Our response to Dhaka

In 1994, a work-related training took me and my friend Zaffar Junejo to Bangladesh. After an extensive two-week field and classroom learning sessions at the Centre for Development Management, run by Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (Brac), outside Dhaka, we came to spend a couple of days in the city.

Junejo had a gift and greetings to deliver from another common friend of ours to a lady in Dhaka. He wanted me to accompany him. The lady invited us to her place over breakfast. A tall, fair middle-aged woman clad in an elegant sari warmly welcomed us. After we settled and had an initial exchange of pleasantries, she said, “You are the first Pakistanis to come to our house since Bangladesh’s liberation.”

Then she smiled and said, “Some of mine and my late husband’s friends were a little exasperated when I told them that two Pakistani young men are visiting us. But then my daughter said that humanity comes first and we should really bury the hatchet now. And, of course, the two of you or our mutual friend in Pakistan had nothing to do with what happened to us here in 1971.”

The lady was Panna Kaiser, wife of the slain Bangladeshi writer and intellectual Shaheedullah Kaiser. Their daughter Shomi Kaiser had become a popular actor in Bangladesh by that time. As a child, I had heard her husband’s name many times from my father. He was among the friends my father had made during the frequent planning and shooting trips he would take to the then East Pakistan for his documentary films. Art, literature and pro-people political ideals brought those men together.

Shaheedullah Kaiser was among those writers, professors and intellectuals who were picked by pro-West Pakistan militias and killed. I call these militias, Al-Badr and Al-Shams, pro-West Pakistan and not pro-Pakistan for a simple reason. East Pakistan was as much Pakistan as West Pakistan was when the tragedy began to happen. The East Pakistanis were more in numbers as well at that time. They had sacrificed and struggled equally if not more than those in the west to gain a separate homeland for South Asian Muslims in 1947. Unfortunately, the dominant West Pakistani elite and state institutions never got it right – the result being the secession of East Pakistan and inception of Bangladesh after a massive conflict and chaos, army operation by Pakistan and Indian military intervention.

How ironic that the majority of Pakistanis chose to secede from the country they helped create. A lot has been written, debated and argued on the subject. But there has not been a fair closure – neither in Bangladesh nor in Pakistan.

It was important for Bangladesh to investigate the military highhandedness committed during 1971, the violence and bloodletting in the streets, public places and homes across many cities and villages that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and other casualties and to bring to the book those who were responsible for inflicting pain and suffering on its citizens. The Bangladeshi national narrative sees the army operation by Pakistan to suppress East Pakistan’s voice as illegitimate and illegal.

Many Pakistanis today agree with them as Awami League should have been allowed to form government in Islamabad after the results of the 1970 elections. Those who aided or abetted the army in carrying out its operations or those who participated in silencing any voices of dissent against the West-Pakistan dominated state narrative at the time are seen as criminals in Bangladesh.

For generals like Yahya Khan, Tikka Khan, Farman Ali and A A K Niazi, East Pakistanis fighting them were traitors. For the then East Pakistanis and now Bangladeshis, those siding with these generals are traitors. While it took them very long to start the process, it is still better than not having a process of fixing responsibilities at all. However, not for anyone else but for the sake of sanity and wellbeing in their own society, the process should be more of fixing responsibilities, establishing guilt, sanctioning and constraining those responsible, asking the guilty to seek forgiveness from the families and friends of victims and people at large.

The death penalty is the worst punishment that is awarded and is something completely irrevocable. For those involved in heinous crimes, banning their outfits and putting these people behind bars for the rest of their lives may have sufficed in order to move forward. Also, for the sake of humanity and history, acts of militias like the Mukti Bahini should also have been investigated and recorded. Fighting with the military, attacking combatant soldiers or their active abetters may be justified but how could the killings of thousands of innocent Bihari or West Pakistani civilians be rationalised in the name of excesses committed during the war?

It is problematic for the emotional and intellectual development of any society when it decides to look the other way or become selective with facts when it comes to atrocities committed against innocent civilians by those the society thinks were right in their cause. I am sure the wise and conscientious Bangladeshi thinkers acknowledge this fact.

In Pakistan, the resolution adopted by the National Assembly condemning the hanging of Abdul Quader Molla in Bangladesh for his involvement and participation in the killings of Awami League workers and their families hints at an even more deep-seated problem than what is happening in Bangladesh. Pakistan recognises Bangladesh as an independent, sovereign country. This was entirely an internal matter of that country and some of our parliamentarians have trespassed into a domain that is not theirs. The Jamaat-e-Islami MNA should not have been allowed to table the resolution in the first place.

A parliamentarian during the session of the highest legislative body of the country is not an op-ed columnist who has the luxury to comment on anything under the sun. Who are we to ask Bangladesh to open or not to open the 1971 cases? We are one of the worst nations when it comes to setting the record straight, bringing resolution to issues that have plagued our social and political consciousness and accepting collectively what went wrong without being defensive.

In this case, we could never put out the full text of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission report, never even attempted to try those who are responsible for what we see as a debacle and a national tragedy. We have neither found and established fair responsibility, nor charged or tried any of the assassins of those who led this country – from Liaquat Ali Khan to Benazir Bhutto. And we are asking the Bangladeshis to follow suit.

Even outside parliament, the interior minister had the gall to say that the whole Pakistani nation is feeling sad over this tragic incident. He further said that a person who was the flag-bearer of united Pakistan was executed through a judicial murder. Now that’s strange. I think the interior minister has no idea what so many Pakistanis, particularly in the smaller provinces, think and feel about 1971 and how they view the running of our federation now. Also, does he still remember the 200,000 stranded Pakistanis in the camps of Bangladesh?

Besides, though for its critics the war crimes tribunal may well have not been as transparent an exercise as it should have been, Molla was not penalised for bearing the Pakistani flag. He and others had criminal cases of killings filed against them. As far as judicial murder is concerned, has Pakistan officially recognised that Z A Bhutto’s hanging under Gen Zia was a judicial murder? Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, the Islami Jamiat-e-Talba-turned-PML-turned-PTI leader, declared Molla Shaheed-e-Pakistan. His senior years are not helping him it seems. However, the interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar, should have been more careful.

The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com