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Yahya, Bhutto and 7 March 1971

Published : Tuesday, 7 March, 2017 at 3:15 PM  Count : 1161
On 7 March 1971, history for the people of Bangladesh acquired a whole new meaning. When he placed his four demands ---- as a precondition for participation at the 25 March session of the Pakistan National Assembly --- among which demands was the necessity of a transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was simply informing the world that the Bengali nation had coalesced around the idea of unity and inevitable independence. For him and for the Awami League leadership, the issue was now the matter of the survival of Pakistan as a nation-state. In the weeks following the general election of December 1970, the popular expectation, in both East and West Pakistan, was that the new National Assembly would meet early, get down to the business of drafting a Constitution for Pakistan and move on to a transfer of power from the Yahya Khan military junta to a government headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
There was of course the suspicion that under the terms of the Legal Framework Order of 1970, President Yahya Khan might take recourse to delaying tactics in assenting to the Constitution, that he might even reject the entire document and put politics back on a chaotic course. But that was of course prejudging the future. In December and into January 1971, the point was that power would be transferred to the Awami League and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would take charge of Pakistan's government in Islamabad. To be sure, it would be a transition that would be based on an adoption of the Awami League's Six Points and on the degree to which the federating units of West Pakistan were ready to accept the plan for themselves or adopt measures toward regional autonomy on their own. There was the likelihood, though, that in Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province (today's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa), where nationalist politicians had won the elections, the idea of regional autonomy in line with the changes proposed by the Awami League for East Pakistan were ready to be considered.
The Punjab and Sind were a different proposition, however. These two provinces had given the Pakistan People's Party a clear majority in West Pakistan despite its lack of majorities in Baluchistan and NWFP. The difficulties in the way of a framing of the Constitution were therefore perceptible from the beginning, especially given the fact that the Awami League had not won a single seat in the West and the PPP had not gained a single seat in the East. But that certainly did not detract from the fact that the Awami League had, on an all-Pakistan basis, gained a clear majority --- 167 to the PPP's 88 --- in the 313-member National Assembly and was legally poised to take power. In his meeting with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman towards the end of December 1970 in Dhaka, General Yahya Khan had congratulated the AL leadership on its victory and also discussed the implications of the Six Points with Bangabandhu. Amazingly, until the elections and until the triumph of the Awami League, Yahya Khan had little idea of the Six Points and the radical changes they promised for Pakistan. As he departed for Karachi after his talks with the majority leader, Yahya Khan made it clear to newsmen at Tejgaon airport that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was Pakistan's future Prime Minister and as such would inherit the powers ordained by the nature of the office. The question is: did the President mean it?
A major impediment to the continued functioning of the state of Pakistan was the inability or reluctance of the junta to call the National Assembly to an early session. The appropriate time for the President to have the NA meet would have been early January, but when the New Year began, there was yet no sign of any early convening of the assembly. The fact that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his colleagues in the Awami League had asked Yahya to call the NA into early session did not have any effect. The reasons were obvious. In the first place, the generals were disturbed at the prospect of a Bengali-led government taking charge of Pakistan. In the second, they stayed busy trying to persuade the Awami League to reach an understanding on constitutional issues with the PPP prior to the convening of the National Assembly. As subsequent events would make clear, the delay in calling the NA into session would exacerbate conditions and lead to grave suspicions, later to be proved correct, that the civil-military bureaucratic complex in Islamabad was not prepared to see the Awami League conduct the affairs of the state of Pakistan. The Awami League, having already toughened its position through an oath of loyalty to the Six Points on the part of its elected members of the national and provincial assemblies on 3 January 1971, was now in little mood to accommodate the junta and with that the increasingly destabilising Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Having had his suggestion of a grand coalition, along the lines of the 1966 CDU-SDP coalition in West Germany, with the Awami League rejected by Bangabandhu, Bhutto now switched tactics. He closed ranks with Yahya Khan and reinforced his links with the military. Working on the assumption that the key to power play with the Punjab and Sind, he demanded that the Awami League modify the Six Points and that the stipulation laid down in the Legal Framework Order (LFO) for the Constitution to be framed in 120 days be waived. Unless his conditions were met, Bhutto and his party would not go to Dhaka for the inaugural session of the National Assembly. It should have been for the junta to go ahead with a convening of the NA session on 3 March, as announced by General Yahya Khan in mid-February. Such a move would have called Bhutto's bluff and indeed made matters easier for Pakistan. But Yahya clearly capitulated before Bhutto's threats when on 1 March he had the scheduled session of the National Assembly deferred, citing no fresh date for the meeting.
Bhutto's strategy had worked. And the military establishment in Rawalpindi too was happy. Everything was falling into place. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would be forced to reach a compromise. But things did not quite work out that way. The scale of the overall Bengali reaction to the postponement of the NA session forced the President to call, on 3 March, a Round Table Conference of the leaders of the political parties represented in the NA on 10 March. Where Bhutto had refused to attend the assembly session in Dhaka, he now eagerly accepted the President's invitation to the RTC. For his part, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had properly been readying his party for the 3 March NA session, now dismissed the RTC move out of hand. East Pakistan passed under his control. As de facto leader of the province, now publicly being referred to as Bangladesh, Mujib was in little mood to indulge the army and the PPP. The Bengali mood was patently shifting from a demand for regional autonomy on the basis of the Six Points to a call for Mujib to declare Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan. Talk was in the air about a probable Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) by Bangabandhu at the mass rally scheduled for 7 March at the Race Course grounds.
General Yahya Khan and the junta scrambled to retrieve the situation. Obviously worried by the possibility of East Pakistan making its dramatic exit out of the state of Pakistan on 7 March, the President went on the national hook-up again on 6 March in what was seen as a move to assuage the Bengalis. The National Assembly, he declared glumly, would now meet in Dhaka on 25 March. It did not occur to him that circumstances had moved too far ahead for the new announcement to placate the collective Bengali mood. Again, as later recapitulations of 1971 history would show, the regime had already formulated plans for a suppression of the Bengali movement by the army. The negotiations that would follow from 15 to 24 March in Dhaka would be a cover for the military operations to be put in place and readied for implementation.
Bangabandhu's speech on 7 March, against the background of all the manipulation resorted to by the Yahya Khan junta and the Pakistan People's Party, was a forceful response to the circumstances in which he and the people of Bangladesh had been pushed. Every inch a leader committed to a constitutional settlement of issues, Bangabandhu deftly negotiated his way out of the bind he was in. Aware of the futility involved with a UDI --- he clearly had the instances of Rhodesia's Ian Smith in 1965 and Biafra's Odumegwu Ojukwu in 1967 in mind --- he stopped short of declaring Bangladesh an independent state. But he did make sure that Bengalis were, beginning on the declining afternoon of 7 March, effectively and surely on the way to an attainment of national sovereignty.
On 7 March 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman let it be known, in so many words, that the Bengali population of Pakistan had lost faith in the country cobbled into shape in August 1947. His four-point demand before he could even consider taking part in the freshly convened National Assembly session on 25 March was in essence giving the regime and its allies a long rope to hang themselves. The rope began to tighten when in the nocturnal darkness of 25 March the Pakistan army fanned out --- to kill academics, university students, rickshaw pullers, pedestrians, indeed anyone who looked like a Bengali. The rising mountain of corpses would be a portent of the moral and physical demise of Pakistan in Bangladesh.
7 March 1971 was the point when we as a nation approached the bend in the river and set sail in a new, brighter direction of historical destiny.r
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor,
The Daily Observer.
Email: ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com





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