Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 14:09:24
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.95 2.03%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,456.40 1.09%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 431.00 0.70%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 277.70 2.45%
  1. State Bank Of India share price
  2. 756.35 3.04%
Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Excerpt: The Colonel Who Would Not Repent
BackBack

Excerpt: The Colonel Who Would Not Repent

A new book on the Bangladesh war recounts how the first victims of Operation Searchlight fell in Dacca

Protesters at a rally in Trafalgar Square, London, calling for the recognition of the Bangladeshi declaration of independence from Pakistan in 1971. Photo: Keystone/WesleyHulton Archive/Getty ImagesPremium
Protesters at a rally in Trafalgar Square, London, calling for the recognition of the Bangladeshi declaration of independence from Pakistan in 1971. Photo: Keystone/WesleyHulton Archive/Getty Images

Around midnight on 25 March in Dacca, in a four-room apartment in a university building numbered 34 on Secretariat Road, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, a reader in English literature at Dacca University, was quietly correcting examination papers at his desk. Guhathakurta was a scholar who had researched the myths in the plays of A.C. Swinburne, Robert Bridges, Sturge Moore and T.S. Eliot when he studied at King’s College in London, and he was popular with his students.

The campus was closed, as were schools and colleges, in response to the call for non-cooperation that Mujibur Rahman had issued on 7 March. Strikes in Bengal inevitably brought much of public life to a standstill. But students’ examination papers could be marked from home, while many of Guhathakurta’s students were probably busy demonstrating. Guhathakurta diligently marked their papers so that they wouldn’t end up without results, if the strikes went on for too long. The professor’s 15-year-old daughter Meghna was worried that her father would get arrested. They had been warned.

On that night they could see the sky being lit up and heard loud sounds of explosions. They could also hear occasional screams. The roads seemed to tremble under the rumble of the army trucks. One convoy stopped at their building.

In a few minutes soldiers began banging the doors. The Guhathakurtas lived on the ground floor. One officer and two soldiers entered their apartment through the back garden. The officer asked in Urdu: ‘Where is the professor?’ Basanti Guhathakurta, the professor’s wife, asked the officer why he wanted to meet her husband. The officer said they had come to take him away.

‘Where?’ Basanti asked. The officer did not reply.

Basanti called her husband. The officer asked him if he was Professor Guhathakurta. When the professor said yes, the officer said: ‘We have come to take you.’

Meghna is now executive director at Research Initiatives Bangladesh, a development think tank. She is an academic who has headed the department of international relations at Dhaka University in the past. She recalled seeing people being brought down: ‘One other professor, along with his family members, was being brought down. The families tried to hold them or go with them, but we told them—“let them go, otherwise they will shoot you". We turned around and went back to our homes. But then we heard the firing of guns.’

Meghna and her mother rushed out to see what had happened. Other families had come down too. ‘And we saw all of them lying in a pool of blood,’ she said in a calm voice, recounting a story she has told often. ‘Some were shouting for water. We rushed out to the front of our compound. I saw my father lying on the ground. He was fully conscious. He told me they had asked him his name and his religion. He said he was a Hindu, and they gave orders to shoot him. My father was hit by bullets in his neck, his waist, and he could not move. It left him paralysed. The soldiers had run away. We took my father into the house. We could not take him to the hospital because there was a curfew.’

He remained in pain, and they could only take him to the hospital on 27 March, when the curfew was lifted. He died three days later.

A memorial at the spot where Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta died
View Full Image
A memorial at the spot where Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta died

Guhathakurta was among the first victims of Operation Searchlight, as the Pakistani officials called the crackdown in East Pakistan on 25 March. Two days earlier, rumours had been circulating in Dacca that the talks between Mujibur Rahman and Yahya Khan were breaking down. It was a very tense period in the city. Shops, schools, banks, courts, and offices were closed. People had stopped paying taxes. West Pakistanis living in the east found that they could not withdraw any money from their bank accounts. Cheques issued by the cantonment were no longer being honoured.

Students continued to march, without talking of freedom or independence overtly, shouting the nationalist slogans like ‘Padma, Meghna, Jamuna, tomar amar thikana’ (Padma, Meghna, Jamuna are your home and my home, a reference to three major rivers in the country.)

While Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had visited Dacca and carried on the ritual of talks with Mujib, something more sinister was afoot. Tikka Khan had taken over as the governor of East Pakistan. Many Bangladeshis remember planeloads of young men arriving on flights from the west. Nobody knew who they were or why they were coming. They were military men but they did not carry any weapons. Flights arriving from the west had increased significantly—ten to twenty a day, from one or two a day from Karachi, and each flight was full of these young men in plainclothes. A Japanese diplomat in Karachi also noted that some cargo ships heading for Dacca were carrying soldiers. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s navy was shipping weapons through the Chittagong port, keeping Bengali officers in the dark, and secretly arming the men who had landed in Dacca.

Pakistan’s ability to airlift troops had been hampered significantly because India had imposed flight restrictions on Pakistani aircraft, preventing them from flying over India. The Indian decision followed an incident in January 1971 where Kashmiri separatists had hijacked an Indian civilian aircraft to Pakistan and set it afire after all passengers were released. Pakistani flights now had to go south to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) and then north again, doubling the 2,300 kilometre direct journey. Many planes had to land and refuel in Colombo, the capital of Ceylon, with the flying time averaging between five hours for a civilian Boeing 707 to eleven hours for a military transporter.

The Colonel Who Would Not Repent—The Bangladesh War And Its Unique Legacy: Aleph Book Co., 400 pages, Rs595
View Full Image
The Colonel Who Would Not Repent—The Bangladesh War And Its Unique Legacy: Aleph Book Co., 400 pages, Rs595

Many of these flags were home-made, although Bhutto was to claim later that they were made in India and smuggled into East Pakistan. Farhad Ghuznavi, who headed the British multinational company Imperial Chemical Industries’ subsidiary, the ICI Pakistan Group Ltd. in Dacca, lived in Banani and had a Bangladesh flag flying from his roof. At 4 p.m. on 27 March five or six soldiers accompanied by an army officer came to his house. They called him out and asked: ‘Woh kya hai?’, pointing at the flag.

‘Nishan,’ Ghuznavi said.

‘Utaro!,’ they commanded.

Realizing that Ghuznavi was a well-off professional, the Pakistanis did not harass him, but the flag was brought down and snatched from his hand. ‘If looks could kill I’d be dead,’ Ghuznavi recalled. A soldier told him: ‘Sector Commander ka meherbani; hum agar hoten, tumhe goli mar dete. Pakistan ka ek hi nishan hai. Marzi ho to woh urao,’ saying he should thank the sector commander, otherwise he’d have been shot. Pakistan has only one symbol—if you want, fly that flag.

In a class-conscious society, Ghuznavi was not used to being shouted at or treated shabbily, but he began facing frequent petty humiliations, as soldiers would stop his car to ask if he was ‘Bangali or Mussalman?’ ‘In the end, one was what one was—a Bengali,’ Ghuznavi told me when we met at his home in Baridhara, an upscale Dhaka suburb where many diplomats now live.

The new Bangladesh flags were everywhere—all fluttering gaily from mosques, temples, offices, shops, and homes. When the Awami League leaders Syed Nazrul Islam, Tajuddin Ahmed, and Kamal Hossain drove to meet the government negotiators with the Bangladesh flags fluttering on their cars, the government negotiators were upset. Hossain said they had put the flag on their cars to show the intensity of popular emotions. ‘Let us resolve this quickly: we should not delay too much,’ he told them. The government representatives said they’d meet the next day after some internal discussions. ‘We waited. But we also heard tanks were lining up, and the cantonments were being mobilized,’ Hossain recalled.

Excerpted from The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War And Its Unquiet Legacy, with permission from Aleph Book Co. The author is a Mint and Lounge columnist.

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 15 Nov 2014, 12:03 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App