Left, raped and killed, right, checking if circumcised

The education system of Bangladesh has failed in educating its youth about India’s intervention that made 90,000 Pakistani soldiers kneel pleading for release, without which liberation from Pakistan looked unlikely. Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistan provides an interesting study establishing that the “peaceful” population cannot survive in peace even when left solely with their own kind. There is sooner or later bloody conflict.

After creating pools of blood along both the eastern and western borders of India and sending trains into India packed with mutilated Hindu corpses, East Pakistan, with its 85% Muslim population, and West Pakistan with its 97% Muslim population, separated from their mother nation and united for the love and cause of religion – an allegiance that is known to supersede any other for them. However, in the absence of non-Muslims, East and West Pakistan soon discovered new reasons to fight against each other.

From its inception, despite Bengali-speaking East Pakistan being demographically denser, the political and administrative power was largely retained by West Pakistan, which was comprised of an Urdu- and Punjabi-speaking populace. This gradually led to the exploitation of the East Pakistanis by their brethren at the other end of India. It was quite the irony, since the East Pakistanis had decided to join West Pakistan because they feared subjugation by the Hindus of India.

East Pakistan produced 70% of Pakistan’s total exports, yet only 25% (or less) of the imported wealth was spent on its development. At the time of partition, East Pakistan had eleven textile mills; West Pakistan had nine. In a couple of decades, the number in West Pakistan grew to around 150, dwarfing East Pakistan’s total of 26. Bit by bit, resources worth 2.6 billion US dollars were moved from the Eastern province to West Pakistan.

East Pakistanis, led by their leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League started raising their demands for more economic and political powers. But the masters at the helm of power, comfortably seated in Islamabad, paid no heed to these demands. The bottled-up frustration of the East Pakistanis resulted in Sheikh Mujibur Rahman winning a landslide victory among the Bengali-speaking constituency in East Pakistan during the national elections, defeating Pakistan People Party head Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Rahman’s claim to the Prime Ministership of united Pakistan was undisputed. But a devious Butto worked with General Yahya Khan, and had the election results nullified and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman imprisoned.

Enraged East Pakistanis called for a mass movement against this dictatorship. This gave Pakistan a fair chance to impose martial law and have the army, with Lt. Gen. Tikka Khan in command, deal with the unrest by committing large scale atrocities on the Bengalis. Not a single human right was left unviolated. Bengali men, religion notwithstanding, were slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands.

Rape has always been the favorite tool of violence, and it was only a matter of time before the Pakistani Army resorted to it. The Pakistani military, al-Badr militias, their Bihari Muslim supporters in Bangladesh and Bengali Razakars committed mass rapes of around 400,000 Bengali women. These women were abducted from the street, homes, schools, even their bedrooms. They were beaten, tied together in bundles, and transported in dark deserted areas. They were then queued up and segregated based on their age group. Those who had passed the child-bearing age were shot dead; the ones still “fertile” were taken to the rape camps. The Pakistani commander commanded his soldiers to impregnate these women. Fathered by Pakistani soldiers, the war babies, produced of these barbarous and repeated rapes, were supposed to form the next generation of Pakistani loyalists in Bangladesh, or so the commander believed.

Fifty years later, every time there is a “Pakistan vs India” controversy, when we witness the majority of Bangladesh’s Muslims voicing their wholehearted support for Pakistan and extending their support for Pakistan through social media and staged protests, the harrowing words of the Pakistani commander echo in the background, a little painfully, and a with a great deal of irony.