Swarnim Vijay Diwas: Road to Pakistan’s acknowledgement of defeat in Bangladesh in 1971 does not run through New Delhi

Are fifty years enough to study and arrive at a consensual understanding of a set of events? Apparently not, even in Pakistan, where a single institution holds wide power over every aspect of society. Pakistan’s reluctance to face up to even the basic truths of the ‘liberation’ and ‘dismemberment’ of its eastern limb continues to hobble it as a nation-state. That is why the country is yet unable to acknowledge its defeat or even the fundamental mistakes that led it there. 

It would be quite rich to agree to look at the birth of Bangladesh as a failure of the Two-Nation Theory. To do so would be to signal a failure not just of Allama Iqbal’s ideations but also an extension of the identity that Hindu nationalists have struggled to make mainstream.

Bangladesh, as it so poignantly suggests in its name, was a success story against the perils of chauvinism arising from race, language and region. It is a story of a republic failing in its conception of democracy and disagreeing internally over what both these systems of government were meant to achieve.

The trouble always lay with the supplanting of cow belt ideas of Islamic society and separateness into Punjabi-centric ideation of oneness, and the imposition of that imagined singularity over every real and imagined distinction in pluralistic geography.

The country, as Pakistan Studies textbooks will convince you even today, was not founded by Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, but by Mohammed bin Qasim 1300 years ago. In removing the here-and-now nature of its creation, Pakistan’s powers that be have paralleled their ‘iron brother’ from the northeast in social remodelling.

The true trouble in acknowledging the events of 1971was never about the defeat at the hands of India. It has always been about not acknowledging the fact that it was the culmination of a number of theories designed to keep power in the hands of ‘heartland’ Pakistanis (read Punjabi). From the One-Unit to the imposition of Urdu as the state language, every attempt was made to subvert identities that had existed for centuries and supplant them with ideas that had been dreamed of after the nation had been born.

In that sense, what has ailed Pakistan has given truth to it being ‘insufficiently imagined’ in the diagnostics of Salman Rushdie, an author whose prognosis of his own works have often failed him. It is why the nation has grappled with multiple failed drafts at a constitution because in one form or the other Bengalis would have found a path to power.

The fact of the matter, that can find some broad agreement in any case, is that West Pakistan did not want to be ruled by a government comprised of Bengalis. The powers that be in the West were anathema to the very existence of the Bengali, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashtun and Kashmiri identities. They were perceived as subversions of a pan-Islamic identity on the basis of which Pakistan has been created.

This is an impulse that remains troublesome to the GHQ even today. From rebellion among the Baloch to protests by the Pashtuns and dissatisfaction in Karachi, none were birthed in the boardrooms of Indian skullduggery.

Neighbour India had gone through these birthing pains as well, but had dealt with the question of linguistic differences in a very different way and continued to keep its federation going. History in the Indian subcontinent is a transient concept. That’s why the Europeans who held sway for a few centuries were never really able to truly grasp true mental control over the natives. 

Refusing to acknowledge the true nature of why Bengalis revolted remains inconvenient. It is easier to perceive the whole affair as the evil intervention of India. It then becomes easier to allocate more money to a particular arm of the government instead of having to reimagine an entire nation.

The birth of Bangladesh was never a function of India’s evil intentions. It was merely a saga where India played a crucial supporting role. It may require a whole new country to our west to acknowledge this.