http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/
"The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)"
What
Pakistan is still forgetting is the fundamental critique of its conduct
towards East Pakistan contained in a book by senior bureaucrat,Hasan
Zaheer — The Separation of East Pakistan (1994). In this,linguistic
nationalism was more properly understood as the element which alienated
the Bengali Muslim from the West Pakistani Muslim.
The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.P9BZ2A9R.dpuf
The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.P9BZ2A9R.dpuf
What
Pakistan is still forgetting is the fundamental critique of its conduct
towards East Pakistan contained in a book by senior bureaucrat,Hasan
Zaheer — The Separation of East Pakistan (1994). In this,linguistic
nationalism was more properly understood as the element which alienated
the Bengali Muslim from the West Pakistani Muslim.
The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
The
idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a
non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able
to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in
Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the
governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son
of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic
script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded
by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister
didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school
stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
The
idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a
non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able
to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in
Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the
governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son
of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic
script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded
by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister
didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school
stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
The
idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a
non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim,who was able
to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in
Karachi,Fazlur Rehman,to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the
governor of East Pakistan,Malik Feroz Khan Noon,not the brightest son
of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic
script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan,funded
by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister
didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school
stream.
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.
Major General Hakeem Arshad Qureshi,who wrote The 1971 Indo-Pak War: A Soldier’s Narrative (2002),was commander of the SSG Commandos and an infantry battalion in East Pakistan in 1970-71. He was a PoW in India after the war and went on to command the Pakistan Rangers as director-general,before retiring in 1990. His thesis was: “Despite the deliberate strategic conclusion that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan,no effort was made to augment the defence of East Pakistan to gain time before the counter-offensive against the enemy could begin from West Pakistan. It was not taken into account that the Bengali component of the army in East Pakistan was not loyal,given long years of dissent in the Eastern Wing and protest against inequality of treatment.”
Qureshi held that although Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was not to be trusted,his demand that he be allowed to rule Pakistan was negotiable. His six-point programme was actually the “last possible solution to preserve the unity of Pakistan”,as a Dhaka newspaper put it.
More significantly,the book called into question the “victories” against India in 1948 and 1965. The first war failed to achieve its objective because “we caved in without consolidating initial success”. The second war was first opposed by General Musa and General Ayub,but after they agreed to it,no authentic information was obtained about the “sympathetic” Kashmiri insurgency,and wrong assumptions were made about India’s capabilities of launching a major offensive across the international border.
The author points to the “manufacturing defect” of the Pakistani state: “We enter a contest mostly on the rebound,with overly ambitious aims and without due thought and preparation and have usually given up the effort at the half-way mark for want of resources.We have also failed to understand the international interests and reactions in the event of an armed conflict on the subcontinent or to appreciate correctly the enemy’s reaction to a major ingress. The blunder of 1965 was repeated in 1971.”
The late Major General Khadim Hussain Raja’s book,A Stranger in My Own Country: East Pakistan,1969-1971 (2012),exposes the less dignified side of the military leadership in East Pakistan,under a heavy-drinking,constantly priapic head of the state,General Yahya Khan.
Here is the climax of the book: “[Enter Commander,East Pakistan,General Niazi,wearing a pistol holster on his web belt. Niazi became abusive and started raving. Breaking into Urdu,he said: ‘Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga (I will change the race of this bastard nation).’”
Raja adds: “He threatened that he would let his soldiers loose on their womenfolk. There was pin-drop silence at these remarks. The next morning,we were given the sad news. A Bengali officer,Major Mushtaq,went into a bathroom at the command headquarters and shot himself in the head.”
Interested in “genetic engineering”,Niazi also asked Raja for the phone numbers of his Bengali girlfriends: “Abhi tau mujhey Bengali girl friends kay phone number day do.”
Irony of ironies,Niazi surrendered to a Jewish-born Indian general,J.F.R. Jacob,in 1971. “Tiger” Niazi handed over his personal pistol at the famous Race Course ceremony. Jacob examined the weapon: the lanyard was greasy and frayed,and the pistol was full of muck as if it hadn’t been cleaned in a long while. (From Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation,by Lt General J.F.R. Jacob,1997.)
- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-1971-2/#sthash.aa7CvJQC.dpuf
http://archives.dailytimes.com.pk/editorial/30-Dec-2003/second-opinion-are-people-informed-and-wise-khaled-ahmed-s-tv-review
"The crisis of East Pakistan started much earlier. KK Aziz in his book "World Powers and the 1971 Breakup of Pakistan" (Vanguard) reveals the real cleavage. The Aligarh movement set up Urdu as the language of all Muslims of India, ignoring the fully developed Bengali in which the Muslims of that part of India expressed themselves. In 1906, the Simla Delegation of Muslims went to meet the viceroy. The delegation was 35 strong with only five members from Bengal. Out of the five, three were actually not from Bengal, and of the remaining, one was Urdu-speaking, which left only one Bengali representing India's Muslim majority area. Yet the Muslim League was founded in Dhaka in 1906 and in the first session, East Bengal had sent 35 members while the UP had only 16. Then, when the Simla Delegation was deliberating what to tell the viceroy in Simla a Bengali member suggested defence of the partition of Bengal because that was close to the heart of Bengali Muslims. But the Delegation ignored the proposal and the subject was not mentioned to the viceroy. The partition of Bengal was annulled in 1911.
The Muslim League reached an agreement over separate electorates with National Congress in a joint session at Lucknow known as the Lucknow Pact of 1916. The Muslims of Bengal were not given fair allocation of seats (they demanded 50 percent on the basis of population) under separate electorates and appealed to the All India Muslim League to agitate the demand, but to no avail. When the Bengal Muslim League failed to elicit a response from the central party in 1920 it encouraged Bengali leaders to turn to the Hindus for support, arriving at what was later known as the Bengal Pact. In 1930, AK Fazlul Haq denounced the Lucknow Pact and called for its revision. In protest, the Bengal League did not send its delegation to the All-India Muslim League session at Allahabad in 1930 where Allama Iqbal spoke of a Muslim state in the Northwest of India. Then in 1935 the central League decided to contest the coming elections. The 54-member Central Parliamentary Board had only eight Bengali seats. And when the session was called only two members from Bengal attended and they were not Bengalis! No secretary of the All-India Muslim League was to be from Bengal: Finally, when in 1946 the Muslim League decided to join the Interim government in Delhi it sent five men to the Viceroy's Council. The Bengali member it chose was a Hindu from the non-scheduled castes! No wonder that East Pakistan opted out by calling in India in 1971."
http://archives.dailytimes.com.pk/editorial/11-Jan-2005/second-opinion-the-trouble-with-national-language-khaled-ahmed-s-tv-review
"Hassan Zaheer in his book The Separation of East Pakistan (OUP) first revealed the ham-handedness of the policy of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan. First the Aga Khan thought that Arabic should be the national language. Then All-India Muslim League ran into trouble in 1937 when it proposed Urdu as the national language. It was opposed by the Bengali Muslim Leaguers who got Jinnah to water down the resolution to read that Urdu should be encouraged in areas where it was spoken. In the 1951 census of East Pakistan, 8.8 million persons were recorded as literate, of whom 6.4 million were Muslims. The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan, Mr FA Karim, who was able to convince the Bengali central education minister in Karachi, Fazlur Rehman, to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of East Pakistan governor Malik Feroz Khan Noon, not the brightest of sons of Punjab. This started the equally grotesque scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script and in 1952 there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan with Education Ministry funding. The East Pakistan chief minister didn't even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream, which was a provincial subject. In 1973, we put Urdu in the Constitution as the official language of Pakistan. But each year the provinces, except Punjab, say no to it. The market too has responded negatively. After General Zia privatised education, almost all the new schools are English-medium! School chains run by clerical leaders, who have otherwise vowed to banish English, are English-medium."
http://archives.dailytimes.com.pk/editorial/17-Jan-2006/second-opinion-wrangling-witnesses-of-fall-of-dhaka-khaled-ahmed-s-tv-review
"In his book The White House and Pakistan (OUP), FS Aijazuddin informs us from official documents that President Nixon delivered an ultimatum to India that if it attacked West Pakistan the US will move against it. He made the threatening move on the sea to back it up. And the threat worked. There was no American commitment to save East Pakistan. There was also no similar Chinese commitment."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/opinion/nixon-and-kissingers-forgotten-shame.html
Nixon and Kissinger were not just motivated by dispassionate realpolitik, weighing Pakistan’s help with the secret opening to China or India’s pro-Soviet leanings. The White House tapes capture their emotional rage, going far beyond Nixon’s habitual vulgarity. In the Oval Office, Nixon told Kissinger that the Indians needed “a mass famine.” Kissinger sneered at people who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.”
They were unmoved by the suffering of Bengalis, despite detailed reporting about the killing from Archer K. Blood, the brave United States consul general in East Pakistan. Nor did Nixon and Kissinger waver when Kenneth B. Keating, a former Republican senator from New York then serving as the American ambassador to India, personally confronted them in the Oval Office about “a matter of genocide” that targeted the Hindu minority among the Bengalis.
After Mr. Blood’s consulate sent an extraordinary cable formally dissenting from American policy, decrying what it called genocide, Nixon and Kissinger ousted Mr. Blood from his post in East Pakistan. Kissinger privately scorned Mr. Blood as “this maniac”; Nixon called Mr. Keating “a traitor.”
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