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How Dacca fell: The inside story
With only four other British newspaper correspondents, Gavin Young has been in besieged Dacca throughout the war. Last week he was the only journalist present in the bunker when the Government of East Pakistan collapsed under the deliberate pressure of an Indian air bombardment. He later attended the ‘Amazing Surrender Lunch’. Gavin Young’s story here is the first inside account of how Dacca fell
Dacca, 18 December. Now the shouts of 'Joi Bangla!' deafen us. Our hands are sore with shaking the hands of jubilant Bengalis. The jail has been broken into and hooligans too are on the streets of Dacca. The shooting is sporadic, but heavy. Law and order teeters; the water may give out. Sikh officers, all turban and tangled hair, crowd into the reception lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel where so recently big Punjabi majors shouted to the bar pianist to play 'Roll out the barrel.' Now the problems begin, and the Indian officers are clearly appalled by the prospect.
Piles of dead soldiers lie about the roads and ditches at the entrance of Dacca. With the advance guard of the Indian Army, the first Indian general into the city, Major-General Gardharu Nagra, said: 'Casualties are severe. Very messy.' I asked him if he had already met General Niazi, the Pakistani Army commander in the east. 'Oh, yes. He said he was very happy to see me. We knew each other at college.'
That first morning of the cease-fire, when victors and vanquished met at last at Army headquarters in north Dacca, I saw the officers of both sides, looking at one another bleakly, but without rancour. There was no Indian jubilation, simply a drained sense of sad futility. Officers who had been comrades at the same staff colleges, who wear the same North Africa or Burma Stars on their chests, and use the same British slang ('What's the drill, Sir?'), stood looking at one another wondering who to blame. The Indian troops - dusty in buses, jeeps, or trucks - took the garlands and embraces, the cries of 'Joi Bangla' from leaping near-hysterical Bengalis, smiling but aloof.
When the Indian Eastern Command chief of staff, General Jacob, arrived in Dacca at noon by helicopter, he looked desperately tired and cast down. I lunched with him and General Niazi and General Farman Ali. Also present was the Governor of East Pakistan, Mr. Malik, who resigned on Tuesday as I crouched with him as his official residence was demolished around our cars by Indian jets. It was an embarrassing meal. We stood up and picked at curried chicken legs and bananas. Indians and Pakistanis hardly spoke to one another. The surrender had not yet been signed.
'Niazi could have made a better defence if he had concentrated his forces in a tighter ring round Dacca,' Jacob said quietly to me. 'But he stuck to the frontiers, and we came between them and behind them and separated them up. We don't feel like crowing. You may know that I was not happy about this war in the beginning.' (The generals were doves, the Indian politicians hawks for this war). Niazi told me: 'We surrendered because otherwise we'd have had to destroy the city between our two armies. We would have had to surrender in the end, so what was the point in continuing?' He gave a pale smile.
A similar meal that I had had with Niazi in the garrison town of Mymensingh the day war started seemed a very long time ago. Then he had cracked jokes and talked of fighting to the last man. Now he still wore his pistol, but was a man whose occupation had gone. He is not at all a brilliant man, but he is dedicated - not a political thinker. The war could have ended a week earlier, but President Yahya Khan convinced Niazi that China and the United States would intervene on Pakistan's side. So Farman Ali's proposal for a cease-fire leading to a handover of government to the Awami League went by the board.
Now, a week later, the end has come anyway. The humiliation of defeat is shocking to see. The sight of Farman Ali, grey-faced and desolate, wandering alone across the Dacca race course after the surrender, was not something one wanted to see again. Nor - despite his faults - do I ever again want to contemplate a man like General Niazi, large and portly, heeling and toeing it across the grass to the howls of the jubilant Bengalis. Or towards him stand reading the surrender terms, crowded by television cameramen and the probing microphones that cheapen the dignity and tragedy of great defeat. Or to see him sitting and sign the several copies of the humiliating document that ended his career.
Still less would I care again to see the crowing insult, the unbuckling of his gun-belt and its handing over to the turbaned Indian commander, General Aurora. At the point, I saw Niazi's face blurring with misery. One hoped more than anything that he would not cry. He did not. Niazi has been castigated by the foreigners in Dacca as well as by Bengalis. But he is a simple man. He had no chance for ultimate victory once general war was on. I know he feared abandoned by his boss, Yahya Khan. 'The President said he did not expect general war.' Farman told me at that amazing surrender-day lunch.
The hotel soon instituted a one-menu regime, which was hardly surprising since Indira Gandhi said the war would go on a long time, and Yahya Khan implied it would last for ever. There was no beer. The last shipment was hijacked by the Mukti Bahini near Chittagong. Before the women and children were evacuated, the hotel was like a railway station, full of civilian men, women and children, Red Cross and United Nations people - even one poodle. The only British doctor in Dacca, Dr. Basset, who has been here 20 years, was handing out tranquillisers in handfuls.
We felt more vulnerable when the RAF planes that evacuated the civilians had been gone. No one was sure that the Pakistanis would not fight to the end and take the city down with them. The UN people thought we might be used by the Pakistani Army as hostages in the crunch. Most people thought Niazi capable of that but maligned him. We were not pleased to find that several Red Cross men had left on the British planes, including the American responsible for the security of the hotel. Not one but two German television teams had left as well, leaving behind them, we found later, all their equipment, worth thousands of dollars.
Bernard Holt, the tough hero-manager was superb. No emergency seemed to get him down. All his staff were Bengali, and obviously many of them were Mukti Bahinis in disguise. As soon as the war ended, receptionists, doormen and room boys emerged as persons of some authority around town. A network had surfaced. Holt had to cope with hysterical civilians - not all of them women - frightened West Pakistanis, tricky Bengalis. He even carried a large slab of plastic explosive out of the ladies lavatory into the garden. He had suggested clearing the top three floors in case the shells started coming in when the Indian reached the city. But the view was so good we chose to remain up there. In the bombing the hotel shook like a blancmange.
Despair became palpable nine days after the war began, on 11 December. The Governor, Mr. Malik, wanted to surrender then. So did his adviser, Major-General Farman Au Khan, an academic-looking soldier, who talked more sense than other Pakistani bigwigs around Dacca. Farman Ali on 10 December sent a message to Yahya Khan in Islamabad proposing a 'cease-fire leading to a peaceful transfer of power to a government here of elected representatives of East Pakistan.' The Pakistani troops would not have laid down their arms, but would have ceased fire and been repatriated to West Pakistan. The Indians too, would have evacuated East Bengal under this scheme. No surrender, Farman stressed, but a 'peaceful transfer of power.'
Yahya first agreed, then vetoed it. Then for the first time - but not the last - he used the intervention story to put new fire into Niazi: the Chinese and Americans would intervene, he promised, to save Pakistan. Hearing this, Niazi threw up his hands crowing, 'We are off the hook.' Farman Ali never believed the intervention theory. He told me as much on the day of surrender. But he confirmed that Niazi believed it. So did General Jacob, whose code-breakers intercepted these gung-ho messages from Islamabad.
I remember vividly the burning villages I saw just before the war outside Dacca, destroyed by the Razakars - the hated gendarmes locally recruited by the Army from the non Bengali minority - because they thought Mukti Bahinis had been there. Every pot and pan had been systematically smashed with boot or rifle butt. The peasant bodies were still there to see and the stink of burnt flesh as strong as the stink of retribution in the air now. Is Yahya aware of what has gone on here?
I remember, too, a scene up-country when a dead Razakar, shot higher up by the Muktis, floated through a riverside village. Peasant children pelted the body with stones, shouting: 'How many Bengalis did you kill? Go on tell us.' The parents looked on with grim smiles.
'Should we give up?'
On Tuesday, I went to see the ultra dynamic Paul-Marc Henri of the United Nations. He had moved into a missionary college fearing that he and his people would be used as hostages by the Pakistanis. A sustained air attack, very low and very noisy, came in. I heard later that, during it, the Soviet Consul, Mr. Popov, lay on the floor with the US Consul in the American's office. Smoke billowed from the nearby Governor's palace. I learned that John Kelly, a short, ex-Balliol Australian, who normally socialises in refugee relief for the UN, was inside the palace because Mr. Malik, the Governor, was meeting his cabinet to decide whether he should resign. Was Kelly dead, we wondered? No - soon he drove up, shaken but alive. The Governor's house, he said, had been badly hit. But Malik was still undecided. His wife and daughter were there. 'As I dived out of the window into a slit trench,' said Kelly, 'I saw General Farman Ali loping past, white-faced, crying "Why are the Indians doing this ?" and not stopping for an answer.'
'Let's go and see if Malik's all right,' I suggested. Kelly said, 'Well, if we make it quick. The Indians may be back.' We arrived. The house smoked and was shattered. A calm colonel led us to an above-ground bunker in the garden. In it we meet Malik and his ministers. Malik clutched my hand as if he would never let it go. He was elderly and frightened. 'Should we give up now do you think?' he quavered to Kelly. Kelly did not want to commit the UN to any of this, so he hedged.
In another room, I found Malik's Austrian wife and her daughter, looking distraught against the stark concrete of the bunker. An old carved four-poster bed added a surrealist touch. They had been crying. 'Should I send my family to the hotel now or would tomorrow morning be all right?' Malik asked me. 'Right away' - just as another raid started. The jets made a shattering row. The ground crashed and heaved outside. 'We are refugees now, too,' choked Mr. Malik. There seemed nothing to say to that. Kelly looked at me, silently saying 'What did lead me to come back here?'
Then Malik produced a shaking pen and a sheet of office paper. The Ministers mumbled, held on together. Between one crash and the next Kelly and I looked at the paper and saw that it was addressed to President Yahya Khan and that Malik had at last resigned. Then, the raid still seething round us. Malik, a devout Muslim, took off his shoes and socks, carefully washed his feet in a small washroom opening into the bunker, spread a white handkerchief over his head, and knelt down in a corner of the bunker and said his prayers.
That was the end of Government House. That was the end of the last Government of East Pakistan.
Nervous and encumbered by wives and numerous children, the Ministers adjourned to the hotel. All, Malik included, are Bengalis, so their future is far from happy as they cannot cheerfully be flown out to West Pakistan, like Farman Ali or Niazi or the troops. Their homes are here. Millions of Bengalis think of them as traitors.
Malik had another blow to endure. When that same afternoon Yahya agreed to Niazi's surrender, his cable said to Niazi and Malik: 'You should now take all necessary measures to stop the fighting and preserve the lives of all armed forces personnel, all those from West Pakistan and all loyal elements.' Malik evidently did not find himself sufficiently covered by the phrase - 'all loyal elements.' He felt bitterly that the message was a sign of Yahya's cynicism towards East Pakistan and those Bengalis who had loyally served him and had to take the direct consequences. Malik huddled in the hotel listening no doubt to heavy firing outside as Razakars and Muktis shot it out and some Bengalis loudly suggested storming the hotel to get the 'puppets.'
Chess on the side
At ground level, the Soviet consul, Mr. Popov, a lanky intellectual with a bow tie and domed forehead, raced about breathing brandy fumes, in high elation, inquiring how many Pakistani Government officials had taken refuge in the hotel, offering sanctuary to any other diplomats he met, and occasionally dropping off to play a game of chess with American journalists at the hotel. The Iranian consul was detected in the act of making lots of West Pakistanis into instant Iranian citizens, and so was asked to leave the hotel himself.
On the last day of the war, Wednesday, Farman Ali made a final effort to convince Yahya not to fight on. He had Niazi's support this time. Messages want back and forth to Islamabad. But the Indians forestalled all that with a straight ultimatum: cease fire, unconditional surrender. It was due to expire at 9.30 a.m. Thursday. And it is a sign of the chaos in Dacca and in men's minds here then that at 9.15 Farman and Niazi were actually incapable of telling the Indians they accepted because their communications at GHQ were not working.
Luckily the ubiquitous John Kelly decided to contact Farman and discovered the danger. A flash on the UN radio saved the day - save Dacca from a massive shelling and bombing, from destruction in fact. General Jacob said later, 'Oh, yes. If they had not replied in time, I would have let you all have it.' To the end, Niazi refused to call it surrender. Even Farman Ali took the pointless trouble to tell journalists at midday on Wednesday that there was no question of a cease-fire. So East Pakistan went down in muddle and noise and blood.
The Observer, 19 December, 1971
They are not finished with you yet, Bengal
New Age reproduces an article by Enayetullah Khan from the 14 March 1971 issue of Holiday. Note may be made of the fact that the fears expressed in the write-up were to prove prescient. The Pakistani junta, having begun ‘negotiations’ with the Bengali leadership, was to initiate a genocide late on 25 March 1971. The rest, of course, is history
Anticipations of a settlement notwithstanding, the uneasy truce between Bengal and the military establishment of General Yahya Khan may finally turn out to be a deceptive stratagem of repressive violence. Faced as they are with a people’s war, or at least the beginning of one, when they cannot isolate the fish from the sea, and when counter-insurgency techniques have failed to work, they might as well go for indiscriminate violence or genocide which literally means the total extermination of an intransigent people.
Their options are very limited. Either they withdraw completely from the soil of Bengal leaving the Bengalees to shape their own destiny, work out a solution which will not imperil the status quo as they view it or resort to the third course of brutal assault with their superior fire-power and organisation on an unarmed mass of rebellious populace.
The logistics of the Pakistan army point unmistakably to the third course unless, of course, they are compelled to withdraw from Bengal owing to the mounting pressures in their home ground, that is, West Pakistan.
The possibility of a settlement seems remote because even the acceptance of Sheikh Mujib’s demands does not break the impasse. The fulfilment of the conditions does not yet ensure the participation of the majority party in the national Assembly. Any other formula designed to resolve the crisis may not be entertained at all by the constitutional leadership and the not-so-constitutional people of Bengal.
In fact, the alternative to a political settlement on Mujib’s terms does not fit into the behavioural pattern of the present establishment. When they could have accepted the same prior to this crisis (that is, withdrawal of the martial law and transfer of power to the people’s representatives), why should they create conditions wherein they would be paying a higher price than their bidding?
The only logical explanation is that they are taking a long breath before plunging into an orgy of mass killing by trying to instil a false sense of security and achievement among the fighting populace now being led into the unknown by an inadequate and vacillating leadership.
History bears testimony to the fact that the warlords, as colonialists, as feudal landlords, as big bourgeoisie, are either part of the ruling class or the servants of rulers, who just do not
give up economic and political power out of benevolent feelings for humanity To expect that the same kind of establishment which could not even afford to wait for the 120th day of the NA (National Assembly) deliberations will now give Bengal everything on a platter in the face of universal hostility on this soil, is as illusory as the faith in electoral socialism.
Thus, the current euphoria over the stunning success of a non-violent civil disobedience movement in the absence of even the minimum of predicable governmental reaction may ultimately become counterproductive in the struggle for total emancipation.
After all, it is not hurting the army excepting that it may hurt its pride. But pride is only a dispensable sentiment to an army which does not even hesitate to shoot unarmed people from the rear.
It is now obvious that the struggle against repressive violence of an organised and determined army has got to be met by insurgent violence.
As of today, it may not have the revolutionary leadership required to carry it to its logical goal. But then it is a patient and protracted struggle.
And since the victory of the alien colonisers cannot be assured short of extermination of their enemies, that is, the united masses of Bengal, it is time to brace ourselves against such a danger which may be coming any day.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who has displayed an acute sense of history, must realise this danger and come out of the insidious trap laid by some of his educated(?) advisers whose bona fides are yet to be proved. He must choose between glory and power, and it is now or never.
The Pakistan Eastern Command agree to surrender all PAKISTAN Armed Forces in BANGLA DESH to Lieutenant General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA, General Officer Commanding in Chief of the Indian and BANGLA DESH forces in the Eastern Theatre. This surrender includes all PAKISTAN land, air and naval forces as also all para-military forces and civil armed forces.
The forces will lay down their arms and surrender at the places where they are currently located to the nearest regular troops under the command of Lieutenant General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA.
The PAKISTAN Eastern Command shall come under the orders of Lieutenant General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA as soon as this instrument has been signed. Disobedience of orders will be regarded as a breach of the surrender terms and will be dealt with in accordance with the accepted laws and usages of war. The decision of Lieutenant General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA will be final, should any doubt arise as to the meaning or interpretation of the surrender terms.
Lieutenant General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA gives a solemn assurance that personnel who surrender shall be treated with dignity and respect that soldiers are entitled to in accordance with the provisions of the GENEVA Convention and guarantees the safety and well-being of all PAKISTAN military and para-military forces who surrender. Protection will be provided to foreign nationals, ethnic minorities and personnel of WEST PAKISTAN origin by the forces under the command of Lieutenant- General JAGJIT SINGH AURORA.
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