December 15, 2002

Karamatullah K. Ghori, who served in the Pakistan Foreign Service before his retirement in 2000, is a poet, short-story writer and columnist who never stopped pursuing his literary interests while roaming the world as a career diplomat. He has published four collections of poetry, a collection of short stories in Urdu, another collection of short stories in English (published in Beijing in 1984) and a travelogue-reportage on China. He lives in Toronto and still writes for a number of newspapers and journals in Pakistan and abroad

It has almost become a cliche to say that there are moments that test a man’s mettle to choose between right and wrong. But at the risk of repetition I would describe the 1971 East Pakistan crisis, that eventually gave birth to Bangladesh as an entity separate from Pakistan, as just that kind of a testing time.

I was in Karachi on home leave from my diplomatic post in Buenos Aires, Argentina, when the elections of December 1970 were held. The world hailed their fairness and crystal clarity. We all felt proud. The darkness of the long military rule over Pakistan seemed to be lifting. We were standing on the threshold of a new dawn of democracy in the country. I returned to Buenos Aires holding my head high. We were about to drop off, for good, the stigma of being a military dictatorship.

As a diplomat operating overseas I’d been haunted by the odious comparisons the world made, as a matter of routine, between India’s thriving democracy next door to us — despite its enormous complexities and oddities against which ours just paled — and Pakistan remaining perennially mired in military Bonapartism. We were about to level off the field with India and put an end to that damning comparison game.

I could detect a positive change in the behaviour of my ambassador — a gentleman from East Pakistan. It’d been a tense relationship between the two of us before I went away on my home leave against his wishes. But I found him a different man on my return to the post. His body language had changed. He showed greater accommodation to me and was generally more congenial. The impending transfer of power to the Awami League’s leadership — a natural consequence of the party’s thumping electoral victory — had made him more magnanimous.

However, magnanimity wasn’t a word in the lexicon of the then military rulers and their principal political cohorts in West Pakistan. Come March, and the whole momentum that had been building up since the elections came unstuck. Pakistan was quickly thrown into the jaws of the biggest crisis of its life. Gloom descended on us all, at home and abroad.

The unravelling of the political chessboard and the full-blown crisis that sucked in the country in its vortex affected people differently.

For me the depressing point was that we’d been robbed of a great opportunity to put a sordid past behind us. “Why,” I questioned myself, “did it have to run off-course like this?” “Were we really unfit to live in a democratic polity? Had it been ordained for us to lurch from crisis to crisis? Were we incapable of living up to the ideals of the father of our nation?”

I’d no immediate answers to these troubling questions, which would keep me awake at nights, rattling my conscience all the time. “What was the point of serving a government that had lost all its moral authority to remain at the country’s helm?” I asked this question agonizingly to myself.

The sole comfort I could ferret out of that suffocating distress was that I was sworn to serve my country, not any government, and the country needed people to serve it with greater than ever vigilance and dedication. That thought kept me going.

Three colleagues of mine from the Civil Service were caught in the storm at their posts in East Pakistan. They and their wives were mercilessly butchered by the mukti bahini. The news made me sick. The innocents were paying the price, on both sides of the great divide, for the follies of their leaders.

The ambassador was getting consumed by his own depression. He wasn’t exactly known for his communication skills but since the carnage in East Pakistan began at the military’s behest, he’d become even more reticent. I soon gave up trying to draw him out. I knew his distress must’ve been much greater than mine. After all, it was his people who were being hunted and targeted by the military.

On top of it, he, much more than me, was required to be in the forefront of ‘explaining and defending’ the military ruler’s rationale to use force in East Pakistan. He was at the receiving end of a spate of ‘instructions’ and ‘guidelines’ from Islamabad every day to present this and that diplomatic demarche to the Argentine government in defence of General Yahya’s monumental treachery against Pakistan. His sorrow was greater than mine. His mettle was certainly being tested much more than mine.

But I was soon to cross a higher threshold than his. In the middle of the crisis I was ordered, in May, to take up a new post in Manila, the Philippines, half way across the world from Buenos Aires. It was an emergency, I was told, because both the ambassador and his number two in Manila happened to be Bengalis. I asked for some leave in transit and was surprised when it was quickly approved. Apparently, the ruling elite in Islamabad didn’t feel overly perturbed by what was happening in East Pakistan and seemed smugly confident about snuffing out the crisis with force.

My week-long stopover in New York was a grilling time for me. The American news media were going full blast against Pakistan and the atrocities being committed in East Pakistan by besotted generals were lead stories in print and on TV. I’d served in New York before Buenos Aires and knew a lot of people in the media as well as among the intelligentsia. As soon as they learned of my presence there, they pestered me with questions to which I’d no answers.

Invariably, the bottomline of all the grilling was the same: “How could you, in all conscience, serve a government showing such appalling insensitivity to wholesale plunder and carnage of its own people?”

The best I could offer in my defence was to draw a line between my country and its benighted government. But that didn’t convince anyone. How many people, in all fairness, keep that distinction in mind?

Manila posed greater challenges. It was within hailing distance of Hong Kong and the then Crown Colony was the nerve-centre of the Bangladesh movement. Manila was being fed from there. Those were gory tales of mayhem and plunder by the army in East Pakistan.

Manila had seven private TV channels and half a dozen English newspapers, all privately owned, some by prominent politicians. They were all gunning for Pakistan. They greeted my arrival with derision.

“So the generals have sent one of their boys to mind the store in Manila, because they don’t trust the Bengali ambassador,” wrote a columnist. So, it had come down to that. I was being labelled as a “boy” of the generals. There couldn’t be a more unkind cut. I detested it.

One irate Filipino columnist, from his sick bed in a hospital, even had the gall to denounce me as a “factotum from the slums of Karachi” doing the generals’ bidding. That was vicious. But I’d to take it in the line of duty.

The ambassador was kind and considerate. He appreciated my plight but we both knew we were gravitating in different directions. Our loyalties were poles apart. I was waging a one-man crusade to salvage the name of my country in very hostile surroundings. It was, in more ways than one, a baptism of fire for one who was still green in service.

But the battle raging inside me was even more intense. I was being pilloried by my own conscience, day and night. Shame that I was marshalling all my faculties to defend the indefensible. It was a colossal calling.

And, one sultry morning in July — barely weeks after my arrival on the scene — Ambassador Khurram Khan Panni walked out on Pakistan and defected to the cause of Bangladesh. He called a press conference at the embassy residence, but had the grace to tell me in advance what he was going to do.

A reporter asked him at the press conference: “What is your number two doing. Is he also walking out on Pakistan?”

“No,” said the ambassador. “But years from now when he looks back at this period he might regret he didn’t make the right choice.”

Those were prophetic words.

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