, the Indian government had followed an ‘open door’ policy; anyone who came was allowed in. Significantly, the responsibility for the camps vested with the centre, not the states. In fact, from the beginning of the conflict New Delhi had taken a very keen interest in the future of what was already being referred to in secret official communications as the ‘struggle for Bangladesh’. On the other side, Islamabad spoke darkly of ‘an Indo-Zionist plot against Islamic Pakistan’.
²¹
This was an exaggeration; for the origins of the problem were internal to Pakistan, while Israel was nowhere in the picture at all. Still, once the dispute presented itself, India was not above stoking it for its own ends.

A key player here was the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), an intelligence agency set up in 1968 on the model of the CIA, its aims the pursuit of Indian interests worldwide, its activities screened from parliamentary enquiry, its orders to report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office. The head of RAW was (perhaps inevitably) a Kashmiri Brahmin, R. N. Kao, while its officers were taken from the police and, on occasion, the army. No sooner had the Pakistani elections been called than RAW was being kept busy writing reports on that country. A memorandum of January 1971 presented a somewhat alarmist picture of Pakistan’s armed strength: listing numbers of troops, tanks, aircraft and ships, it claimed that the country had ‘achieved a good state of military preparedness for any confrontation with India’. It thought the ‘potential threat’ of an attack on India ‘quite real, particularly in view of the Sino-Pakistan collusion’. Besides, the constitutional crisis might encourage the generals to undertake a diversionary adventure, to begin, as in 1965, with an ‘infiltration campaign in Jammu and Kashmir’.
²²

Whether Yahya Khan had any such plans in January 1971 only the Pakistani archives can reveal. The archives on the Indian side tell us that India had certain designs of its own, aimed naturally at Pakistan. Thinking through these designs were P. N. Haksar and his colleague D. P. Dhar, then Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union. In April 1971 Dhar wrote to Haksar expressing pleasure that India was winning the propaganda war with Pakistan – chiefly by providing succour to the victims of its repression. Some analysts wanted swift military action but, advised Dhar, instead of ‘policies and programmes of impetuosity’, what India had to plan for ‘is not an immediate defeat of the highly trained [army] of West Pakistan; we have to create the whole of East Bengal into a bottomless ditch which will suck the strength and resources of West Pakistan. Let us think in terms of a year or two, not in terms of a week or two.’
²³

By the summer of 1971, along with the hundreds of camps for refugees, India was also hosting training camps for Bengali guerrillas. Known as the Mukti Bahini, these fighters numbered some 20,000 in all; regular officers and soldiers of the once united Pakistani army, plus younger volunteers learning how to use light arms. The instruction was at first
in the hands of the paramilitary Border Security Force, but by the autumn the Indian army had assumed direct charge. From their bases in India, the guerrillas would venture into East Pakistan, there to attack army camps and disrupt communications.
²⁴

In April 1971 the Chinese prime minister wrote to the Pakistani president deploring the ‘gross interference’ by India in the ‘internal problems’ of his country. He dismissed the resistance as the work of ‘a handful of persons who want to sabotage the unification of Pakistan’. He assured Yahya Khan that ‘should the Indian expansionists dare to launch aggression against Pakistan, the Chinese Government and people will, as always, support the Pakistan Government and people in their just struggle to safeguard state sovereignty and national independence’.
²⁵